World War I was jarring in many ways. It was one of the largest, if not the largest, collective trauma the world had experienced up until that point. One thing it changed forever was traditional notions of Western art.
It was the first world war, and many young men entered it idealistic and left feeling completely disillusioned and hopeless. In the 1920s they became known as the "lost generation," a phrase coined by famed American author and WWI veteran Ernest Hemingway.
The end of WWI sparked the entrance of modern art into the spotlight in popular art. Surrealist and Expressionist painters began to emerge from various corners of the world, and art, rather than depicting a beautiful, perfect world, began to depict the struggles, chaos, and splinters of the world with distorted figures and mangled bodies. Picasso's "Guernica," which was actually a response to the bombing of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War, is an example of how WWI changed art forever.
