War

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Dix 'The War' (1928-32)

Description

  • Left: solider march through misty landscape, murky grey juxtaposed with visceral red
  • Centre: dead bodies- skeleton impaled, solider in pile of guts, legs with bullet holes, man with gas mask- green mist
  • Right: survivors help each other, Predella panel: tomb of soliders, references trenches

Context

  • New Objectivity- unglossed, machine gunner in WW1- Nietzche, build things up to destroy
  • Horrid confitions, soldiers desensitised- expressionless faces, nightmare of dark passages
  • Goya-esque studies made- show extremes, sublime landscpae, like John Martin's

Religion

  • Grunewald's 'Isenheim Atlarpiece' -rotting flesh of Christ, given to St. Anthony's- skin disease
  • Soldiers on left carrying cross, skeleton impaled like cruxifiction, resurrection on right
  • Bodies in predella like Holbein the Younger's 'Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb'
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Picasso 'Guernica' (1937)

Event

  • Spanish Civil War in WW2, General Franco created dictatorship, revolt against Repub. Govnt.
  • 6th April 1937 Guernica (Republican town) bombed, 1500 killed- mainly women/ children
  • Exposed by George Steer in The Times

Description/ Symbolism

  • Pain, destruciton, humans/animals open mouthed, look up to bombs, flat and stylised
  • Woman holding dead baby, evokes pieta- Spanish Catholicism
  • Spain shown by bull and horse, horse gashed in side, tongue a danger, skull in nose
  • Lightbulb/ eye - ever watching eye of facist regimes or God, figure with stimgata on floor

Context

  • Condemnation of 'military force which has sunk Spain into an ocean of pain and misery'
  • Dream and Lie of General Franco- eats horse and fights bull, destroying Spain
  • Nazis in studio 'no, you did' , broken figure = earthquake at Malage and Al Jahib
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Kirchner 'Self Portrait as a Wounded Soldier' (191

Description

  • Psychologcial effects, Kirchner in Field Artillery Regiment no.75 uniform
  • Dark features, hollow eyes, green-tinged face and amputated stump of an arm
  • Wooden, flat nude without sexuality, use of nervous, angular brushstrokes

Influences

  • German Expressionists The Bridge, infuence of Nietzsche, Fauvism in colour, Cubism in space
  • Van Gogh's 'Self Portrait with Bandaged Ear', religious images of matyrs parading wounds
  • Primitivism- honest and direct, hollow cheeks, full lips, black eyes, African mask-like

War

  • Volunteered as driver so didn't have more dangerous role, declared unfit for service
  • Hand a potential injury to identity as an artist, other a brush, ref to propoganda of allies
  • 'Self Portrait with a Model', sexual suggests, war has unmanned him sexually
  • Suffered from alcohol/ drug abuse, but in Degenerate Art Exhibition, suicide 1938
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