Trench (Otto Dix)

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Trenches
Otto Dix , 1923
Oil on jute
227 × 250 cm
most recently City Museum , Dresden

Link to the picture
(please note copyrights )

The trenches is a painting by Otto Dix from the years 1921 to 1923. Art critics assigned it to Verism , is regarded as his main work and was politically controversial as an anti-war image with its drastic depiction of violence. It produced deliberate scandals and was part of the Degenerate Art exhibition . It has been lost since 1940. There are only black and white photographs of the picture, which make a description difficult.

Background and story

Otto Dix did not volunteer in 1914, like many other artist colleagues, but after he was drafted into the military in 1915, he was deployed as a machine gunner on the front line on both the western and eastern fronts. So he experienced the war in the trenches up close to the end. Otto Dix, like many artists of his time, knew texts by Friedrich Nietzsche . Especially his work The Will to Power was with the chapter 853 The Art in the "Birth of Tragedy" inspiring for Dix. Dix was quite taken with the catharsis to be expected in borderline situations during the war . He was looking for a human state of emergency. The art historian Uwe M. Schneede wrote in an exhibition catalog at the Kunstverein in Hamburg in 1977: “You have to be able to say 'yes', yes to the human expressions that are there and will always be. That does not mean a yes to the imperialist wars, but to a fate that approaches people under certain circumstances and in which they have to prove themselves. ”Dix also drew during the war, but killing and violence did not come in these works before, it was more like the rubble landscape with uninjured soldiers than staffage . Only after the war, from 1920, did he begin to paint the horrific. He trained in drawing at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts and visited the anatomy department of the Friedrichstadt hospital to draw corpses, intestines and brains. Dix also visited Palermo as part of his trip to Italy in order to make studies of bones, skulls and mummies in the catacombs of the Capuchins under the Capuchin monastery in Palermo. The first beginnings for the picture trenches already existed in 1921. When the work was exhibited in the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum in Cologne in 1923 , it was a crowd puller and triggered protests from officers' associations of the former imperial army. The art audience was shocked and a scandal of national importance ensued. There was talk of "military sabotage". The nationally conservative art historian Julius Meier-Graefe wrote about the picture in 1924: “Mr Dix probably wanted to work in all simplicity for pacifism, the well-known deterrent theory. That is his private pleasure. The picture, moved to an official position, becomes a German cultural document. That's the catch. "The art critic Paul Fechter made a connection with the Allied occupation of the Rhineland and wrote:" Because Cologne is occupied territory - and to officially present a document of this kind to the British and their French and Belgian guests in the museum today - that means to awaken ideas about the mentality of the Germans, which only drive the gentlemen over there to ever more disregard and arrogance. ”After Paul von Hindenburg's election as Reich President in the same year, right-wing propaganda and German nationalism intensified.

Years later, as a recognized famous artist and lecturer, Dix took up the subject of war again from 1929 to 1932 with his triptych Der Krieg (Dresden, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Galerie Neue Meister ). The central panel of the triptych shows motifs from the trenches . In contrast to this, which has been lost to this day, the triptych survived National Socialism and the Second World War . In 1933 Otto Dix was one of those artists who were the first to lose their post as lecturer and were expelled from the academies. The National Socialist artist and art critic Bettina Feistel-Rohmeder defamed him as a “mocker of heroic people”. As early as 1933 there was a first disgraceful exhibition in Dresden in the atrium of the new town hall , organized by Richard Müller , which is considered a forerunner of the later touring exhibition Degenerate Art . Among the works by Dix was the trench from the Dresden City Museum. In addition to Goebbels and Göring, Hitler also visited the exhibition and remarked to Otto Dix: “It is a pity that these people cannot be locked up.” In the exhibition brochure on degenerate art, the trench was described in detail under the title “Painted military sabotage by the painter Otto Dix” discussed (excerpt): “Here, 'art' comes into the service of Marxist propaganda for conscientious objection. The intention becomes clear: the viewer should see in the soldier the murderer or the senseless victim of a 'capitalist world order' in the sense of the Bolshevik class struggle. [...] The fact that not only Jews, but also German-blooded 'artists' with such vile creations, subsequently confirmed the hostile atrocity propaganda, which was already exposed as a fabric of lies, without being asked, will remain an eyesore on German cultural history forever Trench was not on offer in the auction commissioned by the German government on June 30, 1939 at Theodor Fischer in Lucerne. At the beginning of the war in 1939, the picture came to Güstrow in the former studio of Ernst Barlach . It was listed on the sales lists of Bernhard A. Böhmer , a friend of Barlach's, and the art dealer Karl Buchholz , both of whom were commissioned by the government to sell confiscated art, at a price of $ 200 until 1940, then the track is lost . It is therefore clear that the picture was not burned on March 20, 1939 by the Berlin fire brigade in an action called an exercise.

