Armistice Day: Otto Dix self-portraits

Whilst looking for paintings for yesterday and today, I was struck by the difference between the attitudes of the British and the Germans towards war art. In the UK in 1914, art was far less adventurous than the rest of Europe; the avant garde had not really leapt across the channel and yet the government, on entering the war, commissioned artists galore including the most modern we had. They were given relatively free reign and it seems to me that the challenges of depicting the war is what finally brought the new styles of art like cubism, futurism, surrealism and the rest to this country. In Germany by contrast there were already bold artists doing interesting things. Berlin may not have been Paris, but there was far more going on there than London. When it came to war art though, I have only been able to find one official German artist from the Great War, and he was as traditional as they come. It seems as though the power of art was ignored and that the Kaiser's government must have been just as aesthetically conservative as the Nazis were later on, when avant garde artists were shunned, shamed and chased into exile. Through the midst of this neglect and hostility from his government strode Otto Dix.

Dix served throughout the First World War and was decorated and, like so many others, deeply affected. If his work was sharp and cynical beforehand, it was doubly so afterwards. As an artist he was formally restless, trying many different styles and constantly evolving through his life and yet his subject - sharp, cynical observation of people and society - was constant through war and peace. Harsh is probably the best word.

With all this in mind, here we have two self portraits.

On the left, from early in his service and probably about the time Dix became an officer in charge of a machine gun, we have Self Portrait as Mars or Self Portrait as the God of War. On the right, painted after his release from a French POW came at the end of the Second World War, we have Self Portrait as a Prisoner of War. Put together they say more than words ever could; a journey from an angry young man just given the power to cause death on an industrial scale and affected who knows how (maybe even intoxicated by it at the beginning) to a weary, phlegmatic old man who looks as though he is no longer capable of feeling anything but fatigue. Individually they are hugely powerful pieces. Working together, they are a very human story of the path, effects and futility of war.