The Online Otto Dix Project

Description: J. B. Neumann was an art dealer and connoisseur. In the early 1920s, he recognized Dix's talent and displayed his work in his German galleries. When he opened a New York gallery, Neumann introduced Dix to a new audience in the United States.

Description: This is the first plate from Dix's series about the Great War. It was called The War and it was modelled on Goya's The Disasters of War devoted to the Spanish War of Independence. Dix opens the series with a reflection on the First rule of battle: Young men die in war.

Description: The series opened with a soldier's grave between the lines. The second plate provides a graphic depiction of how such graves are produced. Soldiers react in horror as the earth collapes around them. In the instant before they are swallowed, Dix depicts them not as they are but as they will become. Their faces are reduced to depictions of skulls.

Description: By 1924, the audience aware of the horrors of gas but censored wartime reporting spared many from its ghastly details. Here the results are depicted with raw clarity of someone who was there. Indeed, much of Der Krieg was based on Dix's wartime diary drawings. Many were probably struck by the appearance of the victims, darkened for lack of oxygen and the nonchallance of the medical staff who had seen it many times before.

Description: Already by plate number four we begin to understand this is no ordinary series of etchings. Throughout the series, Dix demonstrates a commanding use of print techniques with etching, dry point and aquatint. Here a night time flare illuminates a lunar landscape.

Description: Men were not the only victims of their savagery. The war indiscriminately destroyed anything in its path.

Description: Bapaume was hotly contested in 1871. In the fall of 1916, it was an Allied objective during the Battle of the Somme. In the Second World War, armies would battle there once again. Dix survived but the images of wounded men haunted him.

Description: After four years of war, the landscape near Langemarck is nothing but a wasteland stripped of life and littered with human remains.

Description: The station is more like a rodent's burrow but its occupant manages comfort as he sprawls on the ground and indulges his pipe.

Description: For all its discomfort, the trench was was home. Here the enemy managed to destroy a section of home and the scene is depicted almost as Armageddon. Two pieces of tattered cloth hover above the soldier. One resembles the Reaper, the other a vulture. Each awaits the soldiers fate which is most certainly death.