Georg Scholz, Lords of the World (1922) Photo © 2008 Museum Associates/LACMA |
In his war diary, Otto Dix wrote, “Lice, rats, barbed wire, fleas, grenades, bombs, holes, bodies, blood, schnapps, mice, cats, gas, guns, dirt, bullets, mortars, fire, steel: this is war! This is the work of the Devil!” He later translated those impressions to the Der Krieg cycle, five portfolios of etchings produced in the 1920s. Rather than the predictable pacifist stance, Dix viewed his front-line experiences with the Expressionists’ Neue Sachlichkeit, or new objectivity, insisting that real courage lay in seeing conflict as an inevitable and “natural phenomenon” of human life.
Graphic art has long been the medium of choice for artists chronicling the horrors of war. Unlike Callot or Goya, however, Dix focuses on the “tremendous” in wartime scenes. The bemused naturalism of his etchings—the stiff legs of a decaying horse, light and shadow playing on a shell crater, a botched skin graft—document a war that fascinated him even as it terrified him.
“Shell-Shocked: Expressionism After the Great War” draws on works from LACMA’s Robert Rifkind Center for German Expressionist Studies to present a snapshot of graphic arts before and after World War I. The picture is a complex one, ranging from social realism and war commentaries, to satire, dada, and primitivism, even to a newfound reverence for biblical metaphor. “Shell-Shocked” consists of only about sixty objects—posters, prints,