Otto Dix: The War (Der Krieg) 50 etchings, Berlin 1924 (with captions) [HD]

The War (German: Der Krieg) is a series of 50 drypoint and aquatint etchings by German artist Otto Dix. The prints were published in Berlin in 1924 by Karl Nierendorf. The series is often compared to Francisco Goya's series of 82 engravings The Disasters of War. Dix was born in 1891, and studied art in Dresden before the First World War. He was conscripted in 1915, and served in the Imperial German Army as a machine gunner on both the Eastern Front and the Western Front. After the war, he returned to study at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts, and then in Italy. He was a founder of the short-lived avante-garde Dresdner Sezession art group, and then supported the post-expressionist New Objectivity movement. His horrific experiences in the trenches inspired the anti-war art he created after 1920. Dix came to public attention when featured by Theodor Däubler in Das Kunstblatt in 1920. In 1921, Otto Dix met Karl Nierendorf, an art dealer in Berlin, who became his agent and publisher. Dix's large anti-war painting The Trench ("Der Schützengraben") caused great controversy when first exhibited in Cologne in 1923. It was confiscated as degenerate art (Entartete Kunst) by the Nazis, and lost during the Second World War. Dix's reputation for controversy continued in 1925, when he successfully defended himself against charges of indecency following exhibitions in Berlin and Darmstadt of two paintings of prostitutes. He became a professor at the Dresden Academy in 1927, and returned to anti-war sentiments for his 1929 to 1932 triptych, also entitled The War (Der Krieg), the central panel of which reworks themes from The Trench: this painting been held by the Galerie Neue Meister in Dresden since 1968. Dix's War prints were published in 1924, the tenth anniversary of the outbreak of the war, as an antidote to the heroic interpretation of the war. Dix had seen Goya's series of 82 engravings The Disasters of War in Basel: he was inspired by Goya's etching technique that combined etching and aquatint to depict horrific scenes from the Napoleonic Wars in Spain, and created a similar series of etchings of atrocities from the First World War. Among the other influences on Dix's prints were the works of Urs Graf, Jacques Callot's Miseries of War print series, and Goya's painting The Third of May 1808. Some of the scenes also draw inspiration from preparatory sketches for his 1923 painting The Trench, and others from a visit to the catacombs in Palermo in 1923–24, and the wartime photographs of Ernst Friedrich, published as Krieg dem Kriege ("War against War") in 1924. The etchings measure approximately 22 by 23 centimetres, printed on cream-coloured paper approximately 39.8 by 42.1 centimetres.