As a rule, this triptych is usually “read” from left to right as an eloquent and laconic history of the war: soldiers leaving for battle; the battlefield, presented as an apocalyptic dead landscape; the few survivors who managed to get through this “hell on earth”; and as the apotheosis of the entire composition – rows of soldiers’ bodies in a mass grave, those who could not survive. However, I would like to believe that “War”, like any great timeless work, should cover something more than a simple “description of everyday life” of the darkest and bloodiest pages of human history. Of course, at the time of the creation of “War”, Otto Dix was a supporter of the “new objectivity” movement, which put “unapologetic, naked realism” into the avant-garde, not allowing allegories and different interpretations, but too much was done by the artist in such a way as to give the right to say: “This is all for a reason.” The triptych “War” is not just a “story about war”; this is the personification of three temporary states of a person who has gone through war.

PAST

In 1914, 23-year-old student Otto Dix volunteered for the war. Like many young people, he succumbed to the illusion of “war romance” and the thirst for extreme sensations. Later, he would say that he did it out of curiosity: “I had to experience these terrible bottomless depths of life myself.” The young soldier would spend the next three years in the very crucible of the hell of war, including participating in the darkest and bloodiest battles of the First World War. The personal experience of the “true realist” resulted in more than 600 drawings made right on the battlefield: Dix would present the war in all its unimaginable ugliness – it was obvious that not a trace remained in the young man’s mind of the romantic image of war. From this moment on, the artist’s work will be connected with the war in one way or another, and we will never know what Otto Dix would have been like if the war had not happened to him.

The left panel of the triptych is the Past. What was at the beginning of the war? The uncertainty of its end. There is a tense uncertainty here, expressed by the thick fog into which the soldiers leave and from which they will never return. Neither we nor they themselves know how the fate of each of them will turn out, but we know exactly where they are all going. The soldiers are standing at the gates of the Underworld. This is the fog of Hel, the Kingdom of the Dead. These people are no longer alive, they are obviously dead. Dissolving in the fog, they become like disembodied spirits, eventually becoming ghosts and disappearing completely.

THE PRESENT

But this is only the threshold of Hell. Hell itself is depicted in the center of the triptych. This is the Present for the soldier, the culmination of hell on earth. Orphaned stumps of trees; scorched, deserted land pitted with craters from bombing. In the trenches, blood, guts, and body parts of the dead mixed with mud to form one monstrous swamp. In it, almost knee-deep, stands a silent figure in a gas mask, wrapped in a cloak. Who is this: the only soldier who survived the chemical weapons attack or a motionless corpse that can only be mistaken for alive? Or maybe this is the ghost of war, impartially surveying its bloody domain? The most terrible thing is that Dix did not have to invent anything to create this monstrous landscape: this is not an exaggerated image or an allegory – he saw it all with his own eyes.

As a soldier, Otto Dix took part in the battles in Flanders in 1917 – the darkest event of the First World War. At the Battle of Passchendaele, constant artillery attacks ground up the marshy soil, causing groundwater to overflow, turning the entire battlefield into impassable, sticky mud. Troops on both sides literally “drowned in mud”: over 800,000 people died in this small area in just a few months. A month earlier, the Germans had used “mustard gas” – yperite – in combat for the first time. Unlike other poisonous gases, this chemical weapon affected not only the lungs and eyes, but also the skin. Surviving or not becoming crippled after poisoning with yperite was almost impossible – a person died in terrible agony.

Yperite quickly demonstrated its deadly effectiveness: Allied losses from this gas were eight times greater than losses caused by any other chemical weapon. It was a very modern war – cruel, mechanical, in which there was nothing human. It was a war of total annihilation, leaving behind only corpses and depopulated barren lands.

There is no chance to survive here. This is the kingdom of Death. Here it is in the picture – a half-decayed skeleton hanging on steel bars, which seems to “float” above its “kingdom”. This “image of Death” points its finger at the body of a soldier, painfully reminiscent of the crucified Christ…

Dix will begin writing his great work in 1929 – ten years after his own militaristic nightmare ended. By this time he had already become one of the most significant German artists, a favorite of high society, favored by both critics and the press. But the horrific images of war do not leave him and he returns to this theme again and again. In his creative searches, he came to be fascinated by the masters of the Northern Renaissance: the frank, rough naturalism of Grünewald, Bosch and Bruegel fascinates him. The apotheosis of this search is the triptych “War”. Dix deliberately chooses the composition of a traditional Renaissance altar, referring us directly to the famous Isenheim Altarpiece by Grünewald. The artist creates an altarpiece, obviously filled with a religious context and wants it to be noticeable. He even paints his work as in the old days – on wood, with egg tempera and oil.

