How to explain

I have completed my Summer assignment at the Canadian War Museum as Interpreter guide for the painting exhibit ''Transformations'' paintings of the Canadian A.Y.Jackson and German Realist Painter Otto Dix. Two interesting men and certainly famous painters though in the final analysis I find Otto Dix far more interesting as a painter than Jackson who was essentially a landscape artist.

In the course of the tour of the exhibit I presented the basic differences between the two men, they were in fact very different men not only by temperament but also in their up-bringing and in the life they led.

Otto Dix (1891-1969)

With Otto Dix comes the various art movements he worked in and associated with, Futurism, Cubism, Dadaist movement, Realism, etc... Dix modelled his life on the Philosoply of Friedrich Nietzsche who is seen as the philosopher whose theories influenced much of the XXth Century and the way we live. He was the main proponent of Existentialism. Now the problem for me was to try to explain very briefly Nietzsche as an influence in the life of Dix and his paintings. How do you do this with a public who has very minimal knowledge of painting, who has never heard of this painter and who does not know who Nietzsche is. The easy way out would have been to skip it all together but the explaining notes alluded to it, so you need to maybe give some context to it all.

The other problem is that the Second World War is a very large elephant in our collective memory and unfortunately our view of that war and the events surrounding it is very distorted and has been simplified into a lot of nonsense. So here I am trying to explain that the painters Jackson and Dix saw action during the First World War (1914-1918) which has no relation to events between 1933-1945 and their world was transformed by the Great War and no I am not talking of Nazis and Jews.

In fact one of the questions that came back constantly was at the very beginning of the tour when people would ask, So what did Dix do during the Nazi era? Was he a Jew? Did he leave Germany? How come he survived did he collaborate with the Nazis? I constantly had to remind my dear public that first Dix was born near Dresden in Germany in 1891 and we are looking first at the paintings of his early life and his war experience during the period 1914-18 as a very young man.  In most cases I could clearly see that my public was lost or at least disappointed, they could not pigeon hole Dix into the bad German or bad Nazi mode. It has been 100 years and that is a very long time ago for most people.

One person insisted that he had to be an evil man because he did not get on the soap box to denounce Hitler in 1914 and leave Germany pronto.  Never mind the fact that Hitler an Austrian, was not a political figure in 1914 and was just an anonymous conscript like millions of others. I did say that Otto Dix had a difficult character, was a social climber and became famous and infamous because of his high jinks in the art world in Germany.

On the other hand A.Y.Jackson was seen as the good guy simply because his name is recognisable with the Canadian Group of 7 Painters. Beyond that most people did not know a Jackson from a Renoir. Most cannot identify a Group of 7 painting from any other landscape painting. If truth be told only the most famous paintings, those that are endlessly reproduced are known by sight. The Group of 7 contrary to popular mythology was also short lived, they were active only between 1919 and 1932. Some members of the public thought that they were still painting as a group in the 1970's when in fact most of them were long dead. The Group disbanded because the Art critics got tired of their landscapes.

Many women were asking about another Canadian Painter Emily Carr who did not figure in the exhibit since she did not take part in the Great War, was not a Canadian War Artist and the exhibit was not about her to begin with, for some reason I always got the impression that my female public was disappointed she had not been included as if this was another ''equity issue'' we are so fond of here in Canada.

The automatic association the viewing public made with the Group of 7 and A.Y.Jackson was also maddening. It was as if they believed that from birth Jackson was in the Group of 7 as a painter. However almost no one could name another painter in that group, it seems that when it comes to Canadian painting if you do not mention the Group of 7 there is no Canadian painting period.
A rather sad commentary on general knowledge of Canadian Art and artists.

So there I am back in the early years part of the exhibit trying to give a concise explanation about Nietzschean philosophy. I would usually say this: Nietzsche rejected Traditional Christian values, he argued that the ideal human the Übermensch would  be able to channel his passions creatively instead of suppressing them.  He also reasoned that Christianity's emphasis on the afterlife makes its believers less able to deal with earthly life.  Dix certainly followed Nietzsche in his life and in the way he perceived himself in the art world.

In some cases, not all, depending on my audience, I would also explain the fascination Dix had with violence and sexual violence done to women, the case of Jack the ripper was fresh in European minds at the time and the recurring theme in his early works of the idea of regeneration, that the earth is associated with motherhood and fecundity, that trenches were men hid and fought from was similar to a woman's genitalia. This was presented in the notes and I heard more than one visitor scoff at the program notes as inventions by the Curator. In fact the Curator, a knowledgeable expert, was paraphrasing Dix himself who explained why he painted as he did.

