Art of World War One
From website Art of the First World
War
Otto Dix
• Otto Dix (1891-1969) painted himself twice on the same piece of paper thus
producing one of the most important works to come out of the Great War.
• Immediately - even before experiencing the front line -Dix takes an
ambivalent stance, both epic and painful.
• The Self-Portrait as a Soldier, lighted by reds and the white reserve, is a
celebration of strength and violence verging on savagery.
• It can be seen as the quintessence of the image of war, proclaiming the
necessity of the struggle and the intoxication of destruction with no
remorse or regrets.
• On the other side, the Self-Portrait as a Gunner is in opposition to this oversimplified interpretation, with the all-pervasive black, the shadow around
the helmeted head, the worried look and the stark contrast between the
warlike symbols of the gold facings against a background of night and death.
• Despite his youth and his attraction to the war as an experience of the
unknown, Dix is not unaware of the horror of war, the appalling daily
chronicle of which he later did drawings and etchings.
• This same ambiguity can also be found in his Self-Portrait as Mars (1915).
Otto Dix, Selbstbildnis als
Soldat (Self-Portrait as a
Soldier), 1914, ink and
watercolour on paper, on
both sides, 68 x 53.5 cm,
Municipal Gallery, Stuttgart.
Otto Dix, Selbstbildnis
mit Artillerie-Helm
(Self-Portrait Wearing
a Gunner's Helmet),
1914, ink and
watercolour on
paper, on both sides,
68 x 53.5 cm,
Municipal Gallery,
Stuttgart.
" We left the schoolrooms, the school desks and benches,
and the few short weeks of instruction had bonded us into
one great body burning with enthusiasm. Having grown up
in an age of security, we all had a nostalgia for the unusual
great perils. The war thus seized hold of us like strong
liquor. It was under a hail of flowers that we left, drunk on
roses and blood. Without a doubt, the war offered us
grandeur, strength and gravity. It seemed to us like a virile
exploit: the joyous combats of infantrymen in the meadows
where blood fell like dew on the flowers. "
Ernst Jünger, Storms of Steel, Paris, Christian Bourgois,
1970.
Josh Nash
• The archetype of the battle scene, Over the Top depicts the attack
during which the First Artist Rifles left their trenches and pushed
towards Marcoing near Cambrai.
• Of the eighty men, sixty-eight were killed or wounded during the
first few minutes. John Nash (1893-1977) was one of the twelve
spared by the shellfire.
• Painting from memory - unlike his brother Paul Nash - he produced
this uncompromising picture which has remained the painter's best
known work and one of the most remarkable to come out of the
war, revealing as it does, with methodical neutrality, the absurdity
of the unprotected offensive and the certainty of not coming back
alive.
• Even more important than the artist's style or his naked realism is
the strength of conviction of a picture intended to leave a mark on
the memory.
John Nash, Over the Top, oil on canvas, 79.4 x
107.3 cm, Imperial War Museum, London.
• John Nash
Oppy was a village not far from Vimy. Fortified by the
Germans, it withstood the assaults of the British,
Canadian and French troops until September 1918.
• Although not the most famous of his war paintings,
John Nash's painting depicts with careful didacticism
the circumstances of the confrontation - the
destruction of nature, the plain ravaged by shell-holes
which had been turned into lakes, shelters dug deep in
the ground, and trenches with cemented floors and
arches reinforced by sheet metal, and - once again - the
immobility, the void, the lookout on his watch with his
face at ground level among the roots and clods of
earth.
• Unlike his elder brother Paul, John Nash favoured a
painstaking naturalist style with geometrical
schematisations.
John Nash, Oppy Wood, 1917. Evening, oil on
canvas, 182.8 x 213.3 cm, Imperial War
Museum, London.
" As soon as our line, set on its jolting way, emerged, I felt that two men close
by had been hit, two shadows fell to the ground and rolled under our feet, one
with a high-pitched scream and the other in silence like an ox. Another
disappeared with a movement like a madman, as if he had been carried away.
Instinctively, we closed ranks and pushed each other forward, always forward,
and the wound in our midst closed itself. The warrant officer stopped and
raised his sword, dropped it, fell to his knees, his kneeling body falling
backwards in jerks, his helmet fell on his heels and he remained there, his head
uncovered, looking up to the sky. The line has promptly split to avoid breaking
this immobility.