Description and interpretation

The picture has the dimensions 227 × 250 cm and is executed in the painting technique oil on jute , the painting surface is roughly sewn together. In its first exhibition in the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne, it was presented in a frame made of simple wooden profiles. Apparently there was a gray curtain that hid this picture from visitors when needed and was only pulled aside when requested.

The painting shows the end of a World War I battle with countless tattered dead and rubble. There are only black and white photographs of the picture, so that a description is possible solely on the basis of observations made by contemporary museum visitors. The art historian Alfred Salmony saw the picture in Cologne in 1923, describes it in detail and also gives hints about the colourfulness: “The first impression is only: unheard of colors [...]. A trench is completely shot, material mixes torn with tattered bodies [...]. The gas mask and wristwatch remained intact. The phosphor puddle (yellow according to other observers) forms the color center point. Intestines, flesh and blood hang around. Some of the corpses are rotting […]. Soldiers with torn faces kept themselves in a strange standing position, one was speared on supports. In the mountains in the background it is dawning in wonderful colors. It was like that on autumn days in the trenches south of Soissons . ”Salmony also comments on the meaning of the picture and writes:“ The picture shows no tendency, only meticulously precise factual description: this is war. The city of Cologne and its museum director will be attacked and praised for this acquisition, and buzzwords will be regrouped. ”According to art historian and curator Kira van Lil, Otto Dix uses a strategy of seduction in his picture to lure the viewer into even more terrible ones Discover details. The picture was never seen as glorifying war, but it plays with the fascination of horror . The Hungarian art historian Ernő Kállai was of the opinion that “the painter's obsession with the idea of ​​the atrocities of war moves them into an area of ​​monumentality, in which it is completely indifferent whether one protests against the monstrous or indulges in shuddering devotion . The trench picture of Dix could just as well be the object of the highest adoration of a fanatical worshiper of the god of war as a pacifist propaganda medium. "

The scenery is shown life-size and thus includes the viewer. There are hardly any differences between body parts, intestines and the soggy earth; the earth slowly absorbs the limbs and entrails of the dead. Karl Scheffler found that the picture looked like a “piece of deep sea, like an aquarium” and came to the conviction that “This blatantly relentless art was perfumed.” Curt Glaser also noticed this perfumed man and wrote: “The corpses don't smell after putrefaction, but after perfume. ”This perception of the supposedly“ perfumed ”is explained by Dix's intention to deviate from painterly conventions, because the common view was that“ anti-war paintings ”had by no means to be perfectly executed in terms of painting technique. However, this contradicts the carelessly sewn jute fabric for the large painting surface. (quoted by KvL p. 56 ff.)

Provenance

After completion, the painting was acquired in autumn 1923 through the Nierendorf Gallery for 10,000 marks by the director of the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne , Hans Friedrich Secker , and exhibited for the first time. After protests and harsh criticism, the museum had to part with the work. It was acquired by the city of Dresden five years later in 1928 and confiscated in 1937 as "degenerate". After the exhibition as degenerate art, the picture was acquired by the art dealer Bernhard A. Böhmer in January 1940 , and the trace of the painting is lost here.

Exhibitions

  • December 1, 1923: Wallraf-Richartz-Museum Cologne
  • 1937: Degenerate Art exhibition in Munich

Criticism (selection)

After Hans Friedrich Secker acquired and exhibited the picture for the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne, it became known to a large public and numerous reports about the "scandalous picture" appeared.

