Autorretrato como Soldado

By 1915 the First World War had swallowed a generation of young German men, and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, a founder of the Expressionist group Die Brucke, had joined an artillery regiment. He never saw combat. Within months he suffered a physical and nervous collapse and was discharged. He painted himself here in uniform, a cigarette in his mouth, and where his right hand should be there is only a raw stump. He was not actually wounded. The severed hand is a metaphor for his terror that soldiering would cost him the thing that made him himself, the ability to paint. A pale nude model stands behind him in the studio. It hangs at the Allen Memorial Art Museum in Ohio.