But we couldn't see the lieutenant any more. No more superiors, then... A
moment's hesitation held back the human wave which had reached the
beginning of the plateau. The hoarse sound of air passing through our lungs
could be heard over the stamping of feet.
- Forward! cried a soldier.
So we all marched forward, moving faster and faster in our race towards the
abyss. "
Henri Barbusse, Le feu (Fire), Paris, Flammarion, 1916.
• C. R. W. Nevinson
Léger and Nevinson are clearly close in terms of
generation, background and viewpoint.
• Geometry is their common language and in this
representation of French infantrymen on their way,
Nevinson uses the same elements: hemispherical
helmets, cubic back-packs, cylindrical limbs and
angular greatcoats.
• Just like Léger's card players, these resting soldiers
are faceless, their only expression being one of
fatigue, although they have not yet actually reached
the battle zone.
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• We reach the tunnel. Down below, the atmosphere is
heavy and damp. There is a mixed smell of wet
clothing, tobacco and soot. Here and there, candles
placed at waist height cast a reddish-brown light. At the
far end, at the exit to the tunnel, we can see the grey
light of day. We have to bend down to avoid banging
our heads on the ceiling. To the right there are wire
trellis twin bunk beds. Next to us, the passage is so
narrow that a man who is eating there has to haul
himself up from his bed to let us past. With his great
blond beard and his blue eyes he is now sitting in the
middle of wet socks, bread, shoes, cigars and writing
paper, and he smiles at his own untidiness. "
• Ludwig Renn (pseud. de Adolf Friedrich Vith von
Golssenau), Guerre, traduit par C. Burghard, Paris,
Flammarion, 1929.
Paul Nash
• Along with Nevinson and Wyndham Lewis, Nash (1889-1946) was
one of the major British war painters who, like them, had been
influenced by Cubism and Futurism prior to 1914.
• He signed up in 1914, was made a lieutenant in 1916, and fought
near Ypres.
• An accident led to his repatriation in May 1917.
• He then set down to work from memory and from his sketches.
• Nash's paintings rely on detailed observation, from which he
extracts the substance of his pictorial, lyrical and tragic effects.
• This is the case with this picture, where Nash is not content merely
with a representation of the gun under camouflage nets.
• The initial flash of light and the reddening of the sky in contrast
with the shadow of the foreground heighten the picture's
expressiveness.
Paul Nash, A Howitzer Firing, oil on canvas,
71 x 91 cm, Imperial War Museum, London.
• Paul Nash
Produced for the Canadian War Memorial, this painting is
reminiscent of the work of Vallotton, in spite of the difference
in the two painters' ages, training and experience of the war.
• In this commemorative picture, Nash combines figurative
elements - mainly tree trunks, barbed wire and the dark
entrance to a dugout - with geometrical elements - now
curved, like craters and smoke etc., now angular, like the
explosion, parapets and wooden frames.
• It reminds one of early Nevinson, which relies on the same
pictorial system.
• However, faced with a monumental format, Nash introduces a
further element, with the brutality of his earthy colours, the
muddy grey-browns, the red of the barbed wire and the
whitish lights, forming sharp contrasts against the backdrop of
an opaque sky.
• Paul Nash
The battle around Ypres lasted as long as the war itself.
• This appalling blood-bath was for the Commonwealth troops like Verdun
for the French: an endless carnage in a marshy landscape where the
wounded were swallowed up in the mud.
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These three paintings by Paul Nash, while showing how he moved from
Cubo-Futurism towards descriptive naturalism, bear witness to the extreme
violence of the destruction, in the wetlands, in the mutilated woodlands
and around the town, itself destroyed.
• Void can be seen as the archetype of the Great War landscapes: not a
soldier to be seen, abandoned lorries and guns, flooded trenches, a limp
corpse among the shells and rifles, smoke and, in the distance a plane,
either dropping bombs or falling to the ground, we cannot tell.
• On top of everything, it rains continually.
• There can be no more hope of coming back alive from such a place which
no longer has a name, which has become a field of death.
Paul Nash, The Ypres Salient at Night, 1917-18,
oil on canvas, 71.1 x 91.4 cm, Imperial War
Museum, London.
• " We gingerly crossed the valley of Paddebeek
through a hail of bullets, hiding behind the foliage
of black poplar trees felled in the bombardment,
and using their trunks as bridges. From time to time
one of us disappeared up to their waist in the mud,
and if our comrades had not come to their rescue,
holding out their rifle butt, they would certainly
have gone under. We ran along the rims of the
shell-holes as if we were on the thin edge of a
honeycomb. Traces of blood on the surface of some
heavy shell-holes told us that several men had
already been swallowed up. " Ernst Jünger, Storms
of Steel.
