August 4, 2012 by fosco lucarelli First World War was such a
traumatic experience for Otto Dix, (he served as a machine-
gunner in the Western front from 1914 to 1918) that he later
described a recurring nightmare: “As a young man you don’t
notice at all that you were, after all, badly affected. For
years afterwards, at least ten years, I kept getting these
dreams, in which I had to crawl through ruined houses, along
passages I could hardly get through…” Based upon his grisly
memories, the fifty one etchings of Der Krieg (The War) were an
unflinching account of the horrors and the perversity of war.
This cycle is a brutal representation of the body: dying, dead,
mutilated, decomposing, resting on a landscape becoming
lifeless. The technique used (acid etching a metal printing
plate to heighten the sense of decay) is a further reminder of
the corrosive nature of the artist’s experience. Francisco de
Goya‘s Los Desastres de la Guerra (The disasters of war) –
[1746–1828] provided an obvious model for Der Krieg. L