untitled (In the trenches), Otto Dix

Exhibition Label: "Machine in a Void: World War I & the Graphic Arts," Mar-2010, Steve Goddard These two drawings by Dix were evidently done after the War in preparation for his towering achievement as a graphic artist, his 1924 portfolio of 50 etchings, Der Krieg (War)-an accomplishment often compared to Goya's print series, The Disasters of War. While there is no direct correspondence, these drawings are closest to the finished etchings titled Trichterfeld bei Dontrien, von Leuchtkugeln erhelt (Field of Craters near Dontrien, Illuminated by Rocket Flares), and Verschüttete (January 1916, Champagne) (Buried Alive (January 1916, Champagne)). The fact that the study with the water-filled craters includes a notation "wässrig Aquatinta" (watery aquatint) assures us that this drawing was a study for a print. As introduced elsewhere in the exhibition, Dix volunteered for military service at the outbreak of war, in August 1914. He served first in a field artillery regiment, and next received heavy-machine-gun training in Bautzen; by the fall of 1915 he was a machine gunner and platoon commander in France, Flanders, Poland, and Russia. He witnessed some of the most harrowing chapters of the War and was a survivor of the Battle of the Somme, in which Allied and German forces each suffered more than 600,000 casualties.