Paul Nash, Void (Néant), 1918, oil on canvas,
71.4 x 91.7 cm, National Gallery of Canada,
Ottawa.
Paul Nash, The Menin Road, 1919, oil on
canvas, 182.9 x 317 cm, Imperial War Museum,
London.
• "A great movement of earth and sky through our
burning eyelids, wet and cold; things you find in the
pale dawn, one after another and all of them; nobody
killed in the darkness, nobody even buried despite the
relentless shell attack, the same earth and the same
corpses, all this flesh that trembles as if from internal
spasms, which dances, deep and hot, and hurts; no
more pictures even, just this burning fatigue frozen
skin-deep by the rain; another day dawning over the
ridge while the Boche's batteries carry on firing on it
and on what remains of us up there, mixed with the
mud, the bodies, with the once fertile field, now
polluted with poison, dead flesh, incurably affected by
our hellish torture. "
Maurice Genevoix, Ceux de 14 (The Men of 1914), Paris,
Flammarion, 1950.
Max Beckmann
Beckmann adds to the immediacy of this image by depicting the fraction of a second before
the explosion.
He makes it even more expressive by avoiding too much depth, with a pile of corpses in the
foreground, soldiers firing or running away around the incandescent ball which is about to
spew out flames and shrapnel.
There is no escape for the man who has turned away with his arms spread out, or for the man
firing the gun.
A similar fate to that of the disfigured victims all around awaits them.
The construction of the work and the tragedy of the scene are so effective that the
representation of the explosion itself is no longer a problem.
A bare sketch of black fragments around a white mass is sufficient because what really matters
is not the explosion, but the announcement of the destruction and the description of the
terror.
In a letter to his wife on October 11th 1914, Beckmann wrote: "When an enormous salvo
lands here, it's as if the gates of eternity have been opened. Everything is suggestive of
space, distance, infinity. I would like to paint the din if I could." He did not paint it, but he
did engrave it.
• " Twenty yards behind us, clods of earth flew out from a white
cloud and cracked through the high branches. Their echo resounded
through the undergrowth for a long time. Frantic eyes met each
other and bodies, crushed by a feeling of powerlessness, pressed
together on the ground. A hail of shots rang out. Noxious gases
infiltrated under the thicket and heavy smoke enveloped the
treetops and trunks, branches came crashing to the ground, and
cries could be heard. We got up quickly and left, groping our way,
harassed by the explosions and the deafening impact of the shots,
from tree to tree, turning around huge trunks like hunted animals
searching for cover. A dugout towards which many of us were
running and which I was heading for myself received a direct hit
that shattered its log roof and sent its heavy pieces of wood flying
in all directions. "
Ernst Jünger, Storms of Steel..
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At that moment, another whistling sound rang out up in
the air; we all felt it, our hearts in our mouths, this one's
for us. Then a huge, deafening din - the shell had landed
right in the midst of us.
Half-dazed, I got to my feet. In the huge shell-hole,
machine-gun cartridge belts set off by the explosion
glowed with a crude pink light. They lit up the heavy
smoke where a mass of twisted blackened bodies lay
and the shadows of survivors were running away in
every direction. At the same time many appalling
screams of pain and appeals for help could be heard.
The dark mass of people turning around the bottom of
this glowing, smoking cauldron opened out for a second
almost like the vision of a hellish nightmare, the deepest
abyss of horror. "
Ernst Jünger, Storms of Steel.
George Grosz
• In January 1917, Grosz, who up to then had been
convalescing, was recalled to his unit.
• The following day he was hospitalised and shortly afterwards,
owing to the seriousness of his depression and the nervous
disorders which affected him, he was interned in an
institution for the mentally ill.
• He experienced repeated attacks accompanied by
nightmarish hallucinations.
• In April, the painter was declared unfit for further service.
Explosion was painted shortly afterwards, not as the memory
of the fighting, but rather as an allegory of the destruction: a
town is razed and catches fire in a bombardment and cannot
escape the destructive fury that had taken hold of Europe.
• This is Cubo-Futurism in a dreamlike vein.
George Grosz, Explosion, 1917, oil on panel,
47.8 x 68.2 cm, Museum of Modern Art, New
York.
