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Lot Essay
Otto Dix's Der Krieg is one of the finest and most unflinching depictions of war in western art. His early 20th century vision of the horrors of the battlefield ranks alongside those of Jacques Callot's Les Grandes Misères de la Guerre (also in the Hegewisch Collection) and Francisco de Goya's Los Desastres de la Guerra (see lot 342).
Dix enlisted in the army soon after hostilities began and took part in some of the deadliest engagements of the entire conflict, including the Battle of the Somme, the Russian front, Verdun and Ypres. His work before and in the early stages of the war echoed the dynamism of the Italian Futurists, whose works had been exhibited in Germany in 1913. Whilst Dix avoided the nervous collapse experienced by many other artists, including Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Max Beckmann, he was nonetheless radically transformed by what he saw. The excitement and fascination with industrial warfare gave way to an intensely critical attitude towards the German social and military establishment once the war was over. Back in Dresden he became involved with a small Dadaist group, and through them exhibited at the First International Dada Fair in 1920. He adopted a collage technique, which had its roots in Dada as well as in Cubism and proofed perfectly suited to depicting the grotesque effects of war and its corrupting influence on society.
His horrific and grotesque, at times darkly funny, depictions of the war - the battlefields, the trenches, shell craters, soldiers in close combat, dismembered bodies and rotting corpses left behind in the mud - were the result of a desire, a need almost, to exorcise the ghosts that haunted him. 'My dreams were full of debris' he said many years later (quoted in: J. Willett, 'Dix: War', Disasters of War - Callot Goya Dix, Arts Council Touring Exhibition, South Bank Centre, London, 1998, p. 65).
This exorcism found its first expression in a large, gruesome painting entitled The Trench (1920-23), which was sold initially to the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne. After much controversy it was given back to Dix before at last finding a home in the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen in Dresden. In between it was sent on tour as part of a pacifist exhibition called Nie wieder Krieg! ('Never another War!'), the popularity of which prompted Dix's dealer Karl Nierendorf to commission a series of fifty prints on the same theme, to be published in Berlin in 1924. The painting was to slumber in a Dresden storeroom until it was seized by Nazis officials and shown in the notorious Entartete Kunst exhibition in 1937, where it hung near a complete set of Der Krieg. The painting subsequently disappeared, and was presumably destroyed. The prints, however, have survived - Dix's most famous, passionate and shocking work in the print medium.
A furious and bitter depiction of the realities of war, this set of prints is also an astonishing display of the artist's technical command of the medium. Depending on the subject of each plate, Dix alternated his methods, from pure line etching to darkest aquatints, to almost uncontrollable open-bite, which best reflected the decaying bodies and disintegrating landscapes. Trained as an artist in a very traditional manner (see also lot 333), he even referenced the art of the Northern Renaissance: one white-line etching of a rural landscape with broken trees, a skeleton and a corpse in the midst of it, recalls the exquisite drawings on prepared paper by Albrecht Altdorfer (1480-1538) or the white-line woodcuts of Urs Graf (1485-1529).
In the winter of 2002, as a war in Iraq became increasingly certain, Klaus Hegewisch initiated an exhibition of the war series by Callot, Goya and Dix from his collection at the Hamburger Kunsthalle. Having lived through World War II, he was particularly pleased by the many school classes and students who came to see it.
Dix enlisted in the army soon after hostilities began and took part in some of the deadliest engagements of the entire conflict, including the Battle of the Somme, the Russian front, Verdun and Ypres. His work before and in the early stages of the war echoed the dynamism of the Italian Futurists, whose works had been exhibited in Germany in 1913. Whilst Dix avoided the nervous collapse experienced by many other artists, including Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Max Beckmann, he was nonetheless radically transformed by what he saw. The excitement and fascination with industrial warfare gave way to an intensely critical attitude towards the German social and military establishment once the war was over. Back in Dresden he became involved with a small Dadaist group, and through them exhibited at the First International Dada Fair in 1920. He adopted a collage technique, which had its roots in Dada as well as in Cubism and proofed perfectly suited to depicting the grotesque effects of war and its corrupting influence on society.
His horrific and grotesque, at times darkly funny, depictions of the war - the battlefields, the trenches, shell craters, soldiers in close combat, dismembered bodies and rotting corpses left behind in the mud - were the result of a desire, a need almost, to exorcise the ghosts that haunted him. 'My dreams were full of debris' he said many years later (quoted in: J. Willett, 'Dix: War', Disasters of War - Callot Goya Dix, Arts Council Touring Exhibition, South Bank Centre, London, 1998, p. 65).
This exorcism found its first expression in a large, gruesome painting entitled The Trench (1920-23), which was sold initially to the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne. After much controversy it was given back to Dix before at last finding a home in the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen in Dresden. In between it was sent on tour as part of a pacifist exhibition called Nie wieder Krieg! ('Never another War!'), the popularity of which prompted Dix's dealer Karl Nierendorf to commission a series of fifty prints on the same theme, to be published in Berlin in 1924. The painting was to slumber in a Dresden storeroom until it was seized by Nazis officials and shown in the notorious Entartete Kunst exhibition in 1937, where it hung near a complete set of Der Krieg. The painting subsequently disappeared, and was presumably destroyed. The prints, however, have survived - Dix's most famous, passionate and shocking work in the print medium.
A furious and bitter depiction of the realities of war, this set of prints is also an astonishing display of the artist's technical command of the medium. Depending on the subject of each plate, Dix alternated his methods, from pure line etching to darkest aquatints, to almost uncontrollable open-bite, which best reflected the decaying bodies and disintegrating landscapes. Trained as an artist in a very traditional manner (see also lot 333), he even referenced the art of the Northern Renaissance: one white-line etching of a rural landscape with broken trees, a skeleton and a corpse in the midst of it, recalls the exquisite drawings on prepared paper by Albrecht Altdorfer (1480-1538) or the white-line woodcuts of Urs Graf (1485-1529).
In the winter of 2002, as a war in Iraq became increasingly certain, Klaus Hegewisch initiated an exhibition of the war series by Callot, Goya and Dix from his collection at the Hamburger Kunsthalle. Having lived through World War II, he was particularly pleased by the many school classes and students who came to see it.