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The War | |
---|---|
Artist | Otto Dix |
Year | 1929–1932 |
Medium | Oil an tempera on wood |
Dimensions | 204 cm× 112 cm(6.69 ft× 3.67 ft) |
Location | Galerie Neue Meister, Dresden |
The War (German: "Der Krieg"), sometimes known as the Dresden War Triptych, is a large oil and tempera [1] painting by the German artist Otto Dix on four wooden panels, a triptych with predella. The format of the work and its composition are based on religious triptychs of the Renaissance, like those by Matthias Grünewald. It was begun in 1929 and completed in 1932, and has been held by the Galerie Neue Meister in Dresden since 1968. It is one of several anti-war works done by Dix in the 1920s, inspired by his experience of trench warfare in the First World War.
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 gunner on the Eastern and Western Fronts. He returned to study at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts, and then in Italy. After the war, he was a founder of the short-lived avant-garde Dresdner Sezession art group, and then supported the post-expressionist New Objectivity movement. The anti-war art that Dix created after 1920 was inspired by his horrific experiences in the trenches. Before this triptych, he completed his large anti-war painting The Trench in 1923, which caused great controversy when first exhibited, and he published a portfolio of fifty prints also entitled Der Krieg in 1924.
Dix became a professor at the Dresden Academy in 1927. He started working on the triptych soon after the tenth anniversary of the end of the First World War, as a reaction to the popular public perception of the war as a heroic experience. The painting was first exhibited at the autumn exhibition of the Berlin Academy of Arts in 1932.
Many of Dix's works were condemned as degenerate art by the Nazi Party, but the triptych was hidden by Dix and survived. Several of Dix's preparatory cartoons are held by the Hamburger Kunsthalle. The War was purchased by the Galerie Neue Meister in Dresden for 500,000 Deutsche Marks in 1968.
The triptych has three main panels, with a fourth as a supporting panel or predella below the main central panel. The large central panel is a 204 cm (80 in) square; the flanking panels to either side the same height but half the width, 102 cm (40 in) each; and the predella below the central panel has the same width but is only 60 cm (24 in) high.
From left to right, the left wing depicts a column of German soldiers marching away from the viewer through the fog of war towards the battle in the central scene. The central panel shows a devastated urban landscape scattered with war paraphernalia and body parts, reworking the themes in his 1923 work The Trench, and divided like the 16th-century Isenheim Altarpiece of Matthias Grünewald with a living side to the lower left and a dead side to the upper right. A skeletal figure floats above the scene, pointing to the right, with a soldier in gas mask below, and scabrous legs upended to the right, recalling the legs of Christ in Grünewald's crucifixion scene. The right wing shows several figures withdrawing from the fight. A dominant greyish figure, helping a wounded comrade, is a self-portrait of Dix, in a composition similar to a descent from the cross or a pietà. In the predella, several soldiers are lying next to each other, possibly sleeping under an awning, or perhaps they represent the dead in a tomb. This fourth panel is based on The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb by Hans Holbein the Younger.
The painting uses a restricted palette of mainly dark colours, with cold greens, greys, and whites for death and decay, and warm reds and oranges for blood, destruction and shellfire.
Wilhelm Heinrich Otto Dix was a German painter and printmaker, noted for his ruthless and harshly realistic depictions of German society during the Weimar Republic and the brutality of war. Along with George Grosz and Max Beckmann, he is widely considered one of the most important artists of the Neue Sachlichkeit.
An altarpiece is an work of art in painting, sculpture or relief representing a religious subject made for placing at the back of or behind the altar of a Christian church. Though most commonly used for a single work of art such as a painting or sculpture, or a set of them, the word can also be used of the whole ensemble behind an altar, otherwise known as a reredos, including what is often an elaborate frame for the central image or images. Altarpieces were one of the most important products of Christian art especially from the late Middle Ages to the era of Baroque painting.
Matthias Grünewald was a German Renaissance painter of religious works who ignored Renaissance classicism to continue the style of late medieval Central European art into the 16th century.
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The Crucifixion of Saint Wilgefortis is a c. 1497 triptych by the Early Netherlandish painter Hieronymus Bosch. The subject of the painting has been uncertain, and it has also been known as the Triptych of the Crucified Martyr, or The Crucifixion of Saint Julia, but is now believed to depict Saint Wilgefortis.
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The Dresdner Sezession was an art group aligned with German Expressionism founded by Otto Schubert, Conrad Felixmüller and his pupil Otto Dix in Dresden, during a period of political and social turmoil in the aftermath of World War I. The group's activity spanned from 1919 until its final collective exhibition in 1925. During its heyday, the group consisted of some of the most influential and prominent expressionist artists of their generations, including Will Heckrott, Lasar Segall, Otto Schubert and Constantin von Mitschke-Collande, as well as the architect Hugo Zehder and writers Walter Rheiner, Heinar Schilling, and Felix Stiemer.
The Heller Altarpiece was an oil on panel triptych by German Renaissance artists Albrecht Dürer and Matthias Grünewald, executed between 1507 and 1509. The artwork was named after Jakob Heller, who ordered it. Dürer painted the interior, Grünewald the exterior.
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Metropolis is a triptych painting by the German artist Otto Dix, executed between 1927 and 1928. The painting depicts three nighttime city scenes from the Weimar Republic. The painting belongs to the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart since it was bought from the artist's estate in 1972.
The Trench, but earlier known as The War Picture or simply Der Krieg, 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 War is a series of 50 drypoint and aquatint etchings by German artist Otto Dix, catalogued by Florian Karsch as K.70 to K.119. The prints were published in Berlin in 1924 by Karl Nierendorf, in an edition which included separate high quality folio prints, and a lower-quality version with 24 prints bound together. It is often compared to Francisco Goya's series of 82 engravings The Disasters of War. The British Museum, which holds a complete set of the folio prints, has described the series as "Dix's central achievement as a graphic artist"; the auction house Christie's has described it as "one of the finest and most unflinching depictions of war in western art".
War is the title of two oil paintings on the same theme completed in quick succession in 1896 by the Swiss Symbolist painter Arnold Böcklin. The first version is in the collection of the Galerie Neue Meister, Dresden and the second, defined as unfinished, in the Kunsthaus Zürich in Switzerland.
The Skat Players is an oil-and-collage-on-canvas painting executed by Otto Dix in 1920. It depicts disabled veterans of the First World War playing a card game. It has the dimensions of 110 by 88 cm. It is held at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. He also had the later title of Kartenspielende Kriegskrüppel. It was one of the first works of the artist in the style of New Objectivity.