Mutilated woman stripped and impaled to a door. A lieutenant smokes on the doorstep.
The Bryce Report has much testimony about events of this character."
-George Bellows
Of all Bellows' war images, this is the grisliest. The focus of the composition is a
dead woman whose left breast has been hacked off, and whose body is fixed to the door
of a destroyed home by a knife through her palm. The body of another woman can be seen
at the window. The scene is made grislier still by the addition of soldier
who sits calmly smoking a cigarette.
Buy the catalogue An American Pulse: The
Lithographs of George Wesley Bellows.
