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Percy John Smith
Death Awed (from the portfolio Dance of Death, 1914-1918), 1919
This harrowing image exemplifies the dreadful reach of total warfare: combat boots with the remains of severed feet dismay the personification of death.
Printmaker Smith served on the Western Front, a line of trenches that stretched from the English Channel to the Swiss Alps, where the deadliest, most destructive conflicts of the Great War were waged.
This image from Smith's series Dance of Death, 1914-1918 reinterprets the often darkly humorous, medieval motif in which a skeletal figure leads people to the grave. But here, even death clutches its chest in horror -- awed. |