Portrait against the backdrop of someone else’s story – Weekend
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The exhibition “Dix and Modernity” is open at the Deichtorhallen in Hamburg. Obviously, each time has its own view of this or that classic, but this exhibition shows that today several modern times coexist from which to look at the title character.
Dix’s self-portrait greets those entering the exhibition, and this hackneyed expositional move comes in handy here. The self-portrait, painted in 1942, during the period of internal emigration, produces a very strange, at the same time integral and contradictory impression – both in manner and composition. The manner, if we describe it in historical and political terms, is an impossible hybrid of the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich, that is, in it we can clearly distinguish the overtones of the “new materiality”, which will be branded as “degenerate”, but the paraphrases of the old German masters sound much louder, but not because it is welcomed by National Socialist aesthetics, but quite the opposite – as a quiet and at the same time very harsh protest. The composition is also a hybrid – a ceremonial and intimate portrait: the artist is depicted at work, sitting in front of an easel, holding a palette and brush in his hands, dressed in a white work robe, reminiscent of a monastic robe and stained with paint, but at the same time the figure of the painter is presented against a scarlet baroque background curtain, as if it were a monarch or commander, the edge of the curtain is thrown back, and behind it one can see an ominous landscape with a crimson sunset in clouds of gray clouds that look like explosions. We don’t see the easel in front of which the artist is sitting – we see that he is peering intently at what he is writing on the canvas, but it turns out that from his 1942, he is looking at us, his contemporaries.
The exhibition genre “classic and modern” will never go out of fashion, and although only half a century has passed since the death of Otto Dix (1891–1969), he is an undisputed classic of modernism and is perfect for triggering dialogues about the relevance of the past, because his works of the “classical” Weimar period became one of the main poster anti-war statements in world art. Actually, he was not involved in posters and political journalism – he himself, from his school days, from the days of his pre-war studies in expressionist Dresden, inclined to dialogue with the classics about relevance, was engaged in the modern “danse of death” and the new “disasters of war,” but the etching suite “ War” (1924), based on his trench diary graphics, read like a poster in 50 parts with the motto “never again.” During the war, Dix, a young Nietzschean, ended up as a reservist, but asked to go to the front line and, unlike many colleagues who really went crazy or feigned a nervous breakdown in order to “switch off” from the army, he served from call to call on the Western and Eastern fronts . I wanted, like an artist, to see everything with my own eyes. I’ve seen enough. He went to war with a mess of German Expressionism, French Cubism and Italian Futurism in his head, reconciling all nationally opposing currents in the militaristic “Self-Portrait as Mars” (1915); he returned from the war a Dadaist, but not a cynic. Not only the etchings of “War,” but also the main paintings of the times of “verism” and “new materiality” are full of living military impressions, albeit filtered through the prism of academic scholarship. In short, one could take on display two of Dix’s “Wars,” a series of etchings from 1924, and a great pictorial triptych from the Dresden Albertinum of 1932, and add to them many anti-war statements by contemporary artists to get an exhibition on a newly relevant (or eternal) topic. However, the curators did not take this simple route.
Maybe it’s a matter of finances and logistics, but neither “War” from the Albertinum nor Dix’s other titular works are at the exhibition in Hamburg. From the anti-war – only all the etchings of “War” and the painting “Flanders” (1934–1936), which can be mistaken for a landscape in the style of Altdorfer, with mountains and lakes, but when you look closely, you notice that the mountains are formed by the corpses of fallen soldiers and horses, and the lakes are water-filled trenches and shell craters. Of course, this is quite enough for the exhibition to have a large anti-war section. There’s Kader Attia’s “Culture, the Second Reclaimed Nature,” a series of wooden heads that recall the African sculpture that so inspired the modernists, but actually appeal to another aspect of modernist culture—all the busts are based on medical photographs of soldiers mutilated on the fronts of the Great War (among them Dix’s etchings also contain one such terrifying image of a young man in the infirmary). Here there is “Balkan Baroque” by Marina Abramovic, which refers to the Yugoslav wars, and “The Battle of Britain” by Grayson Perry, which refers, among other things, to “Brexit”, and so on and so forth. The Dresden triptych “War” is represented by a large life-size photographic reproduction, but the exhibition also includes other reproductions, in particular of paintings from the war cycle: “The Cripple” (1920) and “The Trench” (1920–1923). Both are listed as missing – most likely, they were destroyed, although the faint hope that they were sold, as much of the “degenerate” art decommissioned from museums was sold, and they are gathering dust in some unknown secret collections, still remains. Here another important and, alas, relevant topic arises for dialogues between the past and the present.
