Those seeking solace or distraction from the deafening buzz of television broadcasters discussing the prospects of war will not find it at the Fogg Art Museum, where they’ll instead encounter a wrenching discourse on the atrocities of war and their representation.

“George Bellows: Tragedies of War,” which opens tomorrow, centers around a large painting by early 20th century artist Bellows which depicts the gruesome dismemberment of a Belgian youth by German soldiers.

Entitled “The Germans Arrive,” the painting shows pastoral Belgian village rendered grotesque by the brutality of German invaders during World War I. The painting is on loan from an anonymous donor.

“The Germans Arrive” is surrounded by a series of lithographs that depict German behavior towards Belgian civilians during World War I. The lithographs portray horrors such as German soldiers’ use of Belgian captives as human barricades, rape and the impalement of women and children.

The painting and lithographs demonstrate the artist’s emotional attitude towards a powerful subject matter.

Kim Orcutt, assistant curator of American art at the Fogg, says the lithographs are remarkable because of their formal excellence.

“Barricade,” which features German soldiers gathered behind a human shield of naked Belgian civilians, is both a meditation on war crimes and an artistic study of the human form. Bellows explores diverse body types, posed so as to be reminiscent of classical paintings.

Orcutt, who calls the Bellows work “emotional, provocative and compositionally well thought-out,” says there is a tension between responding to the barbaric events depicted and examining those depictions for their formal qualities.

“It’s hard to look past the subjects and say, ‘He did a good job with that,’” Orcutt says. “But though it’s difficult, it’s rewarding.”

The new exhibit places Bellows in the context of a long tradition of European artists’ portrayals of the ravages of war, including paintings by Edouard Manet, Honoré Daumier and Marie-Anne Collot. One Bellows lithograph in the series, “Massacre of the Dinant,” directly references works by Francisco de Goya, which are also on display in the exhibit.

And yet while Bellows was clearly influenced by the history of European artists grappling with war, his war series diverges strikingly from American artists who came before him.

According to Orcutt, American artists before Bellows overwhelmingly portrayed soldiers as heroic and battle scenes as triumphant.

Pointing to an almost cartoonish Civil War battle scene by American artist Winslow Homer, also featured in the exhibit, Orcutt says Bellows’ style is unprecedented.

“What’s unique about this whole series is that Americans haven’t done this,” she says.

Bellows created his series after reading official British reports about war crimes inflicted on Belgian civilians by German troops. Working directly from these reports, he portrayed events that had occurred between 1915 and 1918.