• Georges Leroux
• Leroux (1877- ?) belonged to a camouflage unit and
served in northern France and Belgium.
• He told how on returning from a reconnaissance
mission he had seen "a group of French soldiers
taking shelter in a great shell-hole full of water" and
how he later painted the picture from a sketch
made that same evening.
• With a realism quite unlike the style of Nash or
Léger, he produced a work which attempts to
represent as accurately as possible the
unrepresentable reality of war.
Georges Leroux, L'Enfer (Hell), 1917-18, oil on
canvas, 114.3 x 161.3 cm, Imperial War
Museum, London.
• " I climbed up to the top of the gully I am in. Behind
me was Fleury, and in front of me Vaux and
Douaumont. I could see out over an area of ten
square kilometres that had been turned into a
uniform desert of brown earth. The men were all so
tiny and lost in it that I could hardly see them. A
shell fell in the midst of these little things, which
moved for a moment, carrying off the wounded the dead, as unimportant as so many ants, were left
behind. They were no bigger than ants down there.
The artillery dominates everything. A formidable,
intelligent weapon, striking everywhere with such
desperate consistency. " Fernand Léger, Verdun,
November 7th 1916.
• Félix Vallotton
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Unlike Bonnard, Vallotton pushed his own experiment to the limit.
Using sketches drawn in Champagne, with characteristic attention to detail,
he painted a landscape of ruins in gentle graduations of late afternoon light.
The light slides over crumbled walls and the ribs of a vault indicating that a
church once stood here.
Flowers have blossomed among the rubble and the overturned tiles, whilst
the trees stand straight against the clear sky in the background.
The colours are in perfect harmony, the style is delicately Japanese and the
composition highlighted with alternating bands of colour.
None of this corresponds to the subject. Vallotton is aware of this and plays
on this contradiction as far as he can so as to expose the destruction of man
by man in all its absurdity while unchanging nature carries on undisturbed.
During the time spent in the Champagne and Argonne regions and on his
return to Paris, Vallotton repeatedly sought to exploit this sharp contrast to
draw out its expressive potential.
He remained unconvinced by the result, and later experimented with CuboFuturism in Verdun.
Félix Vallotton, L'église de Souain en silhouette
(The Church of Souain, Silhouetted), 1917, oil
on canvas, 97 x 130 cm, National Gallery of Art,
Washington.
• We finally halted, after how many hours? our exhausted
flesh, drained of blood, shaken about in other people's arms.
I had to comb my fingers over my face as sticky traces
stiffened my skin as they dried. I'm going to be a fine sight
by the time they get to me, those two slow-moving nurses
walking along the foot of the stretchers and bending for a
moment over each wounded man. A hand stuck my new
Verdun képi on my head, my velvety blue 'flower pot'. How I
looked like Pierrot, so pale and blood-smeared in my
beautiful new képi! (...)
There is a nauseating smell, of coal-tar, bleach and the sickly
smell of blood. "A lieutenant from the 106ths, doctor."
They touched me and another needle pricked me. I could
see the dark tunic of the major between two white nurses.
They were talking to me. I answered "Yes, yes...". And the
doctor's voice said,
"Can't be evacuated. Military hospital." Maurice Genevoix,
Ceux de 14.
• John Singer Sargent
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During his stay in France in the summer of 1918, Sargent
travelled all over the Picardy and Artois regions.
In Arras, he painted the ruins of the cathedral and collapsed
houses like this one.
A shell has burst through the wall, revealing an old horsedrawn carriage.
The floor has fallen on top of part of it with planks of wood
left hanging in mid-air.
With his skill and rapid execution, Sargent has captured the
scene in watercolours without seeking additional detail for
extra pathos.
The Scottish soldiers resting nearby are perfectly indifferent
to these ruins, having grown accustomed to seeing them.
John Singer Sargent, A Street in Arras, 1918,
watercolour, 39 x 52 cm, Imperial War
Museum, London.
The village disappeared, never before had I seen a village
just vanish like that (...) Here, among the massacred trees
which in the fog surrounded us in a ghostly scene,
everything was shapeless, there was not a piece of wall
even, not a fence or gate still standing, and we were
surprised to note that underneath the tangle of beams,
stones and iron, there were paving stones - this had been a
road!
