Henri de Groux: Gas Masks

This etching by Groux portrays the gas men of World War I as beings who are not human. This is of course befitting to the style of ruthless killing that these soldiers caused. Underneath each of these masks, however, is a person leading their own life. The mask transforms them into a killing robot-like individual. Soldiers in the trenches of World War I must have felt great terror when they saw enemies approaching with these masks on. All of the art I saw depicting gas men cast these soldiers in a light of fear. Most of this picture is very dark, and it is hard to make out the pictures of the soldiers. This is because of the cloud of gas behind them. I wonder how many soldiers survived gas attacks. The cloud seems so thick and oppressive. The experience would certainly drive anyone crazy. I guess the gas would have been somewhat visible, even though I had always imagined the gas to be an invisible killer. I think it probably would have been much more frightening to see the gas approaching, even though soldiers falling dead from apparently no cause would definitely be enough to scare me too.

Fernand Léger: Membership to the Keys

Membership to the Keys, 1929, by Fernand Léger, strikes me as a very odd piece. This seems to be a time period filled with very abstract art. I have no idea what to make of this piece, which is one of the reasons I picked it. I first thought that many painters were creating these abstract paintings due to the mental stresses of the war. However, Léger had started painting abstract forms before he fought in the French Army.

The keys in this painting are the most dominant feature. I feel like these keys are those to some arcane secret. Maybe they are the keys that can put the rest of the objects in the painting together. I also think that they could be the keys to power, thrown in with some other arbitrary junk. Another part of the picture that really catches my attention is the arrangements of the straight lines. To me, they kind of appear to be the lines that make up the framework of a three dimensional graph. However, the vertical line does not line up with the intersection of the other two lines, which would normally be the case in a mathematical model. This more than anything gives the painting a very unbalanced look when I inspect it. All of the other shapes are relatively meaningless to me. The thing on the left might be the moon, but the keys and the lines leave the greatest impression on me.

George Grosz: Explosion

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.

Who was Franz Ferdinand?

Let me start out by saying wow, Franz Ferdinand is one unlucky guy. History only really remembers him as the guy who was shot in Sarajevo. I don't really know anything else about him. What kind of a person was he? Was he going to be an anti-Serbian leader? It is even more depressing to think about how his wife suffered the same fate on June 28, 1914. She was probably innocent and undeserving of being killed. The death of someone innocent seems to be the way that most major revolutions start, or at least the revolutions that produce major results fast. The deaths of the weak French King Louis XVI and the former czar Nicholas II, who had abdicated and no longer threatened the revolution, are examples of such deaths, or at least in my eyes. These people differ from a repressive ruler like Saddam Hussein because a repressive ruler works with a network of ruthless, loyal followers who may still opperate under the death of their leader. This could easily lead to war, as we are seeing today. The assassination of a relatively benign leader is not met by such crippling consequences as other leaders because these rulers do not have such a close group of followers that were relied upon in life to take up the cause of revenge.

Franz Ferdinand obviously had some powerful alllies, however. His death caused a global feud. Does this mean that he would have had the power, or desire, to be an oppressive ruler? I don't necessarily think so. I think strong feelings of nationalism, causing the citizens of Austria-Hungary to feel insulted by the assassination, were more the cause of war than powerful government bodies. If the citizens of his country were so upset by his death, Franz Ferdinand was probably expected to be a good ruler for his people.

Connection Across Time

World War I seems to have started over rivaling alliances, with the assassination of Franz Ferdinand as the catalyst to actually start the fighting. Why were these countries hostile in the first place? Greed. The alliance consisted of empires that wanted more land. Since this war, there have been no empires. Yet, there are still countries that want to expand their borders today. These wars are few, but fierce. Now I can see how one might argue that the effects of World War I are still felt almost a century after the war. I doubt I'll live to see the day that these territorial conflicts are resolved, but once people of each ethnicity have their own land and own government, how long will it take for the next major conflict, or series of conflicts, and what will be the cause?



I know I probably have a somewhat warped view of the world due to my exposure to American media and my lack of traveling, but it seems that most conflicts around the world are civil wars of countries that are significantly underdeveloped compared to countries like our own. This is most likely a result of imperialism, which stripped countries of their resources and governments. One of the best examples of such a country that I can think of right now is Afghanistan, which was torn apart after Russia invaded. Hopefully, it is possible for these countries to eventually develop a strong, stable government since the United Nations is designed to keep countries from invading each other and causing a similar situation all over again. One would expect this to help domestic tranquility within each country. However, is this not what China is trying to do right now, gain stability and power in the world, and don't we hate them for this? Of course, we also disapprove of their dictatorial form of rule. Maybe the lingering effects of WWI are still felt because of nationalism, in addition to the damaged countries that were once colonies. It would be nice if countries were able to start feeling more unified as members of the United Nations.