Allemagne, les années noires. 1912-1929

[struggle4progress]

http://jrivais.club.fr.nyud.net:8090/IMAGES/infos5/maillol.jpg

Musée Maillol
Fondation Dina Vierny
59-61 rue de Grenelle
75007 PARIS

By Bus : 63, 68, 69, 83, 84, 94
By subway : 12, Rue du Bac

www.museemaillol.com
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http://english.pidf.com/page/p-292/art_id-1029/idf-FmaIDFSRV0022512

Germany’s Black Years Seen From the Inside
By ALAN RIDING

... Of these, Dix was the most interesting. Like Grosz and Beckmann, he volunteered to join the German Army. But unlike Grosz and Beckmann, who were demobilized on medical grounds after barely a year, Dix fought to the end. And fight he did: he commanded a unit of machine-gunners and, as such, was engaged in the mass killings that he would later denounce.

For at least two years he kept a form of journal through sketched postcards that he sent to a woman friend in Dresden. The 37 postcards displayed here include scenes of life and death in the trenches, of a military hospital, of fellow soldiers, of a battlefield planted with crosses. One showing a cross at the bottom of a huge shell crater carries the words “A beautiful grave.”

One or two of Dix’s oils, like “The Wild Man,” evoke a certain pessimism, yet more striking is the objectivity of his wartime art. Both Grosz and Meidner convey the violence of destroyed villages, fleeing refugees and scattered corpses with more immediacy, while Beckmann, a medical orderly at the front, shows wounded soldiers awaiting treatment.

Yet in the postwar era, it was Dix who looked back with the most terrifying hindsight: the 50 engravings in his 1924 “War” series can be compared to Goya’s “Disasters of War” etchings more than a century earlier. And here, with dead and fleeing soldiers, worm-ridden skulls, phantomlike figures in gas masks, uniformed skeletons, craters and ruins, Dix’s disgust is overwhelming ...

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/03/arts/design/03noir.html

German art
Expressionists at war
Jan 3rd 2008 | PARIS
From The Economist print edition
German images of the first world war continue to surprise

... But the exhibition's strongest message is about the extent to which the first world war, known for a long time as the “great war”, was a wholly new kind of conflict. Gone were the grand Napoleonic set-pieces of the 19th century. Here instead were long, dismal years of attrition symbolised by unknown men in gas masks, fumbling night patrols, the horror of a shell bursting overhead and a horizon limited to bits of no man's land. In one image by Otto Dix, a skull sprouts worms from every orifice; in another a sentry—long dead—sits to attention. The mad and the shell-shocked stare out of every wall.

Ludwig Meidner's “Krieg”, a sequence of drawings published in 1914, before he went to war, offer a grotesque early taste of the ghastliness to come. George Grosz never got to the front—he was invalided out early on—but he saw enough of the destruction to produce vivid, spidery battlescapes strewn with corpses. Grosz's exquisite drawings depicting the excesses of the Weimar Republic also include a series called “The Robbers”, a world of sleek black-marketeers and industrialists, war cripples and plump prostitutes, as well as militarists who have learned nothing from their experiences. Most impressive are Dix's etchings and the sketches on postcards which he sent from the front ...
http://www.economist.com/books/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10424262

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