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#259

War

Dix, Otto ((1891-1969)) | Painter

02:30

In stark, unsparing detail, Otto Dix presents an eternal cycle of horror. Soldiers march off to do battle in an apocalyptic landscape; those surviving drag wounded comrades out of the line of fire. Afterwards, they retreat into the trenches, lying in dugouts reinforced with boards where they sleep like the doomed. After a few hours, they make ready to be sent over the top again, and the nightmare begins again.

In 1914, the young Otto Dix was called up and volunteered to fight on the fight line. At that time, he was 23 years old and wanted to experience the war at first hand. As curator Birgit Dalbajewa explains, the enormous power of this work lies in the objectivity of the images and their force as an eyewitness account.

“In the final analysis, Dix has created a magnificent anti-war memorial. But this neither has a wagging finger, nor couches its moral in symbolic terms. In German art history, this triptych can be regarded as ranked alongside Picasso’s ‘Guernica’, painted a few years later. But in contrast to Picasso, Dix took a quite different approach, not working with symbolism, but with seemingly realistic depictions of a situation affecting us in its own right.”

Otto Dix opted for a very traditional format – a triptych, commonly used in the late middle ages for winged altarpieces. So with its central panel and two side wings, as well as a predella – the scene along the base – the painting deliberately evokes such religious works. But here, there is no promise of salvation.

It is, though, something of a miracle that this work with its pacifist message managed to survive the Nazi regime’s iconoclast policies. Dix hid it from the Nazis, and so it could be shown at the First General German Art Exhibition in Dresden in 1946.

In 1968, it was acquired from the artist for the Dresden collections. The funds for the purchase were raised by selling numerous pieces from the Historical Museum, the Porcelain Collection and nineteenth and twentieth century works from the Galerie Neue Meister collections. So this work has a contradictory acquisition history connected with losses and gains.

Material & Technique
Mixed media on wood
Museum
Galerie Neue Meister
Dating
1929/32
Inventory number
Gal.-Nr. 3754
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