Dix at the Met
| Autor: | Sabine Rewald |
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| Rok vydání: | 1996 |
| Předmět: | |
| Zdroj: | Metropolitan Museum Journal. 31:219-224 |
| ISSN: | 2169-3072 0077-8958 |
| DOI: | 10.2307/1512984 |
| Popis: | Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) in Germany in the 1920s. What set Dix apart from his fellow Realists, however, was his fascination with the "ugly." In his work he focused on the nightmare of World War I and its aftermath, the Weimar Republic, with its ubiquitous fat profiteers, raffish demimonde, worn prostitutes, and war cripples. At the beginning of the war Dix had signed up as a volunteer; he became a noncommissioned officer and spent most of the next four years serving with a heavy machine-gun battery on the Western Front. He was wounded several times, once nearly fatally. His painter colleagues Max Beckmann (1884-1950) and George Grosz (1893-1958) suffered nervous breakdowns after fighting in combat. Dix's mental and physical toughness, however, allowed him not only to survive this inferno but also to relish the experience.1 He continued to draw and paint during the war, returning from the mayhem unharmed in body and soul. The artist had a relentless urge to depict reality of the most horrible kind, an urge that no doubt grew out of his wartime experiences. They shaped his near sadistic delight in shocking his contemporaries with works that reek of ugliness, distortion, perversity, and violence. Dix made his debut as an enfant terrible in 1920 with four ferocious and macabre antiwar pictures.2 These paintings mark his shift from personal to political engagement with the war. They were his response to the political chaos, rampant inflation, mass unemployment, bloody street battles, and assassinations that followed the Versailles Treaty ofJanuary 1920. The drypoint Cardplayers of 1920 (Figure 4) in the Museum's collection is based on one of his four antiwar |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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