Jana Jankuliakova
Published: 21 January 2019
The traumatic experience of the Great War and its impact on mental health changed perception and representation of the male body in early 20th century German medical imagery and visual art.
University of Glasgow
The traumatic experience of the Great War and its impact on mental health changed perception and representation of the male body in early 20th century German medical imagery and visual art.
It is grounded in the close analysis of the drawings and sketches of two major German expressionist artists Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880-1938) and Erich Heckel (1883-1970). Both artists worked in the context of the Great War and had direct experience of what was then described as “war neurosis”, today known as PTSD, which affected many soldiers involved in the conflict (Kirchner suffered from “war neurosis”, while Heckel witnessed sufferers during his military service as a corpsman). The artists’ engagement with war neurosis was particularly acute, and each addressed this condition in numerous sketches and drawings created in sanatoria and hospitals across Germany, Switzerland and Belgium.
The research seeks to develop a critical framework for a rigorous analysis of the neurotic male body in the context of Expressionist art practice and medical discourse. It will make use of interdisciplinary perspectives, including those of the medical humanities, to investigate how Kirchner and Heckel’s images intimately mediate the impact of war trauma on masculine mental health and gender identity.
First published: 21 January 2019