Otto Dix

Otto Dix painted the First World War from inside it and the Weimar Republic as a morgue, and the Nazis put both in an exhibition of degenerate art. He was the son of an ironworker, volunteered in 1914, and served four years as a machine-gunner - the Somme, Champagne, the Eastern Front - and was wounded several times. He drew constantly at the front on whatever paper he could get. Der Krieg, a cycle of fifty etchings published in 1924 and modelled explicitly on Goya's Disasters of War, is the result: corpses in shell holes, a skull with worms in the eye sockets, men in gas masks, and it is the most unsparing visual record any combatant made. His Weimar portraits are equally merciless, particularly the crippled veterans begging outside cafes while the profiteers eat inside, which was the political point. He was made a professor in Dresden in 1927 and dismissed in 1933 within weeks of Hitler taking power. Around 260 of his works were confiscated, several were shown in the Entartete Kunst exhibition of 1937, and some were burned. He retreated to Lake Constance and painted landscapes and religious allegories, which is what internal exile looked like. He was conscripted into the Volkssturm at fifty-three in 1945 and taken prisoner by the French. He lived until 1969 and was honoured in both German states. He said afterwards that he had not painted the war to prevent it but because it would not leave him, and that he had needed to see the ugliness for himself. His 1932 triptych The War, painted in the format of a religious altarpiece, hung hidden through the Nazi years. He returned to it as a subject after 1945.

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