Danza Macabra Europea by Alberto Martini

Alberto Martini (1876 – 1954) was an Italian painter, engraver, illustrator and graphic designer. Critics have described Martini's range of work from "elegant and epic" to "grotesque and macabre" and consider him one of the precursors of Surrealism. Much of his career was spent illustrating famous literary works. In 1895 he began the first series of illustrations for Luigi Pulci's Morgante Maggiore and for Alessandro Tassoni's La secchia rapita. During this time he had his first exhibit which was a series of fourteen paintings from the anthology La corte dei miracoli at the Venice Biennale in 1897, where his drawings of beggars were described as "picturesquely grotesque". In 1901 he illustrated an edition of La Divina Commedia. Beginning in July 1905, he produced 132 ink illustrations, which were described as "macabre", for the stories of Edgar Allan Poe. His work was clearly influenced by such artists as Albrecht Dürer, Urs Graf, Pieter Bruegel, Lucas Cranach, Albrecht Altdorfer, and Joseph Sattler whose work he had studied. At the outbreak of World War I, Martini designed a series of "frightening" propaganda postcards called Danza Macabra Europea, to be distributed to the allies against the Austro-Hungarian empire.

Boris Artzybasheff

Boris Artzybasheff (1899 – 1965) was an American illustrator active in the United States, notable for his strongly worked and often surreal designs. Artzybasheff was probably known best for his magazine art. He illustrated the major American magazines Life, Fortune, and Time (including more than 200 Time Magazine covers over a 24-year span between 1941 and 1965.) He drew a series of surreal anti-nazi illustrations. During World War II, he also served an expert advisor to the U.S. Department of State, Psychological Warfare Branch. After 1940, he devoted himself to commercial art, including advertisements for Xerox, Shell Oil, Pan Am, etc. His graphic style is striking. In commercial work he explored grotesque experiments in anthropomorphism, where toiling machines displayed distinctly human attributes. In his personal work, he explored the depiction of vivid and extreme ranges of human psychology and emotion.

David Olère, the illustrator of the Auschwitz horror

inside the gas chambers

David Olère (1902 – 1985) was a Polish-born French painter and sculptor best known for his explicit drawings and paintings based on his experiences as Jewish Sonderkommando inmate at Auschwitz concentration campduring World War II.

On February 20, 1943, Olère was arrested by French police during a round up of Jews in Seine-et-Oise and placed in Drancy internment camp. On March 2, 1943, he was one of approximately 1,000 Jews deported from Drancy to Auschwitz. From this transport, Olere was one of 119 people selected for work; the rest were gassed shortly after arrival. He was registered as prisoner 106144 and assigned to the Sonderkommando at Birkenau, the unit of prisoners forced to empty gas chambers and burn the bodies, firstly working in Bunker 2 and later in Crematorium III. In addition to these duties, he was also forced to work as an illustrator, writing and decorating letters for the SS.

throwing alive babies in furnaces

Olère remained at Auschwitz until January 19, 1945, when he was taken on the evacuation death march, eventually reaching Mauthausen concentration camp, then the Melk and Ebensee subcamps, from which he made five unsuccessful escape attempts. Following his liberation on May 6, 1945, he learned that his entire family had been exterminated in Warsaw. He subsequently moved back to Paris.

Olère began to draw at Auschwitz during the last days of the camp, when the SS became less attentive. His work has exceptional documentary value: there are no photos of what happened in the gas chambers and crematoria, and Olère was the only artist to have worked as a member of the Sonderkommando and survived. He was also the first witness to draw plans and cross-sections to explain how the crematoria worked.

Olère felt compelled to capture Auschwitz artistically to illustrate the fate of all those that did not survive. He sometimes depicts himself in his paintings as a ghostly witnessing face in the background. He exhibited his work at the State Museum of Les Invalidesand the Grand Palais in Paris, at the Jewish Museum in New York City, at the Berkeley Museum, and in Chicago. He retired from being an artist in 1962, and died in 1985. His widow and son have continued to inform the world about Auschwitz via his artwork.

Louis Raemaekers, WW I propaganda cartoonist

A Toast to Kultur (1916)

Louis Raemaekers (1869–1956) was a Dutch painter and cartoonist for the Amsterdam Telegraaf during World War I, noted for his anti-German stance. His graphic cartoons depicted the rule of the German military in Belgium, portrayed the Germans as barbarians and Kaiser Wilhelm II as an ally of Satan. The German government offered a reward of 12,000 guilders for Raemaekers, dead or alive. The German government forced the Dutch government to place Raemaekers on trial for 'endangering Dutch neutrality', but a jury acquitted him. He later left for England because of the bounty on his head. There, his work was published in The Times and he released a collection, Raemaekers Cartoon History of the War, in 1919. His propaganda cartoons and posters were considered as influential during WW I for the German defeat.

THE HARVEST IS RIPE

THE GERMAN TANGO
"From East to West and West to East I dance with thee!"

German Navy attacking Allied nursing (1918)

Thrown to the Swine; The Martyred Nurse

The martyred Nurse is Edith Louisa Cavell (1865 – 1915) a British nurse and patriot. She is celebrated for saving the lives of soldiers from all sides without distinction and in helping some 200 Allied soldiers escape from German-occupied Belgium during World War I, for which she was arrested. She was subsequently court-martialled, found guilty of treason and sentenced to death. Despite international pressure for mercy, she was shot by a German firing squad. Her execution received worldwide condemnation and extensive press coverage. She is well known for her statement that "patriotism is not enough". Her strong Anglican beliefs propelled her to help all those who needed it, both German and Allied soldiers. She was quoted as saying, "I can’t stop while there are lives to be saved." October 12 is appointed for her commemoration in the Anglican church, although this is not a "saint's feast day" in the traditional sense. Edith Cavell, who was 49 at the time of her execution, was already notable as a pioneer of modern nursing in Belgium.

Jo Hedwig Teeuwisse

A Dutch historian has put together a haunting photo series that merges the past and the present. For “Ghosts of War,” Jo Hedwig Teeuwisse superimposed images of World War II soldiers onto images of present-day European streets where they once fought.

Teeuwisse started her project after finding some 300 WWII photographs at a flea market. She then went about visiting the sites in the images and re-photographing the backgrounds. Teeuwisse said visiting the sites had a powerful emotional effect. “I knew what happened there, but knowing the exact spot of some detail will etch it into your visual memory,” she said. http://www.thedaily.com