Otto Dix fought in the First World War for four years before becoming one of the most important artists of the Weimar era. This book takes Dix's very public, monumental works out of the isolation of the artist's studio and returns them to a context of public memorials, mass media depictions, and the communal search for meaning in the war.

<I>Bitter Witness is an intensive, factual study of Otto Dix's war-related art. It is the first book to place Dix's etching cycle, <I>Der Krieg, alongside numerous paintings and drawings in the perspective of his war experience on two fronts from mid-1915 to 1918's finale. It includes a full history of the war, the Weimar Republic's socio-political upheavals, and the Nazi years, following Dix and his colleagues, including Kaethe Kollwitz, through the artistic movements and events in the first half of Germany's most turbulent century.

Om den tyske maler Otto Dix (1891-1969)

"This book examines the confrontational war pictures of Otto Dix (1891-1969) and explores their role in shaping the memory of World War I in Germany during the years 1914-36. Dix's thirty-eight months on the World War I battlefields profoundly influenced his post-war artistic career, saw him produce some of the most enduring images of the conflict and establish himself as one of Europe's leading modernists. Offering substantial new research and presenting numerous primary sources to an English readership for the first time, the book examines Dix's war pictures within the broader visual culture of war in order to assess how they functioned alternatively as cutting-edge modernist art and transgressive war commemoration. Each chapter provides a case study of the first public display of one or more of Dix's war pictures at key exhibitions and explores how their reception was subjected to changing socio-political and cultural conditions as well as divergent attitudes to the lost war. Bringing a unique perspective and original scholarship to Dix's war works, Otto Dix and the Memorialization of World War I in German Visual Culture, 1914-36 is essential reading for art historians of the First World War and the visual culture of Weimar Germany"--

"This book examines the confrontational war pictures of Otto Dix (1891-1969) and explores their role in shaping the memory of World War I in Germany during the years 1914-36. Dix's thirty-eight months on the World War I battlefields profoundly influenced his post-war artistic career, saw him produce some of the most enduring images of the conflict and establish himself as one of Europe's leading modernists. Offering substantial new research and presenting numerous primary sources to an English readership for the first time, the book examines Dix's war pictures within the broader visual culture of war in order to assess how they functioned alternatively as cutting-edge modernist art and transgressive war commemoration. Each chapter provides a case study of the first public display of one or more of Dix's war pictures at key exhibitions and explores how their reception was subjected to changing socio-political and cultural conditions as well as divergent attitudes to the lost war. Bringing a unique perspective and original scholarship to Dix's war works, Otto Dix and the Memorialization of World War I in German Visual Culture, 1914-36 is essential reading for art historians of the First World War and the visual culture of Weimar Germany"--

War, modernism, and the academic spirit -- Women in peril -- Mirroring masculinity -- Opposing visions -- Opening the floodgates -- To see or not to see -- Being there -- Behind the mask -- Monsters in our midst.