The Great War was a distinctly modern conflict in many ways. However, like wars throughout history, it inspired a tremendous amount of creative output from artists and writers.
Many artists were forced to join the army and participated in the battles on both sides of the battlefront if caught either immediately or slightly later. My starting point for considering disappearance and mourning will be a work of art, which was produced precisely a century ago, in 1915.
The painter Bohumil Kubišta, then produced one of his most significant works, The Hanged Man. The painting was made in Pula at the Istrian Peninsula, where Kubišta served in World War One as artillery officer of the Austrian army.
The period of Kubišta's The Hanged Man is a time of intense, melancholy-colored awareness of disappearance and loss, but also a time of recalling what had been lost, and of reviving the cultural memory as a capacity to bring the object of loss back to the present.