click to enlarge

Plate 9  Zerfallender Kampfgraben [Collapsed trenches]

Landscape is an important presence in Dix’s War cycle. It appears sometimes as a simple backdrop to human tragedy, but often as a more integral part of the destruction. Collapsed trenches is also typical of a recurrent psychological strategy that underpins much of what Dix does in his portfolio. 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 – see, for example, the foot in the extreme lower left foreground which many viewers fail to see on first inspection.

Dix’s work, then, is often less about objectively documenting the experience of war in the same way that many commissioned war artists did, than it is about recapturing the hallucinatory quality of its psychological impact.

 click to enlarge

Plate 13  Mahlzeit in der Sappe (Lorettohohe) [Mealtime in the trenches – The Loretto Hills]

In the 1960s, Dix stated that: ‘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 the men had to endure, but also the impact that such extreme conditions can have on a person’s dignity. Here, in an image which is as ghastly as it is macabre, 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 etching processes. The variety of mark-making produces an intensity of effect which mirrors the chaotic desolation of the battlefield and the isolation of its human participants.

 click to enlarge

Plate 22 Nachtliche Begegnung mit einem Irrsinnigen [Night-time encounter with a madman]

Two of the images that most directly echo the work of Goya are plate 22, Night-time encounter with a madman, and the devastating plate 35,The madwoman of St Marie-à-Ply. The original German title of plate 22 is Nächtliche Begegnung mit einem Irrsinnigen: here the word Irrsinnig in German 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.

Equally harrowing is plate 35, The madwoman of St. Marie-à-Ply, which depicts a woman crazed with grief proffering her breast to her dead child who lies before her.

One of the most famous etching from Goya’s war cycle was entitled Yo lo vi [I saw it]. We have the same sense of absolute observed authenticity in many of Dix’s images – see for example plate 28, Seen on the escarpment of Cléry sur Somme, and plate 29, Found while digging a trench – Auberive.

 click to enlarge

Plate 32  Matrosen in Antwerpen [Sailors in Antwerp]

Dix’s unsentimental observation of the realities of a nation at war extended far beyond the battlefield. The artist also acknowledged the less immediate human casualties of warfare: the surviving soldiers who tried to deal with the brutal memories of war by drinking themselves into oblivion; the prostitutes who offered them brief moments of illusory comfort, and all the lonely, grieving widows, mothers and brides-never-to-be.

After the massive collapse of the currency in 1923, postwar Germany looked to the future. Bars and nightclubs began to proliferate throughout most major European cities, and Sailors in Antwerp is one of three prints in this portfolio which depicts not only the bittersweet mood of this lively, seedy nightlife, but which also echo those moments of empty solace a soldier might have experienced while on leave from the front.

Here, using a technique that is reminiscent of Goya, Dix uses a combination of velvety aquatint and coarse drypoint line, evoking the deep shadows and bright lights of the bar to convey a mood of joyless consolation.

 click to enlarge

Plate 33 Lens wird mit Bomben belegt [Lens being bombed]

Dynamic compositions like Lens being bombed give the viewer 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 multiple receding lines of the street, plunging into the distance. 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 seemingly trapped by the dramatic, vortex-like perspective of the scene.

The bomber is rendered in a sketchy, almost childlike way that seems strangely at odds with its menacing purpose. As it swoops down on Lens, one can almost hear the noise and feel the panic it creates. Its shadow ominously divides the two groups of people, while the endless façades of the buildings stretching into the horizon from both right and left create a narrowing tunnel from which the citizens of Lens seem to have little prospect of escape.

 click to enlarge

Plate 42  Toter (St. Clement) [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.’

 click to enlarge

Plate 51  Soldat und Nonne (Vergewaltigung) [Soldier raping a nun]

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.