George Grosz shows in his painting Explosion, 1917, the destruction of a city by an inescapable bombardment. Grosz was considered to be mentally unstable when he painted this picture. It appears to be obvious that any mental trauma he suffered was a direct result of the violence he was exposed to in the war. There are shapes of what might be people, or parts of people, towards the bottom of the painting, but the majority of this piece of art is dominated by the color red. This is the color of the explosion, the color of blood. However, it makes me think of a fire. The city seems to have been turned into a furnace, burning its inhabitants. The process of war has been turned into a largely industrial activity. At this point, war has become nothing but a list of statistics. The age of honor and pride in war has completely vanished. World War I was mechanical and unforgiving.
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