A Bitter Truth
Avant-Garde and the Great War
In an exciting and ambitious collaboration, major museums in Berlin joined forces with the Barbican Art Gallery to stage a ground-breaking exhibition on Avant-Garde Art and the First World War.
Eighty years after the onset of the war, this exhibition brought together two cities who fought on opposite sides, to examine, for the first time, how the experience profoundly affected art and artists.
Containing over 200 works by some 80 artists, the exhibition focused particularly on those painters, sculptors and printmakers of international stature whose first-hand involvement and often harrowing experiences resulted in the creation of outstanding images: figures such as Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, Jacob Epstein, Natalia Goncharova, George Grosz, Paul Klee, Käthe Kollwitz, Paul Nash and Stanley Spencer.
A Bitter Truth opened in Berlin before coming to the Barbican Art Gallery and was organised with the Deutsche Historisches Museum and the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin and selected by Richard Cork, chief art critic of The Times and Henry Moore Senior Fellow at the Courtauld Institute.
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