Dix’s problems began even before the Nazis came to power, and we’re not just talking about Weimar censorship, which advocated morality and decency. Since 1927, when Dix was confirmed as a professor at the Dresden Academy of Arts, he became a red rag for the nationalistically concerned artistic circles of the city, who made public denunciations in the press: they say that the professor is a pervert, who paints cripples and prostitutes, corrupts students who are not destined to be penetrated truly German spirit of art. Soon they had a chance to take revenge. In the autumn of 1933, an exhibition opened in Dresden, which is considered the first rehearsal of the notorious Munich exhibition of “degenerate” art of 1937. “The Cripples” and “The Trench” were shown at the Dresden Town Hall – this opened a direct path for them and other Dix masterpieces to all subsequent public defamation in the form of exhibitions. In 1933 he was fired from the Dresden Academy, from 1936 he could not exhibit, more than two and a half hundred of his works were confiscated from German museums, and at the end of 1938 he spent two weeks in a Gestapo prison. And of course, when contemporary artists engage in conversation with Dix, actually addressing his legacy or unintentionally entering into the conversation through curatorial discretion, they have in mind primarily this persecuted “degenerate” art. For example, the “new materiality”, which looked at the new world through a lens that simultaneously objectifies and grotesquely distorts reality, or the Weimar sexual revolution – the whole room is devoted to all kinds of sexually explicit and queer, so the phrase begun by Dix is picked up by Julian Rosefeldt, Nan Goldin, Lucian Freud and Nicole Eisenman. But at the same time, the theme of totalitarianism and totalitarian repression against culture seems to be developed only by Yael Bartana – in the video installation “Degenerate Art is Alive” based on Dix’s “Cripples”.
In 1933, a period of internal emigration began, which for Dix, it seems, never ended (after World War II he would find himself in limbo – between the Federal Republic of Germany and the GDR, between Western abstraction and Eastern socialist realism, not finding himself anywhere). In 1936, he fled to the very edge of the empire, lived in Hemmenhofen on the shores of Lake Constance, from where free and neutral Switzerland is visible, where he continued to be exhibited, but at the same time, feeling that he was a truly German artist, a true exponent of the German spirit, he left his homeland did not want. You can’t leave your homeland: she remembered him in 1945, drafted him into the army, sent him to the front – he met the end of the war as a French prisoner of war in Alsace. With Dix’s “Self-Portrait as a Prisoner of War” (1947), the exhibition enters into dialogue with a huge two-sided landscape by Anselm Kiefer from a cycle dedicated to Paul Celan: German soil, generously watered with German blood, will give birth to the German spirit. “Self-Portrait” is one of the peaks of German expressionism, which Dix again came to at the turning point of the war, somewhere around 1943, gradually freeing himself from partly forced, partly programmatic retrospectiveism.
Even before all the pogroms of art sanctioned from above, a year before Hitler was appointed Reich Chancellor, Dix suddenly began to paint in the manner and technique of the masters of the Northern Renaissance, so much so that his boards are sometimes indistinguishable from the works of painters of the 15th–16th centuries. At first these were nudes, like those of Cranach the Elder and Baldung Green, then landscapes, portraits and religious scenes reminiscent of the Danube School, Dürer and Bosch. These portraits and landscapes were made for the few collectors who decided to support the disgraced artist, and fed him throughout the eight years of National Socialism. National Socialism also advocated a return to the old German masters and romantics, but the paradox is that Dix, even in the most unbridled Weimar works, never changed the German tradition – all the heroes of his post-war, hungry and mutilated city, in essence, were the heroes of Grunewald and Runge, who sniffed mustard gas. In 1938, an artist in internal emigration was seized by an obsession – the legend of St. Christopher; he painted a series of radiant paintings, completely “Danube”, with allusions to Durer and Cranach. A huge board was brought to Hamburg from Gera, the first “Christopher” in the cycle – it was exhibited in Switzerland in 1938, and one art critic then said that it was an allegorical self-portrait of Dix himself, who carried all the best in German art to a safe place, like a saint martyr – child Christ.
The Hamburg exhibition is precisely valuable because it contains a lot of these retrospective paintings by Dix from the late 1930s and early 1940s – it is clear that in their internal anguish and hidden grotesque they are quite different from the hack work that sensitive people were pushing in those same years to changes in the aesthetic climate, members of the Reichskunstkamera, that art is of a completely different nature, although it draws from the same source. Artists from all over the world are invited to dialogue with Dix in the image of the old German master: Cranach’s nudes are commented on by John Currin with “vile flesh”, Dürer’s portraits and allegories are commented on by Werner Tübke’s “German Grunewald”, the disturbing “Danube” landscapes are commented on by Gianni Motti with “landscapes after battles” in Kosovo and Palestine, gospel scenes – Cindy Sherman in the form of Madonna and Child. The comparisons are interesting and witty, even when the authors had no Dix in mind. But one very important aspect of Dix’s art remains unspoken: this is his internal emigration as such, not individual plots and motives, but the very attempt to survive, remaining true to oneself and not compromising principles as much as possible. Many contemporary artists from Iran, Turkey or Russia could support the conversation on this topic – over the past years they have excellently mastered the Aesopian language. But they are not at the exhibition, and the rest have difficulty speaking, made up of omissions and allegories. This is apparently a good sign: we so quickly cease to understand people living and surviving under repression, because repression does not last forever. People, however, too.
Deichtorhallen, Hamburg, until 25 February 2024
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