La Guerre

In 1914, Otto Dix, a student at the Düsseldorf School of Arts and Crafts, joined the German troops on the Western Front in Picardy and fought until 1918. Like all those who survived the conflict, the artist remained haunted by the vision of chaos. He felt the need to bear witness and exorcise his combat experience. In 1924, he produced a series of fifty etchings, Der Krieg (The War). Using an exceptional chiaroscuro technique, these hallucinatory scenes of battles, trenches, dislocated bodies abandoned on a gutted earth, make up a visual chronicle whose radicalism both suffocates and dazzles. Inspired by Francisco de Goya’s Disasters of War, Otto Dix’s pacifist manifesto provoked controversy. He contrasted the heroism of combat advocated by the nationalists with the atrocious reality of devouring death and tragic absurdity. The painter, stigmatised in the “Degenerate Art” exhibition organised by the Nazis in 1937, saw part of his work destroyed. This book reveals the plastic and subversive power of the fifty etchings in Der Krieg (The War), of which the HistoriaI de la Grande Guerre in Péronne holds one of the rare complete copies.