… the figure of the dead soldier resembles the crucified Christ from the Isenheim Altar not only with its outstretched arms and the cruciform position of its body. Its entire body is covered with stab wounds – traces of bayonets or holes from nails driven in by Roman soldiers? Next to its head is a coil of barbed wire or perhaps a crown of thorns? If so, why does Dix “remove” Christ from the crucifix and cruelly “throw” him into a pile of fragments of human bodies? Is God dead? Is this what “Death”, seemingly grinning in a lipless laugh, wants to tell us, having taken the “supreme” place of the Savior in this composition? Is God really cast down by death, and is there no more hope for resurrection? Alas, everything is more prosaic: it is exactly what it seems, and not what it wants to seem. The body of a dead soldier is just the body of a murdered man, no matter what symbolism we endow it with. Otto Dix creates an obviously religious altar, in which there is deliberately nothing religious, no matter how much we would like to see it in it.

“God is with us!”

While many admitted to art within the framework of agendas and temporary ideals try to prove the presence of God in war, forming a truly Nazi idea of ​​the chosenness of their people and the resulting superiority over others, Otto Dix in his triptych gives a harsh, painful, but infinitely truthful answer:

THERE IS NO GOD IN WAR

This is Hell, there can be no God here, this place is inaccessible to God. This is Hell – the center of pain, suffering, horror and death. So why does Dix take a traditional religious composition and make every effort to transfer it into the most brutal and truthful image of war in art? There are martyrs here, perhaps there are even saints here, but where is Christ here – the Son of God, whose undoubtedly tragic death is nevertheless a prelude to the Resurrection and Eternal Life? Where is this image of Hope, necessary for the heart of any believer? And it is not here. There can be no Hope in this place, but there is a chance for the Future.

THE FUTURE

The right half is the Future, expressed in the gaze of the only surviving person. Behind him, the blood-red glow of the Gates of Hell blazes. He managed to escape from Hell, to stay alive. This path, not at all Dante’s, did not come without consequences: gray hair, crazy eyes, a face disfigured by a grimace. Having passed through all the circles of Hell, he himself no longer resembles a man, but resembles an otherworldly spirit, a ghost.

This man is a self-portrait of Otto Dix himself. Exsanguinated, deathly pale, the color of his skin indistinguishable from the corpse of his comrade-in-arms, whom he drags in his arms. This is how the “history of war” according to Dix ends, and this story has no continuation: this day and this state will be with the Survivor until the end. “I survived,” says Dix, and this is true: he survived both as a character in this hell and as an author who has personally experienced this path.

But is it possible to return from war fully alive?

But these three stages are not able to express the essence of war until the end, this is not enough. If the three large panels show the past, present and future, then what is depicted in the smaller, lower picture? And here ETERNITY is represented. Nameless soldiers lying in rows, sleeping an eternal sleep in a mass grave. For them, nothing more exists that the surviving soldier – Otto Dix – went through. Hell is over for them, now its place is taken by eternal silence and cold emptiness.

This dark predella with corpses closes the complex composition so that our gaze constantly follows from one nightmarish panel to another, in a circle, clockwise. It is this part – Eternity – that loops the nightmarish images of war into an endless whirlpool of death and horror. Otto Dix asserts: war is eternal and will be on earth as long as man lives. And the beginning of the war, as well as its end, are obviously predetermined. As a true realist, striving for absolute truthfulness, Dix states: after one war, another will inevitably begin.

During World War II, the 54-year-old artist was once again called up for military service. By that time, he was persecuted and despised by the new Nazi regime as a man who “offended morality with his paintings, which was a threat to the moral revival of the nation.” There was no trace left of his former success and fame, and soon, after the new war, Otto Dix would quit painting altogether. Many of the artist’s paintings were destroyed by the new regime. The triptych “War” was miraculously saved: Dix took it apart and gave it to his friends one by one – none of them were lost. Otto Dix, who had once again become a soldier, surrendered to the French troops at the first opportunity and was held captive until the end of World War II. He understood that he did not want a repeat of what had prompted him to write his main work in his life.