By Matt RadlerContributing Writer

While images and stories of the Iraq war appear daily on television and in newspapers, a new exhibit on World War I art at the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art reveals the experiences of war from a different angle – the artist’s view.

“From the Trenches to the Street: Art from Germany, 1910s-1920s” brings together a wide variety of German works, including paintings, etchings and woodcuts, and combines the patriotic imagery of the war’s early years with the dark and violent works of protest that came later.

Assistant Curator Corinne Granoff assembled the free exhibit, which runs until March 18. Granoff said she began planning the exhibit in the spring of 2006 as a simple collection of post-World War I German art, but it became a chance to examine how artists view and document war.

“There’s a kind of emotional turn to art sometimes,” Granoff said. “There’s a level of interpretation (the artists) bring in their hand, in their eye, to a subject like war. It has a lot to do with what’s going on now in Iraq.”

Granoff said the exhibit is not intended as a war editorial and that she hopes visitors will make their own impressions.

Much of the exhibit is devoted to military and battlefield imagery, featuring trenches, corpses and the wounded. The most famous pieces of the exhibit come from the artist Otto Dix and his portfolio “War,” although the gallery contains works by other well-known artists, including George Grosz and Max Beckmann.

“The centerpiece is the Otto Dix portfolio,” Granoff said. “Dix brings such a clinical eye to his work, it’s so powerful. It’s got this unrelenting quality, kind of like the war itself.”

Walking together through the exhibit, Weinberg sophomore Akif Irfan and University of Arizona sophomore Brittany Smith said the gallery surprised them.

“I find this particular gallery very disturbing,” Irfan said. “The imagery is very real, very anti-war.”

Smith said she liked the cynical works the most, especially the pieces by Grosz that mock the German military.

“My favorite one by him is definitely the ‘Pimps of Death,'” Smith said. “He’s got a lot of clever pieces.”

Besides well-known works by Dix and Grosz, the exhibit contains many perspectives on war by less famous artists, such as Otto Wirsching, Granoff said. Woodcuts from Wirsching’s portfolio “Dance of Death” line the wall in the exhibit’s first section, featuring skeletons and dark humor.

The pieces in the gallery come from a range of sources, including the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Lawrence University, the Milwaukee Art Museum, private collectors and Northwestern’s own art collection.

Stopping in front of a woodcut by K