German soldier’s ugly art
John Bartlett 10/7/08
According to Jim, an attendant at the the National Gallery of Victoria, feelings ran high last Anzac Day against the exhibition of 51 drawings and etchings by Otto Dix, a German artist/soldier. ‘In Adelaide,’ he says, ‘there were even some attempts to damage the prints.’ This is an exhibition that indeed provokes strong reactions from observers with its often grotesque and always confronting depictions of the realities of war on the Western Front during WWI. Dix said that ‘there was a dimension of reality that had not been dealt with in art: the dimension of ugliness’. In this exhibition there is an excess of ugliness. Mealtime in the Trenches depicts a soldier gulping down a hasty meal apparently indifferent to the human skeleton trapped in the frozen landscape beside him.