Otto Dix and the Memorialization of World War I in German Visual Culture, 1914-1936

Examines the war pictures, both paintings and graphic work, of Otto Dix produced during the years 1914-1936. Places the work within the broader visual culture of the war and how it was understood as war memory through its critical reception in key exhibitions of the period.

The harsh realities of wartime and Weimar-era Germany called for a new kind of painting. Known as Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), these artists confronted social and political issues in new and bold ways. This book highlights how Otto Dix (1891–1969) – one of the leading artists of the movement – employed this style to reveal the injustices of wartime and post-WWI Germany. Having spent thirty-eight months on the frontline, his pictures revealed the brutalities of the conflict and established himself as one of Europe’s leading modernists. Offering substantial new research and presenting numerous primary sources to an English readership for the first time, the book examines Dix’s war pictures within the broader visual culture of war in order to assess how they functioned alternatively as cutting-edge modernist art and transgressive war commemoration.

Each chapter provides a case study of the first public display of one or more of Dix’s war pictures at key exhibitions and explores how their reception was subjected to changing socio-political and cultural conditions as well as divergent attitudes to the lost war. It pulls together a number of key approaches and texts: contemporary reviews, contemporary cultural productions (such as novels and cartoons), and theoretical and historical approaches from history, memory studies and art history.

Bringing a unique perspective and original scholarship to Dix’s war works, this book is essential reading for art historians of World War I and the visual culture of Weimar Germany.