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- Title
A 'Prosthetic Economy': Representing the 'Kriegskrüppel' in the Weimar Republic.
- Authors
Price, Dorothy
- Abstract
For George Grosz, Otto Dix, Heinrich Hoerle and other erstwhile German dadaists of their generation, the neglected, disabled male war veteran – selling matches, playing cards, operating machinery on the factory assembly-line or begging on the streets – became a stock-in-trade of their early Weimar oeuvre, whose female counterpart was the (often syphilitic) urban prostitute. The ‘cripple’ and the ‘whore’ were the symbolic visual tropes in the masculine avant-garde’s arsenal against the socio-political inequities of the fragile German Republic. With a particular focus on work made by Heinrich Hoerle, this essay explores how the body of the disabled war veteran was used by the leftist avant-garde as a visual symptom for the diseased ‘body politic’. It contends that the artworks produced reveal more about Weimar politics and the construction of ‘normalcy’ and the ‘ideal’ during this period than they do about the disabled veterans that they depict.
- Subjects
VETERANS with disabilities; 20TH century German art; WEIMAR Republic, 1918-1933; HOERLE, Heinrich, 1895-1936; DADAISM; AVANT-garde (Arts) -- 20th century; POLITICS in art; ARTIFICIAL joints
- Publication
Art History, 2019, Vol 42, Issue 4, p750
- ISSN
0141-6790
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1111/1467-8365.12459