Artist Selects: Frances Stark, Periodic Love and Perpetual War at LACMA

Otto Dix, Evening on the Wijstchaete Plain (November 1917) (1924). Etching and aquatint from a portfolio of fifty etching, aquatint, and drypoints. Image courtesy of the artist and LACMA. Photo: © Museum Associates/LACMA.

Borrowing from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Rifkind Center for German Expressionist Studies, Los Angeles-based artist Frances Stark’s curatorial presentation, Artist Selects: Frances Stark, Periodic Love and Perpetual War, plunges into the artist’s consciousness during wartime. Though her work is absent from the show, the exhibition continues Stark’s ongoing interest in merging cultural artifacts with personal experience. Her selection of 29 works on paper, archival materials, and photographs, all created in the aftermath of World War I, portray a fragmented society in which artists are faced with circumstances beyond their control. These collected works show artists attempting to process the onslaught of senseless death, while also clinging to life’s fleeting joys; their experiences bear close resemblance to our present moment, as we continue to wrestle with—and try to escape from—the machinery of war. 

Stark prominently features etchings from Otto Dix’s 1924 series Der Krieg (The War), drawn from Dix’s first-hand experience as an artillery gunner. The desolate landscape in Evening on the Wijstchaete Plain (November 1917) portrays a crowd of seemingly lifeless bodies piled on dirt. Their indistinguishable faces, coupled with their uniformly tattered clothing, points to the battlefield’s consequential erasure of human identity: They could be soldiers or civilians caught in the aftermath of gunfire. A similarly powerful piece from the series, though less visually turbulent, is Shell Crater with Flowers, where flowers sprout from a crater plundered by, presumably, a fallen bomb. Dix’s piece registers the crude violence seen by working-class veterans—recalling both those who witnessed unprecedented mass destruction in the early 20th century, and reflecting those who continue to confront it today. Stark placed these etchings in close proximity, as if to say that living is defined by complicated cycles of death and birth. 

Other works turn to everyday life beyond the trenches. In the 1928 lithograph, Lead Soldier by Otto Herbig (who served as a medic during WWI), a young girl plays with a set of toy soldiers, some appearing to wave flags, ride horses, and march to the beat of the trumpets and drums they carry. The girl’s arm reaches forward to reposition her toys as if she too is a crucial decision-maker on the battlefield’s frontlines. Such images reveal how war’s iconography, with its lexicon of “triumph” and “defeat,” envelops the human psyche and seeps into the innocence of children’s games. Stark’s curation evokes a similar sentiment, in which wartime permeates every facet of our world, demonstrating how the history of war is told. As we are currently confronted with acts of genocide, the show asks vital questions about the visual traces artists leave behind and what it means to endure this type of historical moment. 

Artist Selects: Frances Stark, Periodic Love and Perpetual War runs from June 13–November 9, 2025 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (5905 Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles, 90036).

Otto Dix, Shell Crater with Flowers (Spring 1916) (1924). Etching and drypoint from a portfolio of fifty etching, aquatint, and drypoints. Image courtesy of the artist and LACMA. Photo: © Museum Associates/LACMA.

Otto Herbig, Lead Soldier (1928). Lithograph. Image courtesy of the artist and LACMA. Photo: © Museum Associates/LACMA.

Nahui Garcia is an art historian and curator currently living in Los Angeles. She is an MA candidate in the Curatorial Practices and the Public Sphere Program at USC Roski School of Art and Design. 

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