  • The art historian Heribert Reiners wrote in the Kölnische Volkszeitung on December 1, 1923 with regard to the work that “the effect of modern human murder and the true content of the war cannot be described in a more terrible way.” It was “in terms of content perhaps the most gruesome picture that ever been painted. And that is why the content will always come to the fore and therefore the image will find many opponents. "
  • In the Kölnische Zeitung of December 7, 1923, the art critic Walter Schmits wrote: “The painting reveals with ruthless clarity the most hideous grimace of the multi-faceted war. In the cold, pale, ghostly light of the gray day, under a cloudy sky, in which a pale ironic rainbow, the biblical lore of peace, beckons, a trench opens over which a devastating fire has fallen. A poisonous sulfur-yellow puddle flashes in the depths like a smile from hell. "Schmits regrets the purchase of the picture by the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum and writes:" It has been extolled as a moral act. This can only be understood here as pacifist propaganda. ”On December 15, 1923, Schmits followed up in the same newspaper and wrote that the museum visitors who were“ looking for edification would be crushed ”. It is a “degradation of art. Our brave army is thought far too little today due to pacifist ideology. "
  • In 1924, on the initiative of Max Liebermann , the picture was exhibited in the annual exhibition of the Prussian Academy of the Arts in Berlin. Julius Meier-Graefe wrote a slap in the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung on July 2, 1924. He thinks that the limit of permitted nonsense has been exceeded with the purchase of the painting, he describes it as a "monster" and "dirt" and suggests removing the work from the museum or negotiating an exchange with Dix. Meier Graefe: "The answer I heard was that the protected herald of Impressionism [Max Liebermann is meant] was unable to distinguish a NIX from a DIX." Meier-Graefe found the painting "puke".
  • In a letter to the Cologne museum director Hans Friedrich Secker, Max Liebermann considered the picture “one of the most important works of the post-war period”. In his experience, he is not surprised “when a critic [meaning Meier-Graefe] calls Dix's trench picture a tendentious work of the worst kind and without any artistic significance . As far as the tendency is concerned, I believe that there is or cannot exist a work of art that is not tendentious if one understands by tendency according to the true meaning of the word the intention to give life to the idea in the picture. Dix wanted to portray the gruesome and terrible things he had experienced in the forefront of the trenches for four years, in order to roll it off his soul [...]. "
  • In Volume 41 of the Cicerone from 1924, referring to Meier-Graefe, Willi Wolfradt writes about the picture: “It is really a puke and not a comfort that is painted, this screaming still life of worms in thrown skulls, this insane landscape of pierced, wildly pounded together Bodies. ”He closes his article with the words“ What a wall decoration for schools! What a memento! "

