Artillerymen (Kirchner)

Naked conscripts crowd together showering in a cramped barracks under the eye of a mounted officer, their angular bodies jammed into a claustrophobic, tilting space. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, a founder of German Expressionism, painted this after his own shattering experience of military service in the First World War, which led to his breakdown. Now in the Guggenheim, Artillerymen turns the regimentation of army life into an image of dehumanization and dread - the jagged forms and airless space conveying the loss of self and the trauma that the war inflicted on the artist and his generation.