Sex, Power, War, Existentialism and one painter

For the last few months I have been working as a volunteer-interpret in the Summer Exhibit of Canadian War Art created by Lord Beaverbrook during the Great War 1914-1918.

Of the more than 400 Canadian paintings in the collection and numerous bronzes about the First World War, two exhibits have been put together. One is called Transformations and the other Witness, as the title indicate Witness is about Canadian soldiers at the Front who witnessed the war and left to posterity paintings and sketches of what they saw and experienced. The other exhibit Transformations is about two men who could not be more different one from the other, A.Y. Jackson and Otto Dix. Both painters and both soldiers during the war, one quickly became a War Artist in the employ of Lord Beaverbrook's program of the Canadian War Memorial Fund, the other a German soldier who fought for 4 long years as a machine gunner and painted to keep his mind off the horrors he witnessed every single day.

Copse in the evening, A.Y.Jackson, 1917

Dead Sentry, Otto Dix 

My dilemma if I can call it that is about how to present both men and draw comparison if possible on their differences and similarities. If A.Y. Jackson is fairly un-complicated, leading a quiet and long life painting landscape in a style that will not change much in 75 years. A man who went along with the Official Propaganda of Ottawa in Wars and in Peace, never rocking the boat, always accepting to be the agent of Officialdom, who became famous in his lifetime and immortal in the mind of Canadians, living in a stable and prosperous country. This is fairly easy to explain to visitors and it verges on the boring. Jackson's popularity ensures that you do not need to say much, visitors already have an opinion of the man, like most visitors remark, this is one of the Group of 7 Painters right? NO it's not the group of 7 yet, we are speaking of a time well before all that. In most cases people know the name but not the painter.

What I make a point of explaining is that this collection of Canadian War Art (1914-1918) and the team of Canadian painters hired and paid for by Lord Beaverbrook, allowed people like Jackson, Varley and Lismer to become famous and form after the Armistice in 1919 the Group of Seven. Without this idea by Beaverbrook we would not have an archive of Canada's war effort and this also gave a tremendous boost to the development of Canadian Art and painters.  Suddenly there was amongst Canadians this understanding that we also produced art, no need to look to Europe. Recognition came of a new exclusively Canadian School of Painting.

On the other hand Wilhelm Heinrich Otto Dix (1891-1969) is a very complex person, brutally honest to the point of embarrassment, with views and opinions and an ever changing painting style. Living through two World Wars, Nazi dictatorship and the Cold War, dying in 1969 a disillusion man thinking that Death was the only Victor in the end.

Victory of Death, Otto Dix

How to explain Dix to visitors, when visitors know so little about him and German history in general outside of the usual platitudes we have been fed for the last 70 to 100 years. Not to mention the philosophical aspects of his painting style taken from the writing of Friedrich Nietzche and early theories of Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud on the mind and human behaviour.  How do you do this in a few minutes trying desperately not to confuse the audience and keep their attention. More than one visitor mentioned they had seen the movie ''The Monument men'' as if this was a testament to their knowledge or lack there of. The fact that many visitors are already thinking 1939-1945 Second World War, you must constantly bring them back to the fact that we are speaking of the Great War and not of events closer to them. Most have forgotten that there was a war between 1914-1918, there are no movies with Hollywood starlets to explain it all.

Otto Dix requires that you ask yourself questions, something the public is not always ready or willing to do, after all they come to the museum to be entertained not to reflect on life and its meaning or lack thereof.  Also the act of going to a museum for many is foreboding, it is not that people are not interested, no, but they do feel insecure about what they know and do not know. Many realize they do not know much about anything.

Melancholie, Otto Dix

Many of Dix paintings have a sexual and violent overtone, speak of regeneration and hope, of death and war. Existentialism plays a part in his work, it is not possible to look at a Dix painting and not think about the meaning of Existentialism. Dix sees himself as an acting, feeling, living human individual. As he said himself I paint for the common man not the well thinking bourgeois or the profiteers. His Existential Attitude comes from a sense of confusion, of disorientation in the face of an apparently meaningless and absurd world in which he lived and we lived in the XXth Century.

He will enter the First World War as an enthusiastic Patriot, defending the Great German Empire, but being a Machine gunner, having the ability of killing hundreds in a matter of a few minutes will quickly turn him into a fierce critic of a society and world gone mad, full of lies and cynicism. Dix will come to feel he is the tool of the powerful, the Capitalist, the War profiteers, seeing so many of his comrades killed or left to die in the mud, picked at by rats. So horrified he was by the spectacle of war that like many ordinary soldiers, he came to hate those in charge of the War. A feeling shared by British and Canadian Soldiers alike. Then returning home to a Germany in crisis, poverty everywhere, a society in crisis, he decides to denounce the hypocrisy he sees all around him. He will make powerful enemies in German Society.