literature

  • Kira van Lil: A perfect scandal. Otto Dix's "trenches" between criticism and ostracism . In: Uwe Fleckner (Ed.): The ostracized masterpiece. Fateful paths of modern art in the “Third Reich” (=  writings of the research center “Degenerate Art” . Volume 4 ). Akademie Verlag, Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-05-004360-9 , pp. 49–74 ( books.google.de - excerpt ).
  • Ulrike Merkel: Dix's lost masterpieces . In: Ostthüringer Zeitung . November 26, 2011 ( otz.de ).
  • Nils Büttner: From the trenches to the New Objectivity . In: The Eye of the World: Otto Dix and the New Objectivity. Ostfildern 2012, p. 72–83 , doi : 10.11588 / artdok.00003312 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Dietrich Schubert: The pursuit of the painting "Schützengraben" (1923) by Otto Dix. In: Rolf Kloepfer, Burckhard Dücker (ed.): Critique and history of intolerance. Heidelberg 2000, ISBN 3-935025-03-3 , doi: 10.11588 / artdok.00003164 , p. 356.
  2. ↑ Uwe M. Schneede: See the matter very closely, almost without art. Notes on Otto Dix. In: Otto Dix, exhibition catalog. Kunstverein in Hamburg 1977, p. 5 ff.
  3. ↑ Diether Schmidt: Otto Dix in a self-portrait. Henschelverlag Art and Society, Berlin 1978, p. 279.
  4. ↑ Horst Jähner : Before how that what. Conversation with Professor Otto Dix in Dresden. In: New Germany . December 4, 1966, p. 8 ( nd-archiv.de access only via login).
  5. ^ A b Julius Meier-Graefe: The exhibition in the academy. In: Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung . No. 307, July 2, 1924 (bottom left: zefys.staatsbibliothek-berlin.de ).
  6. ^ Paul Fechter: The Cologne Dix. A letter and a few comments. In: Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung. No. 316, July 8, 1924. (bottom left: zefys.staatsbibliothek-berlin.de )
  7. ↑ Kira van Lil: A perfect scandal. Otto Dix's "trenches" between criticism and ostracism . In: Uwe Fleckner (Ed.): The ostracized masterpiece. The fate of modern art in the “Third Reich” . Akademie Verlag, Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-05-004360-9 , pp. 49–74 ( books.google.de - here 50 ff.).
  8. ↑ Bettina Feistel-Rohmeder: In the Terror of Art Bolshevism. Document collection of the "German Art Report" from the years 1927–1933. Karlsruhe 1938, Reprint Archive Edition 2005, ISBN 3-936223-78-5 , p. 204 ff.
  9. ↑ Diether Schmidt: Manifeste 1905-1933. Writings of German artists of the 20th century. Volume I, Dresden 1965, p. 219.
  10. ↑ Degenerate Art. Exhibition brochure, Berlin 1938, p. 122 ff.
  11. ↑ Wolfgang Schröck-Schmidt: The reception of the work "The Trench" by Otto Dix. Master's thesis, Heidelberg 1990, p. 163.
  12. ↑ Article in the Kölner Stadtanzeiger of December 2, 1923 with the title Assessment of the new hanging of the museum's modern pictures: “The most recent acquisition can be seen in the cloister; there, like a piece from the torture chamber behind a curtain, hangs a work by Otto Dix, who has recently become famous, protest against war, manifesto against any violation of the commandment, you should not kill. ”Quoted by Anja Walter-Ris. The history of the Nierendorf gallery , dissertation at the Free University of Berlin , p. 108 ( online ).
  13. ^ Also mentioned by Nils Büttner : Vom Schützengraben in die Neue Sachlichkeit In: Das Auge der Welt: Otto Dix und die Neue Sachlichkeit , catalog of an exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern 2012, ISBN 3-7757-3439-2 , p 74.
  14. ^ Alfred Salmony: The new gallery of the 17th to 20th century in the Museum Wallraf-Richartz in Cologne. In: Jacob Burckhardt (Ed.): The Cicerone. Half-monthly publication for artists, art lovers and collectors. No. 16 of January 1924, Leipzig, Berlin 1924, p. 8.
  15. ↑ Ernst Kállai : Demony of Satire. In: Paul Westheim (ed.): Das Kunstblatt 11, Potsdam 1927, p. 97 f.
  16. ^ Karl Scheffler: Critique of the exhibition. In: Art and Artists: illustrated monthly for fine arts and applied arts XXII. Berlin 1924, p. 284 ff. ( Digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de ).
  17. ^ Andreas Strobl : Otto Dix. A painting career in the twenties. Reimer Berlin, 1996, ISBN 3-496-01145-9 , p. 91.
  18. ^ Klaus Herding : Mimesis and Innovation. Reflections on the concept of realism in the fine arts. In: Klaus Oehler (Ed.): Signs and Reality. Stauffenburg Verlag, Tübingen 1984, p. 82 ff.
  19. ↑ Suffering without redemption . In: Der Tagesspiegel . April 22, 2014 ( tagesspiegel.de ).
  20. ↑ Ulrike Merkel: Dix's lost masterpieces . In: Ostthüringer Zeitung . November 26, 2011 ( otz.de ).
  21. ↑ July 19, 1937 - Exhibition “Degenerate Art” in Munich on YouTube Original to be seen here, time: 0:28 to 0:34.
  22. ↑ Walter Schmits: A picture of the war. In: Kölnische Zeitung. December 7, 1923.
  23. ↑ Walter Schmits: Again the picture of the war by Otto Dix. In: Kölnische Zeitung. December 15, 1923.
  24. ↑ Max Liebermann in Badischer General-Anzeiger Mannheimer Tageblatt of October 10, 1924, quoted by Anja Walter-Ris. The history of Galerie Nierendorf , dissertation at the Free University of Berlin ( online )
  25. ^ Willi Wolfradt: Otto Dix. In: Young Art. Volume 41, Leipzig 1924, p. 13 f.