Excerpt
The War triptych is a monumental revisiting of the traps, revulsions and needlessness of war at the midpoint between two world wars (commenced 1929). Remembrances of horrors past now become harbingers of things to come. Although Dix's painting was in the tradition of the old masters, it was fused with the subjectivity of felt emotion and the objectivity of lived experience. The middle panel is reminiscent of the earlier “Trench” masterwork featuring widespread devastation framing a fragmenting circle of five disarranged corpses (impaled-inverted-dismembered-disfigured-masked). On the left of this “still life” explosion of mayhem are soldiers heading off to battle through an ominous morning fog, only to retreat in the right hand panel under a smoke-filled, burning sky. In the circularising predella below, a restful sleep beckons – a sleep however which is “too” close to death (as eternalised by the mythological twins: hypnos and thanatos). This is not for Dix, however, who had gone to war as a means of “experiencing” life to the fullest (never regretting having done so) and paints himself walking away shouldering a brother-in-arms. Dix courageously embraced life without dilution, inclusive of all its ugliness and his fanaticism for “truth” and “reality” meant that he was just as comfortable with the early expressionist slogan “Man is good” as he was with its supplanting anti-thesis “Man is a beast”.
- ©ERS 2014
