George Biddle, Carnival in Rio, No. 5

The year after he served as a war correspondent at the Nuremberg trials, Biddle made a series of works in which carnival revelry turns to madness. Figures dance, but their expressions convey confusion and even grief. The mask of a dog seems too much like a severed head. Having witnessed the horrors of two world wars and the Great Depression, it is no wonder that Biddle expressed a view that the world had lost its grounding.