In one of Dix's war paintings he paints red poppies on top of the trench, as an erotic flowers and not a flower of remembrance as we in Canada think of them. Certainly between 1919-1933 which was Dix's most prolific period he was in open revolt against the German War profiteers and German Bourgeois society denouncing its hypocrisy in the face of social upheaval and economic uncertainty. Dix late in his life said: I paint for the man in the street, I hope he likes what I do but I do not know.

Many of the visitors at the exhibition preferred Jackson who is much easier to assimilate and whose paintings did not challenge pre-conceived ideas of war and sacrifice. In this sense even British painter Paul Nash who hated the war and those in charge of it, is far darker and Nihilistic than Jackson who simply refused to show in his war art the horror of the battlefield, unlike other Canadian artists like Arthur Lismer and Frederick Varley. No Jackson was not the controversial one, in fact after the Group of 7 disbands in 1932, he will transform himself into the teacher, writer and government propagandist, his paintings will be reproduced into thousands of copies plastered in every waiting room of the nation, he will sit on Government Commissions choosing soldiers who will paint specifically requested scenes of the Second World War (1939-1945).

If during the First World War the Canadian Government of Sir Robert Borden did not care for an archive of Canadian War Art, Canadians can say a large thank you to Max Aitken Lord Beaverbrook for giving us one,  during the second world conflict the situation was very different now propaganda or Art at the Service of War was a powerful tool and continues to this day. In the latest conflict, the longest in Canadian history the 12 year Afghanistan war in which we were involved, the Harper Regime rather clumsily tried to tell the artists what to paint.

Jackson will continue to sit on various government commissions, one will be the Commission on the New Canadian Flag of 1965.  In his final years he will paint at the McMichael studio in Kleinburg Ontario North of Toronto, nothing too challenging for the eyes just more of the same.

After 1945 for both Dix and Jackson it was clearly the case of Fame stifling Genius, they were famous but no one cared much for their painting style. Grand old men of an era most people wanted to forget and today we have forgotten about the war,  but Dix is still present and his paintings are questions for us to answer in this very troubled world we live in. To me he is still fresh and relevant.

In the late 1920's Dix was interviewed and he explained that as a soldier he wanted to feel what it was like to fear death when it is in front of you on the battlefield and the lust he felt in plunging his bayonet into another man in battle. Though this statement is shocking Dix is nonetheless brutally honest, he became infamous for his brutal honesty. Whereas Jackson would say to friends that he did not want to show the horror of war in his paintings, he preferred leaving it to the viewer to figure out what they were looking at, to me his so called reserve is dishonest, very middle-class and so Canadian, don't rock the boat approach.


Art exist so that we will not die from the Truth!  F. Nietzsche.

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

Dresdner Triptychon, Der Krieg by Otto Dix

The Dresdner triptych on should not be confused with a similarly named one by Jan Van Eyck painted in 1437 for the MarienAltar which can be found today in the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister  in Dresden. This triptych was created for the celebrated Giustiniani Family of Genoa, Italy. This family has a Saint in the person of Lorenzo Giustiniani who was Cardinal in Venice.

Between 1929-1932 Otto Dix the celebrated German painter and father of German Realism painted a triptych in memory of the Great War 1914-1918. He being a veteran of this war had strong memories of the horrors he witnessed on the battlefields and regrets, the war experience had transformed him. If before 1914 Dix in a self-portrait presents himself almost like Albrecht Durer, who he admired. After 1919 Dix now presents himself in a new self-portrait as Mack the Knife, the character of the Three Penny Opera of Bertold Brecht. Dix laughs and denounces Bourgeois society and its conservative values, the hypocrisy, the lies, he sets himself against that very society of the Weimar Republic. His world is that of the Cabaret, the Cafés, the Brothels and its prostitutes. As a painter and artist he will enrage Hitler who also a veteran of the Great War cannot understand why Dix rejects what Hitler see as glorious, the army, family, discipline and order.

Here is a YouTube documentary in German and English on this masterpiece. I am very happy I had the opportunity to see it in Dresden. It was one of the highlight of our visit. See the web site of the museum: http://www.skd.museum/en