It might have been a dirty, marshy wasteland not far from
a town, which, regularly over a period of many years,
without leaving an empty space, had dumped its rubble,
its demolition material and old utensils: a uniform bed of
rubbish and debris through which we plunged forward
very slowly, with great difficulty. " Henri Barbusse, Le Feu.
• " In the space of a few days, the heavy artillery had
turned a peaceful lodge into a horrific spectacle.
Whole houses had been flattened or cut in two by a
direct hit, so that the bedrooms and their furniture
hung above the chaos, like stage sets in the wings of a
theatre. The stench of corpses rose up from much of
the debris, as the first bombardment had taken the
inhabitants completely by surprise and had buried a
large number of them under the ruins before they had
a chance to get out of their houses. A little girl was
lying in front of a house, in the middle of a pool of red.
(...) The roads were now only small pathways,
zigzagging across and underneath huge piles of beams
and masonry. Fruit and vegetables were rotting in
gardens ploughed up by shellfire. " Ernst Jünger,
Storms of Steel.
• Death "He was stretched out, with his face in a pool of blood. When I
turned him over, I could see a large hole in his forehead, there was nothing
more to be done. I had just exchanged a few words with him and suddenly I
realised that he was no longer answering my questions. When I turned the
corner a few seconds later, he was already dead. There was something
fantastic about this end."
• This is how Jünger recounts the death of someone he had seen fall close to
him.
• There exists no account of the Great War which is not full of similar stories.
• Death was a daily occurrence and there were bodies everywhere. In the
places where the fighting was the most violent and the longest, the corpses
piled up.
• Those who dug shelters uncovered human remains. Others made parapets
out of them.
• The living ate and slept surrounded by bodies.
• Near Verdun, Léger tried to find a dugout. "My main concern", he wrote,
"was to avoid having a corpse close by me. I made the mistake of digging
the hole to rest my head a little too deep. I uncovered two feet with shoes
on, it was the body of a Frenchman (the Hun only wore boots). I dug a little
further along to try and find a better spot. There was nothing doing. There
were human remains everywhere."
• The newspapers hid nothing from their readers.
• As of autumn 1914, the first photographs of bodies were published, being
careful however to choose enemy ones. Gradually however, such
compunction disappeared, and on October 8th 1916 Le Miroir published a
front page picture of the entangled bodies of a German and a French
infantryman in a shell-hole.
• Meanwhile, the escalation of macabre and cruel horrors continued, with
photographs of pieces of skeleton, charred bodies and communal graves
becoming commonplace in the wartime press and in the cinema, who
followed this trend.
• Jacques-Emile Blanche attended a cinema screening of a number of films
devoted to the destruction of a Zeppelin over France: "Here was another
film showing the bodies of the crew. People's nerves had to be blunted for
the general public to look quite happily at the white back, the back of the
blond, chubby German whose head was a block of coal to the slow waltz
rhythm chosen by the conductor of the orchestra. The other bodies were
carbonised, their arms and legs turned into charcoal.“
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It is therefore no surprise if the drawings, engravings and paintings are full
of death and that it should be the one subject that returns obsessively in
the works of Dix, and that emerges through so many others.
• Otto Dix
There is hardly an engraving in the War set in which Dix
does not introduce the macabre.
• Sometimes it is the only subject of a plate, sometimes it
comes as an aside, but is no more bearable for that.
• In this case, the artist places two different types of
drawing style side by side; the more detailed one
portrays a starving, bestial soldier, and the more
elliptical one shows a skeleton buried close to him - the
dead man that he will soon become.
• From one to the other, the styles become lighter,
broken up and ghostly - a metaphor for the destruction
of the flesh.
Otto Dix, Mahlzeit in der Sappe (Lorettohöhe)
(Meal in the Sapping Trench) (Lorette), 1924,
watercolour, 35.3 x 47.5 cm, Deutsches
Historisches Museum, Berlin.
• Max Beckmann
Stretcher-bearers and nurses place the bodies of
those who had died from their wounds in coffins - a
day-to-day scene that Beckmann knew well.
• The worst wounds were hidden under dressings.
The bodies piled up.
• They had to work fast and it was no time for
emotion or compassion whilst the mechanical
administration of death was in operation.
Max Beckmann, Das Leichenschauhaus (The
Morgue), 1915, pointe-sèche, 25,7 x 35,7 cm.
• William Orpen
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Somewhere, two dead men in a partly destroyed trench.
They have not yet melted into the chalky soil which has
already half covered them.
