Explosion, Otto Dix

Exhibition Label:
"Conversation XVIII: World War I," Jan-2014, Stephen Goddard
Dix volunteered for military service in Dresden. He first served in a field artillery regiment, then 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. At war’s end in 1918 he was being trained as a pilot in Silesia. His portfolio, Krieg, is considered one of the most important portfolios of anti-war prints.

Exhibition Label:
“Machine in a Void: World War I & the Graphic Arts,” Mar-2010, Steve Goddard
The brilliant draftsman, printmaker, and painter Otto Dix served as a soldier throughout the First World War, ultimately becoming one of the most visceral commentators on the horrors of war since Goya. Ironically, Dix, like many of his contemporaries from both sides of the trenches, had greeted the outbreak of war with a naive enthusiasm in the belief that it would provode a quick and cathartic cure. In the words of Richard Cork, Dix had been “ablaze with a Nietzschean belief in the need for purgative destruction.” Although the grim realities soon settled in, Dix was almost pathologically incapable of removing himself from the conflict, believing it gave him the chance to fathom the human condition in an extreme situation, or, as he put it in an interview in 1963:

The war was a horrible thing, but there was something tremendous about it too. I didn’t want to miss it at any price. You have to have seen human beings in this unleashed state to know what human nature is.

His unflinching visual testimony of the War, quickly set down on whatever paper he could find, was reworked after the War in his 1924 portfolio of 51 etchings titled simply Der Krieg (The War). The theme of an exploding grenade was treated by many artists and writers who witnessed the War that gave us the term “shell shock,” but Dix’s drawing is unusually terrifying with its jagged, exploding forms that also define detached limbs.