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Otto Dix Self-portrait as a POW, 1947
Collapsedtrenches Landscape is an important presence in Dix's war cycle. It appears sometimes as a simple backdrop to human tragedy, but more often as an integral part of the destruction. In Collapsed trenches we are immediately aware that something terrible has happened, a perception that is reinforced subliminally by the piece of cloth that seems to loom, vulture-like, over the disintegrated trench. It is only on closer inspection, however, that images of skeletons, disarticulated limbs and the other debris of war slowly emerge. In this and the other plates that show the battlefields, the landscape has been attacked, wounded, and ravaged as much as the humans who crawl around in it. Dix's work is often less about objectively documenting the events of the war than it is about recapturing the hallucinatory quality of its psychological impact.
Barbed wire in front of the trenches This is one of Otto Dix's images that most directly echoes the work of Goya, whose painting Execution of the Defenders of Madrid, 3rd May of 1813 shows a figure with arms similarly outstretched. Where Goya relied on paintwork and colour to Barbed wire in front of the trenches convey the horror, Dix took up a pointed instrument and vigorously slashed cross-hatchings in sky, earth and tattered remains to produce an equally dynamic and dramatic effect. That this was very different from even Goya's approach to etching can be seen by looking at another similar image by Goya, this time from his The disasters of war, plate 2 called 'Rightly or wrongly', in which Goya used no cross-hatching at all.
Soldier's grave between the lines Otto Dix's Der Krieg [War] 1924 is consciously modelled on Goya's [1746-1828] equally famous The disasters of war which detailed Goya's own account of the Spanish War of Independence from 1808 to 1814, although his cycle of eighty-two images was not published until 1863.While Dix's cycle uses an equally astonishing array of etching techniques, its focus in many respects is quite different. War for Goya was an intimate horror, its initial impact localised, its ultimate effect incremental. As the images which open Dix's cycle demonstrate, his war is a modern war - the scale is vast. Not only are men killed in an arbitrary, anonymous and indiscriminate way, the landscape itself is torn apart, desecrated, ravaged in a way that is catastrophic. Often the landscape appears alien; other-worldly, nightmarish. At the same time, each of these images has the immediacy of authentic experience. Many of them are in fact based on the diary sketches that Dix made while fighting in the trenches.
Dance of death 1917 - Dead Man's Hill The dramatic power of this image relies almost entirely on the tonal contrasts realised through a technique known as aquatint. Dix recalled:I suddenly got very interested in etching. I had a lot to say, I had a subject. Wash off the acid, put on the aquatint: a wonderful technique that you can use to get as many different shades and tones as you want. The 'doing' aspect of art becomes tremendously interesting when you start doing etchings; you get to be a real alchemist. In aquatinting, particles of rosin are dusted onto the etching plate and fused to it by heating, the acid biting the plate between them to give an even tone. Here Dix aimed for four main tones: white, two greys, and black. Given Dix's subject matter, a comparison with Henri Matisse's painting Dance 1910 may seem bizarre, but it does work to convince us that what the artist achieved here truly is a Danse macabre; a dance of death.
Dead sentry in the trenches Otto Dix recalled, 'I had the feeling that there was a dimension of reality that had not been dealt with in art: the dimension of ugliness'. Many people still believe that art should deal only with what is beautiful. Even those who concede that Dix had cruel and tragic events to report may still protest at the ugliness of his art.Not only did he choose the starker black and white of the etching medium, he also used many different techniques for making the hollows in the metal etching plates that would hold the printing ink. He thereby exploited the enormous potential of etching to produce messy, disintegrating, and apparently haphazard and quite dirty effects, creating an impression that the plates themselves had been attacked, bayoneted, shot at, and muddied with the mud of Flanders. What people denounce as ugliness is a visual equivalent of the acidic corrosiveness of his war experiences.
Meal time in the trenches In the 1960s Dix stated, 'War reduces mankind to the state of beasts, with its hunger, vermin, mud and insane noises'. Mealtime in the trenches depicts not only the discomfort that soldiers had to endure, but also the impact that such extreme conditions could have on a person's dignity. A lone soldier gulps down a hasty meal apparently indifferent to the human skeleton trapped in the frozen landscape beside him.This work is also an outstanding example of Dix's technical virtuosity. From the soft tonal gradations over the horizon, which suggest an impending storm, to the intricate, cross-hatched detail of the soldier's clothing, to the spattering produced by the action of acid directly on the plate, Dix demonstrates his remarkable command of the full range of the etching process. The variety of mark making produces an intensity of effect that mirrors the chaotic desolation of the battlefield.