The painting is imperturbable, so at least it appears, and
Orpen pays no less attention to the broken duckboards with
the pillars planted in the earth than to the blue face and the
still tensed arm of the corpse lying on its back.
The sky is admirably blue.
One thinks of the closing lines of All Quiet on the Western
Front: "he fell in October nineteen-eighteen, on a day that
was so quiet on the entire front that the despatch merely
stated that all was quiet on the western front."
William Orpen, Dead
Germans in a Trench, 1918,
oil on canvas, 91.4 x
76.2 cm, Imperial War
Museum, London.
© Imperial War Museum.
• Félix Vallotton
Whilst Grosz uses the resources of lithography,
Vallotton relies on wood engraving to produce a
more diagrammatic picture, a symbol rather than a
description, two dead men in an entanglement of
wires.
• Their forms are barely distinguishable from the
tangled wire, their limbs resemble wooden posts
and their bodies are already disappearing.
• Overhead, a far cry from Orpen's insolently blue
sky, a beautiful starry night - nature remains
indifferent to the carnage.
Félix Vallotton, Les barbelés (Barbed-wire),
1916, woodcut, 25.2 x 33.5 cm Galerie Paul
Vallotton, Lausanne.
• Luc-Albert Moreau
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Moreau (1882-1948) fought at Verdun, on the Chemin
des Dames and in Picardy.
He was wounded several times, and was among those
indelibly marked by the war, to such an extent that
during the 1920s and 30s, his work was mostly made
up of paintings of Verdun, memories that he evoked
tirelessly from drawings sketched whilst on the front.
This particular drawing of a body impaled on a tree
trunk broken by shells is effective through its simplicity
and powerful hatching.
We find the same scene the horror of which was also
captured on photograph.
Recognisable too is one aspect remarked on by Léger the force of expression in the hands with the
outstretched fingers in a tense spasm.
Luc-Albert Moreau,
Octobre 1917, attaque du
Chemin des Dames
(October 1917, Chemin
des Dames Assault), 1917,
ink, Musée d'Histoire
Contemporaine - BDIC,
Paris.
• Next to the black, waxen heads like Egyptian
mummies, lumpy with insect larvae and debris, where
white teeth appeared the hollows; next to poor
darkened stumps which were numerous here, like a
field of bare roots, we discovered yellow skulls,
stripped clean, still wearing a red fez with a grey cover
as brittle as papyrus. There were thighbones
protruding from mounds of rags stuck together in the
red mud, or a fragment of spine emerged from a hole
filled with frayed material coated with a kind of tar.
There were ribs scattered all over the ground like
broken old cages, and nearby blackened pieces of
leather, pierced and flattened beakers and mess tins
had risen to the surface (...) Here and there, a longish
bulge - for all these unburied dead finish up going into
the ground - only a scrap of material sticks out,
indicating that a human being was annihilated on this
particular point of the globe. " Henri Barbusse, Le Feu.
• C. R. W. Nevinson
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Because Nevinson was so bold as to paint the bodies of two Tommies in
front of the barbed wire, this painting was banned from an exhibition in
1918.
Nevinson refused to take it down and covered it with brown paper on which
he wrote "Censored".
This gesture earned him a reprimand from the War Office, for it was
forbidden either to show reality or to denounce censorship.
Nevinson had only painted what every soldier had seen dozens of times:
comrades who had fallen under fire during pointless assaults.
The reaction was all the more violent as the painting had nothing in
common with Nevinson's Cubo-Futurist paintings of 1915 and 1916.
Demonstrating a realism inspired by Courbet, devoid of all geometry, and
more photographic than any other of his paintings, Paths of Glory is a work
which leaves little room for aesthetic commentary inasmuch as the effect
produced is essentially moral and political. I
n 1957, the American film director Stanley Kubrick used the title Paths of
Glory for a film which violently denounced the absurdity of the Great War
and introduced a theme absent from Nevinson's painting: mutiny and
repression of mutiny, which is why for a long time his film was never
screened in France...
C. R. W. Nevinson, Path of Glory, 1917, oil on
canvas, 45.7 x 61 cm, Imperial War Museums
• Otto Dix
The light of the flares reveals what was hidden in the night: a
mound of twisted bodies, skulls, limbs torn apart - a dance of
death.
• This, one of Dix's most expressionistic works, boils down
everyday experience into a central theme.
• The clashes of colour intensify the violence of the painting as
can be sensed in the artist's vigorous brushstrokes, in the
deformations, the explosions of red and white and the
patches of blue partly covering the grey and green.
