Art In WWI

World War I devastated Europe, leading to the deaths of millions of soldiers and civilians, the destruction of cities, towns, and the countryside, and psychological damage to those who participated in or were victims of the conflict. After the horrors of WWI, flowery Victorian ways of thinking and expressing had become archaic; people needed new ways of expressing the traumas they had witnessed or experienced, and new technology and art provided the mediums. One of the new forms of artistic expression that reflected this shift in thinking was  Modernism, which was characterized by a rejection of history and conservative values. German artist Otto Dix, who spent four years as an artillery gunner in WWI, began creating prints of his experiences of the War almost immediately after his discharge. Dix, who had been an impressionist artist prior to the War, began to embrace a harsher, more naturalistic artform, known as New Objectivity. This school of art allowed Dix to give a realistic view of his experiences in the War, and he began creating etchings of the horrors he had witnessed. His 1924 work “Mealtime in the Trench” portrays a soldier sitting in a trench, casually eating next to a partial skeleton, illustrating the psychological effects of the War on the soldiers forced to fight. The soldiers–regardless of nationality–had become accustomed to suffering and death as evidenced by Dix’s etching. Otto Dix’s “Mealtime in the Trench” served as a reminder of the impacts of the War and was an urgent message compelling people to fight against allowing a conflict like that to ever happen again. 

Dix uses the contrast between dark and light in “Mealtime in the Trench'' to illustrate the two states of soldiers in the trenches, with darkness representing the somber, harsh conditions in which soldiers lived, and the light representing the freedom that comes with death. Dix utilizes a specific form of intaglio printing known as aquatint, the process of engraving a flat surface in order to create different shades or tones. Through this medium, Dix is able to create dramatic contrasts in Mealtime. A soldier is sitting in a trench, eating from a can of food, and has wrappings around his legs to keep him warm. Dix uses cross-hatching to make the soldier appear filthy, but contrasts the soldier’s dark state with the pure whiteness of the bleak, snowy background of “No Man’s Land.” The whiteness of the bandages around his legs highlight what seem to be rotting wounds. Dix’s use of intaglio, the specific, incised lines on the soldier’s face and clothing, gives the soldier a rough and tattered appearance while the Dix’s use of aquatint—the overall contrasting tones of black and white—emphasize the dramatic coldness and emptiness of his surroundings and the bandages or wrappings on the soldier’s legs. Dix sought to “insistently return the spectator to the front line,” and his etching of this exhausted and prematurely-aged soldier forces the viewer to see the horrific conditions that these soldiers had to endure. Only by forcing the viewer back to the front line can those who had not taken part in the war understand the horror of the conflict. 

 When viewed from left to right, the etching shifts from dark to light, drawing the viewer’s eyes to the frozen skeleton, the whitest image in the scene, implying that death represents a reprieve from the hell of the trenches.  Death, symbolized by the white skeleton, is a preferable state compared to that of the soldier, who Dix has covered in dark, cross-hatched lines. Dix uses an intaglio technique called “stopping out,” the process of varnishing an etching to prevent the surface from being eaten away, which leaves large white spaces on the surface of the print. The New York Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) describes Dix’s process: “He stopped out ghastly white bones and strips of no man's land, leaving brilliant white patches; multiple acid baths ate away at the images, mimicking decaying flesh.” Dix deliberately “stops out'' certain parts of his etching to enhance the emptiness of the battlefield and emphasize the image of the skull. Not only does Dix’s drawing portray the war, his etching itself mimics decaying flesh, and it physically serves as a reminder of the toll war had taken on soldiers. The lone soldier is suffering in  the cold, wearing very little clothing. His only companion is the skeleton that  rests next to him, and Dix heightens the contrast between them by  “stopping  out” the skeleton. The skeleton reveals how few  soldiers survived from the ordeal, with many of them becoming like the skeleton, broken, and frozen in time. With his injuries and feeling of desolation,  the soldier will possibly not survive long, and since he is comfortable eating next to a skeleton, the soldier has clearly reached a stage of indifference that is disturbing.  Trench warfare was made up of battles of attrition, and through his etching, Dix struck a chord with viewers.  As Dennis Crockett states, “The German taste for hero worship had received a serious blow when the war was lost, but hero worship itself was by no means dead. To the numerous soldier organizations and to the hero cult, Dix seemed to be insulting those who had sacrificed themselves on "the altar of the Fatherland." By not painting the soldier in an artificial light of heroism , but instead in a realistic, albeit gruesome, way, Dix does not “insult those who had sacrificed themselves” but instead honors them by showing the truth of war. When discussing Mealtime, Dix stated, “There were a lot of books in the Weimar Republic once again peddling the notions of the hero and heroism, which had long been rendered absurd in the trenches of the First World War. People were already beginning to forget, what horrible suffering the war had brought them. I did not want to cause fear and panic, but to let people know how dreadful war is and so to stimulate people’s powers of resistance.” In the interwar period, the German Weimar government had begun  manipulating public opinion, hailing the  WWI soldiers’ deaths as glorious and ignoring the truth  of the war. Dix understood the dehumanizing experiences many soldiers had faced during the conflict and sought to reject such nationalism. By creating his etching Mealtime, Dix was attempting to force the German people to reject such propaganda and to once again remind them of the dreadfulness of the war. Through the contrast between the dark and light of his etching, and the deliberate way Dix draws the skeleton, Dix conveys the trauma experienced by soldiers during the war and provides a visual into the devastation it wrought on humanity.

Otto Dix sought to caution people from further bloodshed, and to emphasize the importance of not allowing another war so tragic to happen again. Through his depictions of the dehumanizing effects of war on an individual, Dix forced people to face the terrifying truth. Unfortunately, Dix’s message did not last  as only a mere twenty-one years after World War I ended, another war began.  Though many artists had expressed this warning,  they were ignored, leading to even more devastation. 

Works Cited

Crockett, Dennis. “The Most Famous Painting of the ‘Golden Twenties’? Otto Dix and the Trench Affair.” Art Journal 51, no. 1 (1992): 72–80. https://doi.org/10.2307/777257.

Dix, Otto. Mealtime in the Trench (Loretto Heights). Etching, 1924, Los Angeles County Museum of Art. https://collections.lacma.org/node/179568. 

Fox, Paul. “Confronting Postwar Shame in Weimar Germany: Trauma, Heroism and the War Art of Otto Dix.” Oxford Art Journal 29, no. 2 (2006): 247–67. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3841015. 

Hess, Heather. “German Expressionist Digital Archive Project.” German Expressionism: Works from the Collection. Accessed January 25th, 2024. https://www.moma.org/s/ge/collection_ge/artist/artist_id-1559_role-1_sov_page-43.html. 

Neues Deutschland. “Otto Dix.” Spartacus Educational. Accessed January 26th, 2024. https://spartacus-educational.com/ARTdix.htm.