Otto dix the trench images
•
Today I am looking at a painting by an artist whose work has frequently shocked the public. His art often focused on the First World War and the aftermath of it on the people of Germany. It was not his intention to shock people with what was depicted in his paintings. It was simply his intention to tell the truth through his art and ensure that people would not ever forget the price citizens had to pay when their governments took them to war. Of his controversial paintings, he said:
“I’m not that obsessed with making representations of ugliness. Everything I’ve seen is beautiful.”
“I did not paint war pictures in order to prevent war. I would never have been so arrogant. I painted them to exorcise the experience of war.”
“People were already beginning to forget, what horrible suffering the war had brought them. I did not want to cause fear and panic, but to let people know how dreadful war is and so to stimulate people’s powers of resistance.”
My featured artist tod
•
The Trench (Dix)
Painting by Otto Dix
The Trench (German: Der Schützengraben), but earlier known as The War Picture or simply Der Krieg ("The War"), was an oil painting by the German artist Otto Dix. The large painting was made from 1920 to 1923, and was one of the several anti-war works by Dix in the 1920s, inspired by his experience of trench warfare in the First World War.
The painting was immediately controversial when first exhibited in Cologne in 1923. It was acquired by the Dresden City Museum in 1928 but not exhibited there. The work was condemned by the Nazis, confiscated and included in the exhibition of degenerate art (Entartete Kunst) held in Munich in 1937. It was sold to an art dealer in early 1940, but its fate is not known. It is considered lost and may have been destroyed in the war.
Background
[edit]Dix was an art student in Dresden before the First World War. He was conscripted in 1915 and served in the Imperial German Army as a machine gunn
•
Lost Art: Otto Dix The trenchcoat 1920–3
Otto Dix willingly joined the German army at the outset of the First World War and as a machine-gunner experienced artillery bombardment and hand-to-hand fighting in the trenches. In the early 1920s Dix felt sickened by the collective desire of so many civilians to forget the war and in response wanted to create a painting of gut-wrenching impact. The resulting frank depiction of death and dismemberment in the trenches caused a public outcry when it was bought by a Cologne museum in 1923.
In 1937 The Trench was confiscated by the Nazi regime and included in the infamous Degenerate Art exhibition. This show, which proved extremely popular, vilified modernist art as mentally ill, artistically bankrupt and, especially in the case of Dix’s The Trench, unpatriotic.
In 1939 several hundred modernist artworks were burned bygd the authorities in an open bonfire in the Berlin fire station. For many years it was thought that Dix’s The Tre