Lust murder, Otto Dix a painting he offered to his wife Martha. This painting hanged in the family dining room of their home in Hemmenhofen am Bodensee.

Victims of Capitalism, Otto Dix, 1923.

Here we see a prostitute disfigured by venereal disease and a veteran with a wound. The message being that capitalism profits by using the bodies of others.

The wounded veteran, Otto Dix. 

Wounds from shrapnel in WW I were more devastating because the piece of metal were large, this type of wound was common.

A.Y. Jackson will paint landscapes of the war on the battlefields but as he wrote to friends, ''I will not show the horror of battle and the dead'', he did not want to, he explained that it was not up to him to explain the war, he was paid to paint it for a future archive. Arthur Lismer and Frederick Varley had no such reserve, they will use their art to criticize often callous and remote Politicians in Ottawa and the General Staff in London. Their art work is so controversial that it is still in storage to this day at the Canadian War Museum.

Visitors also look for poppies that red flower weed that grows in fields everywhere in May and June. Jackson does not use them in his paintings, he paints red Maple Leafs. The visitors are looking for something comforting and easily recognizable in this exhibit. Many simply say, Oh they were so young, it is so sad, but they do not go beyond that in trying to understand the meaning of these paintings.

For Canadians the poppy is a symbol of remembrance but not for the rest of Europe with the exception of France and Britain. For the Germans the poppy is an erotic symbol and when Dix paints deep trenches with poppies growing on top what he really is painting is a woman's genitalia and the poppies are a sexual symbol of arousal. Now how do you explain that to the visitors who are asking. A delicate situation for sure, the image is one of war and death and here is sexual imagery.
Sex and Death, Power and Death, Re-birth the cycle of life, not an easy topic to broach with any museum visitor who thinks, oh I am going to see War action paintings. In fact I have noticed that most visitors will not look at the Dix paintings and concentrate on the more palatable A.Y. Jackson, maybe because he confirms what they know or have been told. Otto Dix said once, I did not paint war  pictures in order to prevent war, I would never have been so arrogant. I painted them to exorcise the experience of war. All art is about exorcism.

Flanders, Otto Dix

Throughout his life Dix will return to this imagery time and again, in his portraits he will emphasize the grotesque, the ugly in his subjects even when is subjects are known to have been very handsome. All in keeping with his rejection of the Conservatism Petit Bourgeois attitude found in Germany after 1919, the many failures of the Weimar Republic and also in opposition to National Socialism ideology who as of 1933 will put Germany again on a war path. His subjects male and female are depicted as wasted and pathetic, leading a self-destructive life full of random violence, an analogy to Germany at the time. But also Dix said, I paint the beautiful and the ugly because that is the reality of life, both are present in our world.

In the period 1919-1933, he will describe himself as Mack the Knife, the Character of the Three Penny Opera of Bertold Brecht. The world he paints is that of the prostitutes, brothels, cabaret, the Demi-monde of Berlin, though he is a celebrated artist, his paintings hang in all major museums, he is a professor at the Art Academy in Dresden and is married and has several children, Nelly, Ursus, Jan and a daughter by his mistress of 40 years, Katherina. Difficult to reconcile for visitors.

 Otto Dix and his wife and children Nelly and Ursus, 1927

Nelly Dix, daughter of the painter in 1940

Another question often asked by visitors is why did Dix remain in Germany after 1933, why did he not leave like so many did.  I do not have to defend his choices, though he chose internal exile in Germany and he went to live near Lake Constance near the border with Switzerland, first in Randegg Castle and then in a villa in Hemmenhofen, leading a self-effacing life in a small village. He had a family, small children, he had all his paintings stored in Germany and money, He knew that leaving the Nazi regime would have taken everything he had, he would have been destitute with a wife and kids in a foreign land, a terrible prospect, we can empathize, however sone visitors are very critical of his decision to stay in Germany. Today 80 years after the fact it is easy to judge the actions of people like Dix. His career as a painter was destroyed as of 1933 and after the war in 1946 he will not be able to re-start his career though he will be famous, his painting style no longer in fashion.
I believe that most people even when faced with imminent disaster are not able to simply walk away from everything and this is what Dix would have had to do.

Of his family I have discovered that his son Ursus moved with his English wife to 40 Julian street in Ottawa and became an art restored at the National Gallery of Canada, he died in 2002 while riding his bicycle struck by a car.  His youngest son Jan live still in Hemmenhofen and manages the house of his parents now a museum. Katherina is also alive and lives in an apartment in Germany full of her father's paintings. Grandson Geoffrey Dix, a medical doctor, works at the Heart Institute in Ottawa.

Artists should not try to improve or convert. They are too insignificant for that. They must only bear witness.   Otto Dix

Art is given to us to prevent us from dying from Truth. Friedrich Nietzche

If Life is a comedy for Otto Dix it was a Grotesque Farce or as he probably would say himself, Life is Life and Art is Art.
So I continue my search on how to approach this subject and finding a clear explanation to Dix without scaring the horses on the public square.