Lens being bombedThis dynamic composition gives an overwhelming sense of the terrifying reality of the actual moment the town of Lens in northern France was bombed.We are drawn into the image by the street's multiple receding lines. In the foreground, the faces of the fleeing civilians are distorted by fear and grief. Their hollow eyes echo the empty, boarded-up windows of the houses they desert. In the background, these figures are reduced to dark fugitive shapes trapped by the dramatic, vortex-like perspective.The bomber is rendered in a sketchy, childlike way that seems at odds with its menacing purpose. One can almost hear the noise and feel the panic it creates. Its shadow ominously divides the two groups of people, while the endless facades of the buildings stretching into the horizon from left and right create a narrowing tunnel from which the citizens of Lens seem unable to escape
Solider raping a women Soldier raping a nun was suppressed from the original War portfolio on its publication in 1924 on the advice of Dix's publisher Karl Nierendorf. He believed it would be seen as a 'slap in the face for all those who celebrate our "heroes" [and]... for all those who have a bourgeois conception of a front-line soldier.' Nierendorf had similar reservations about plate 34, Frontline soldiers in Brussels and plate 36, Visit to Madame Germaine in Mericourt both of which depict soldiers visiting a brothel.According to Nierendorf, an image such as Soldier raping a nun could 'threaten the whole work with confiscation... People will make this one print into the target of their attacks.'This image is perhaps the least successful of the cycle. Whereas the brothel images may have been authentic in terms of Dix's own observed experience - he was a famous frequenter of such places - Soldier raping a nun is unlikely to have been. It is anecdotal. While such events no doubt occurred, it is also open to the less convincing symbolic reading of mindless brutality triumphing over pure innocence. This, and its almost caricatured voyeuristic content, is in stark contrast to the sense of authentic observation that informs the rest of the portfolio.
Night time encounter with a madman The original German title of plate 22 is Nachtliche Begegnung mit einem Irrsinnigen: here the word Irrsinnig powerfully conveys the sense that all the neural networks that underpin both one's sense of self and the apparent rational structure of one's world have been utterly torn to shreds. This image dramatically articulates the nightmare-like psychological impact of war on a civilian population.
House destroyed by aircraft bombs - Tournai Whereas Dix's War etchings are overwhelmingly of life and death on the battlefield, nearly all of Goya's The disasters of war are of civilians suffering atrocities or inflicting them on others. This is one of the few prints by Dix that show civilians, and it is apparently modelled on one of Goya's prints of a similar event called 'Estragos de la guerra [Ravages of war]'. In both prints there is a dead woman on her back with her head hanging down towards us and her legs apart, and behind her another dead women hanging down towards us on her front. In both cases there is a dead child in the foreground.The difference is that Goya shows us the devastation of a domestic scene almost certainly created by rampaging foreign soldiers using their swords, while Dix shows us the impersonal destruction of bombs dropped by invading foreign aircraft.
Transporting the wounded in Houthulster Forest Because Dix's War prints are so awful, most people see them as expressions of a pacifist sensibility. Yet Dix said of his volunteering for the war, 'I wanted it. I'm therefore not a pacifist at all - or am I?'Dix was not interested in politics. Although some of his war works, including the War portfolio, were financially supported by pacifist groups, and were attacked by rightwing nationalists for being anti-military, it is almost certain that he himself did not intend his works to be taken as propaganda for any kind of political position at all.Dix's War was not a statement against war, but a demonstration of how war could serve his art. As a dedicated artist he subordinated everything else to schooling himself to being an artist first and foremost regardless of the interpretations that viewers might derive from or impose on his work.
Bomb-crater with flowers - Spring 1916 Shortly before he died Otto Dix qualified his earlier statements: 'I was not really seeking to depict ugliness. Everything I saw was beautiful'. By this definition, all lines, textures, tones, shapes and compositions are in some sense beautiful. So a deliberately jagged scrawl may be found to have left an eye-catching graininess in the fibrous texture of the paper, and a vicious series of jabs may impress with its sincerity. Perhaps it is easier to see this beauty when the content is repulsive, when the pushing away of ugly content is in tension with the pulling in of pleasing form. It is natural to feel ambivalent about this, and to question whether we should be seeing beauty in Dix's horrific prints. Is an aesthetic response appropriate when the subject is the First World War? How can we take pleasure in the depiction of suffering and wholesale carnage?
Wounded Man Otto Dix seems to cry out through his images: 'Trust me. This is what really happened. I was there.' After volunteering for the German army at the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 he was sent to the Western Front and fought as a lance corporal in a field artillery regiment in Champagne, Artois, and the Somme. As an eyewitness to some of the most horrific events of the First World War, he is putting them on the record: these soldiers were actually buried alive; this is what dying from poison gas was like; this is what a dead horse looks like; these were the expressions on the faces of the wounded. This image is reminiscent of plate 69 in Goya's series, The disasters of war, which Goya titled, '"Nothing!" That is what it says'.
Dead man - St Clement In 1963, explaining why he volunteered for the army in the First World War, Dix had this to say: I had to experience how someone beside me suddenly falls over and is dead and the bullet has hit him squarely. I had to experience that quite directly. I wanted it. I'm therefore not a pacifist at all - or am I? Perhaps I was an inquisitive person. I had to see all that myself. I'm such a realist, you know, that I have to see everything with my own eyes in order to confirm that it's like that. I have to experience all the ghastly, bottomless depths of life for myself.Elsewhere he said: 'I did not paint war pictures in order to prevent war. I would never have been so arrogant. I painted them to exorcise the experience of war. All art is about exorcism.'
