Among his most famous paintings are "Sailor and Girl" (1925), used as the cover of Philip Roth's 1995 novel Sabbath's Theater, the triptych "Metropolis" (1928), a scornful portrayal of depraved actions of Germany's Weimar Republic, where nonstop revelry was a way to deal with the wartime defeat and financial catastrophe, and the startling "Portrait of the Journalist Sylvia von Harden" (1926). His depictions of legless and disfigured veterans—a common sight on Berlin's streets in the 1920s—unveil the ugly side of war and illustrate their forgotten status within contemporary German society, a concept also developed in Erich Maria Remarque's "All Quiet on the Western Front."