Give specific examples of the impact of World Wars I and II on literature, the visual arts, and music

What will be an ideal response?

The horrific conditions and consequences of the two world wars had a significant impact on the arts. Many writers, painters, and composers responded directly with visceral antiwar statements. Others, acknowledging the requirements of totalitarian regimes (those of Hitler in Germany, Stalin in Russia, and Mao in China), produced works that responded to the revolutionary ideologies of the state. Photography and film—media that appealed directly to the masses—became important wartime vehicles, functioning both as propaganda and as documentary evidence of brutality and despair.
Poets and writers evoked themes of loss and hope for redemption and many, such as Wilfred Owen, criticized war as a senseless waste of human resources and a barbaric form of human behavior. After World War II, artists responded to the horrific violence with absurdity. Kurt Vonnegut and other gallows humor writers (a form of literary satire that mocks modern life by calling attention to situations that seem too ghastly or too absurd to be true) described the grotesque and the macabre in the passionless and nonchalant manner of a contemporary newspaper account.
Visual artists, such as Max Ernst, George Grosz, Fernand Léger, and Picasso, also incorporated the effects of war into their works. Most of these artists put forth impassioned protests, against the brutality and senselessness of modern warfare. Grosz, for example, mocked the German military and its corrupt and mindless bureaucracy in sketchy, brittle compositions filled with pungent caricatures. In Guernica, Picasso used a unique conjunction of powerful images—a screaming woman, a dead baby, a severed arm, a victimized animal—to create a universal icon for the inhuman atrocities of war, one that has made good his claim that art is "a weapon against the enemy."
Twentieth-century composers were frequently moved to commemorate the horrors of war. The most monumental example of such music is the War Requiem (1963) by the British composer Benjamin Britten. Britten's imaginative union of sacred ritual and secular song calls for orchestra, chorus, boys' chorus, and three soloists. Poignant in spirit and dramatic in effect, this oratorio may be seen as the musical analogue of Picasso's Guernica. Similar in intent, the music of Krzysztof Penderecki seeks to capture the agony of war. His Threnody in Memory of the Victims of Hiroshima (1960) consists of violent torrents of dissonant, percussive sound, rapid shifts in density, timbre, rhythm, and dynamics, jarring and disquieting effects consistent with the subject matter of the piece.