• Later, Dix returned to this theme in an uncompromisingly
realistic style; and yet this chaotic, vehement painting of 1917
conveys the revulsion and the terror no less effectively.
• Otto Dix
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Dix's other manner. Impassive detail and the accumulation of
elements for an exhaustive description of his subject: corpses
abandoned in a destroyed dugout.
A plant has taken root in the crownless skull.
There is an arm and a jaw missing.
A leg has come away at the knee.
The stomachs have emptied themselves on the clothes and
on the ground.
The process of putrefaction is underway. Jünger describes a
very similar scene: "One day while I was forcing my way,
alone, through the undergrowth, I was surprised by a gentle
whistling and gurgling noise. I moved towards the sound and
fell upon two corpses which seemed to have been called back
by the heat wave to a kind of life in death. The night was
heavy and silent; I remained there for a long time, fascinated,
watching this disturbing scene."
Otto Dix, Schädel
(Skull), 1924, etching,
25.5 x 19.5 cm, Historial
de la Grande Guerre,
Péronne.
• William Orpen
During the summer of 1916, a fierce battle took
place between the Germans and the British at
Thiepval in the Somme and the surrounding region.
• A few months later, Orpen returned to the scene of
the battle to find the stones littered with skulls,
bones and fragments of clothing.
• Typically, Orpen refused to choose, his eye and his
painting enumerate the human remains and broken
objects without distinction.
• The weather is fine, and tufts of grass and poppies,
are growing in the chalk ground around the
scattered, soon to be forgotten skeletons.
• " It was a disgusting heap, a monstrous exhuming of
wax-like Bavarians on top of others who had already
turned black, and whose twisted mouths exhaled a
rotten stench; a pile of maimed flesh, with corpses
which looked as if they had been unscrewed: feet
and knees were completely wrenched the wrong
way round, and as if watching over them all, there
was one corpse standing upright, leaning against
the side, propped up by a headless monster. "
Roland Dorgelès, Les croix de bois (The Wooden
Crosses).
• Otto Dix
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At a time when the Nazis had banned him from teaching and exhibiting, Dix
secretly produced this last painting in memory of his war and its dead.
Even more so than the triptych, the style is inspired by the old German masters,
notably the treatment of the sky, the roots and the branches.
The homage to Barbusse, a French veteran and member of the French Communist
Party until his death in Moscow in 1935 and an author inevitably outlawed by
Hitler's Reich, shows the extent of Dix's uncompromising political opposition to
the regime as it again prepared for war.
The literary allusion helps to specify the subject - no longer the carnage, but the
flooding of the trenches, which made fighting impossible and forced soldiers from
both sides to flee their dugouts with no thoughts of killing each other.
During the night they sought shelter out of the water's reach.
At dawn, they discovered that they were close to one another. Barbusse wrote:
"It had now become an uncanny field of rest. The ground was dotted with beings
sleeping or gently stirring, lifting an arm, raising their heads, coming back to life
or else dying. The enemy trench finally collapsed in on itself at the bottom of
great undulations and swamped shell-holes spiked with mud, and formed a line
of puddles and wells. In places, you could actually see it moving, breaking up and
slipping over the edges still overhanging (...) All these men with cadaverous faces
in front of us and behind us, exhausted, drained of speech and all will, all these
men weighed down with mud, almost carrying their own burial, looked like each
other, as if they were naked. From both sides, men came out of that dreadful
night wearing exactly the same uniform of destitution and dirt."
• Albin Egger-Linz
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When war broke out, Egger-Linz (1868-1926) was forty-six and, unlike the
major Viennese artists of the time such as Schiele and Kokoschka, too old to
take a direct part in the war.
He did however witness the fighting on the Alpine Front from 1915 on.
But, more than his portraits and his few paintings of the fighting in the
mountains, he is best known for his monumental compositions.
Even before the war was over, he represented it symbolically in War (191516) and in this painting.
Taken from the historical viewpoint alone, despite the details of the
helmets, stick grenades and boots, this painting is not plausible.
As the title tells us, his purpose lies elsewhere, in the statement that war
condemns each man to the anonymity of a shared, inexplicable and almost
invisible death.
The faces are expressionless or turned towards the ground.
The postures are identical.
The nameless men have lost all individuality, and sink together in step into
the pockmarked earth in which they are to be buried.
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