Otto Dix

Otto Dix's Der Krieg [War] cycle 1924 I did not paint war pictures in order to prevent war. I would never have been so arrogant. I painted them to exorcise the experience of war. All art is about exorcism. Otto Dix's Der Krieg [War] 1924 is consciously modelled on Goya's equally famous cycle of prints Los desastres de la guerra [The disasters of war], which detailed Goya's own account of the Spanish War of Independence from 1808 to 1814. While Dix's cycle uses an equally astonishing array of etching techniques, its focusis quite different. War for Goya was an intimate horror, its initial impact localised, itsultimate effect incremental. As the images which open Dix's cycle demonstrate, his war is a modern war -- the scale is vast. Not only are men killed in an arbitrary, anonymous and indiscriminate way, the landscape itself is torn apart, desecrated and ravaged. Often the landscape appears alien, other-worldly, nightmarish. At the same time, each of these images has the immediacy of authentic experience. Many of them are based on the diary sketches that Dix made while fighting in the trenches