Otto Dix: The painter who captured the true hell of war
Before the Great War, German artist Otto Dix embodied the exact opposite of what we remember him as today. His landscape painting of 1912 Elbufer in Dresden, perfectly illustrates this and has become a significant moment in art. It is a painterly impressionistic depiction of a quaint river bank, with orderly white townhouses in the background lined with trees. Its muted palette of mauves and mints makes it perfectly serene.
That’s because before the war, Dix trained as a landscape artist with his cousin Fritz Amann. One can’t help but wonder what kind of artist and person Dix would have been if he hadn’t witnessed the horrors of both world wars.
Elbufer in Dresden, placed side-by-side with any of Dix’s iconic war paintings of mangled bodies, is a jarring and stark contrast that one can’t look away from, perfectly illustrating the ravages of war. It’s like looking at heaven and hell.
Dix himself also was not what you’d expect from a war artist. “He soon arrived with a flapping cape, large hat, and greeted me with a kiss on the hand, something very unusual for me in those days.” wrote art dealer Johanna Ey on meeting Dix, in her memoirs. “In the morning he unpacked his box, revealing: patent leather shoes, perfumes, nothing but beauty care items…” Surely such a dandy couldn’t possibly paint such grotesque images. He probably couldn’t have foreseen it either.
In 1914, at 23 years old, Dix joined the war effort as a patriotic pilot. Fighting all over Europe, he later became a machine gunner, in the infamous bloodbath of the Battle of the Somme. With death at his fingertips, his art was never the same again. Indeed, upon his return home after an injury, he transformed the sketches he had compiled in his notebooks into paintings. Now a broken and “degenerate artist”, he used paint to purge his mind of the traumas he endured, holding nothing back.
Der Krieg, a series of prints published by Dix in 1924, portrays the nightmarish reality of war, through a series of caricaturesque scenes of life in the trenches. Skull (Schädel) is a depiction of a skull with worms sprouting out of its eyes and mouth. The print recalls a ‘memento mori’ still life, popular paintings in the Baroque period which served to remind us of the fragility of death. Except in this case, that is done in a terrifying and gross way. Additionally, in typical Dix fashion, there’s an element of comedy in this print, as the skull seems to be growing a spiky moustache of grass.
Another example is, Stormtroops advancing under a gas attack (Sturmtruppe geht unter Gas vor). This monochromatic print displays Nazi soldiers in the field with stark white gas masks. The print is obscure yet clear. The grey hues that bleed over the paper, echo the thick clouds of gas, causing a blur of endless bodies. In fact, the bottom half of the print is just a dark mess of unidentifiable objects. The soldiers emerge out of this darkness like demons in masks.
The stark whiteness of the gas masks resemble the same skull in the previous print with black circles for hollow eyes, perhaps foreshadowing their tragic deaths. All the figures look the same, you can’t tell their physical features apart, denoting the anonymity of each life lost during the war. A small minority of Germans like Dix, developed an increasing hatred towards the atrocities of war and started to resent it. As a result, Dix, among other artists, formed the Dada movement, aimed at destroying traditional art and replacing it with graphic and nonsensical elements that called into question and critiqued a society that could perform such barbarities.
“Revolted by the butchery of the 1914 World War, we in Zurich devoted ourselves to the arts.” declared Hans Arp, a member of the group. “While the guns rumbled in the distance, we sang, painted, made collages and wrote poems with all our might.”
