Otto Dix

Like Kollwitz, Otto Dix completed a print cycle on the theme of War in 1920. He exhibited it alongside Kollwitz’s series at the International Antiwar Museum in Berlin. While Kollwitz focused upon the sacrifices of those left at home during war, Dix’s 50 etchings depict war’s victims through scenes of horrific action, grotesque physical impairment, and devastation. A war veteran himself, Dix employed satirical realist caricature to emphasize physical and moral deterioration and to problematize male aggression.

Dix drew constantly while a soldier in the trenches of World War I. For the tenth anniversary of the outbreak of war, he revisited these drawings to create a searing fifty-print series, War, which was an indictment of armed combat. A direct translation of the title would be “the man who was shot to bits,” appropriate to the subject: the fragmented flesh of a dead soldier in the minefields. Dix believed that his unwavering depiction of the grotesque was a Nietzschean path to truth.