| Existing comment:
One of the most interesting soldier-artists of the first World War was Otto Schubert, a German painter, book illustrator, and graphic artist. Schubert was 23 years old when he was inducted into the German army, and served from late fall 1914 until May 1916. He was severely wounded during the Battle of Verdun and returned to Dresden to receive medical treatment. During his wartime service, Schubert pictorially recorded his experiences on Feldpostkarten (field postcards), which he sent to his sweetheart, Irma Muller. The few sentences he wrote were relegated to the thinnest of margins, essentially serving as a frame for the image. Amidst the terrible slaughter, Schubert chose to movingly depict the daily realities and tragic truths of the Great War by painting scenes and capturing emotions that words were often insufficient to describe. Alternately detached and despairing, his exquisitely rendered postcards convey the experiences that surely branded all of the soldiers who served in the war. |