BOOK REVIEW / The First World War and the Avant-Garde: A Bitter Truth: Avant-Garde Art and the Great War by Richard Cork (Yale pounds 45

Max Beckmann's 'Self-Portrait as a Medical Orderly', 1915, is taken from A Bitter Truth: Avant-Garde Art and the Great War by Richard Cork (Yale pounds 45) - handsome and abundantly illustrated, but not just for the coffee-table. Cork's text makes an impressive survey of artists' response to the traumas and degradations of war, and how the impact of previously unthinkable horrors resulted in work that broke new ground both artistically and intellectually. It is sometimes a little thin on analysis, perhaps, but the richness of detail and research compensates.

(Photograph omitted)