Otto Dix Self-Portrait with easel

What is Sacred in our world?

I get to read a lot of news and the more I read the more I wonder about what our XXI century society considers Sacred with a Capital ''S''.
Is there anything in our world left that is Sacred? I mean by that something we all hold in common and can agree upon that is Sacred.

The word Sacred as defined means: From the Latin, Sacrare, Middle-English, Sacren, French, Sacrer.
Inviolable, untouchable, Holy, worthy of veneration. Humans in all cultures and since time immemorial have held certain things to be sacred, one is life, birth, another is burial grounds, Religious Temples in every Faith are sacred, anyone performing a religious rite in a ceremonial,
a Constitution, a National Flag, Human Rights as defined in the UN Charter and recognised as such by the Nations of the World.  

However because our general culture tends to trivialise what was considered Sacred many now think that little or nothing is Sacred and can be ignored or discarded, at any rate it is open to debate on the internet where people are free to insult each other with impunity and anonymity.

Is Life Sacred? Recently a man was shot to death in a cinema for texting before the show started to his child. Some commenters, several of them, commented that he fully deserved it, he had it coming, they said. Really? A human life is so worthless today that a simple text message, a disagreement can lead to murder?

In Ottawa in the last 3 years there has been an epidemic of hit and run by careless drivers who injured seriously or killed people. After hitting someone the driver simply takes off, thinking no one will have noticed. However escaping justice is difficult since all car repairs are reported to the Police in case of accidents. Only after the drivers have been found or denounced by someone do they come forward, how disrespectful can you be towards another human being. It seems that not assuming any responsibility is the norm.

What about all the children and other people who are slaughtered in various schools or public places in the USA and still despite the horror, some people claim that their right to own an assault weapon trumps everyone else right to live in peace.  An obscene point of view based on twisted logic and depraved sense of entitlement.

Many great figures have been ridiculed and attacked publicly because they did not meet a certain modern popular idea or standard decided upon by a trendy way of thinking.

I think here of Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965) who devoted his life to others, built a hospital in Africa and cared for his patients, a visionary in his time.  A Nobel Peace Prize Winner and recognised by the World as a Humanitarian of high moral standing is brought down by an article with unproven facts, simply vague rumours claiming he was an awful person, this is trumpeted on Radio-Canada in an historical segment.

No one is safe from salacious rumours and stories surfacing decades later simply to titillate a bored public thirsty for dirt. No one will ask if it is true or not, the public appears more than willing to believe just about anything.

There are schools of thought, I do not know if you can call them that, but this is how they present themselves, who will say the harshest things simply in a crusade to set the record straight or this is what they believe. Correct the mistakes of the past by denouncing them in the present, very reminiscent of Communist Regimes like China and North Korea. Can we ever correct the past? How? What is past is past. How can anyone not living during a specific time period and born later sometimes decades if not centuries later, claim that he or she can correct or apologize on behalf of the dead. We can correct current behaviour or not repeat past mistakes, though with the prevailing ignorance of events more than 20 years old, one wonders if we are not condemn to repeating the same mistakes over and over again.

The same in the work place, we have policies on a Respectful Workplace but that is totally meaningless. No one understands what it actually means. Employees who are incompetent hide behind it. It appears that bullying by Management is now the norm, it is all passive, aggressive behaviour, lies and deceit. Management unable to provide proper guidance and a lack of interest in the job to be done. Every manager has her eye on the Media, what are they saying and how will this affect my bonus or promotion, doing the job is not even on the table. Customers and employees are abused in the worst way and no one is held responsible.

Have you ever noticed now how when you phone a large corporation who is suppose to provide a service they will address you by your first name. You have no idea who this person is speaking with you, but they treat you with contempt and provide generally poor service. You have little choice in the matter. Where is management, they are no where to be found and will not respond to any enquiry. It seems that lack of respect for people in general is the way of the world. But why have we descended to this level?

Another outrage was committed recently in a London Cemetery where the ashes of Sigmund Freud and his wife were interned in an antique Urn 2300 years old. The vandals smashed the Greek Urn at New Year in what appears to be an aborted theft. Freud died in 1939 and his wife in 1951, they had been left at Peace until now. Again what kind of mentality in our society allows people to disturb the dead and vandalise burial grounds. A total lack of respect, of consideration for others. Unable to understand the gravity of the gesture or the words expressed.

Unfortunately there is more and more lack of respect in our society for people, ideas, or what was considered until now as Sacred by all. We strive so much to push the real accepted rights and the made up imagined rights of the individual over those of the collectivity that our shared values are forgotten. What hope is there for any Civilization amid such confusion.

Tiepolo, Pulling teeth.