Hell and afterwards: prints by Otto Dix and Max Beckmann depicting World War and its aftermath make a powerful, unsettling exhibition at the Neue Galerie in New York

Apollo, Sept, 2005 by David Platzer

Although Otto Dix and Max Beckmann are sometimes seen as contrasting artists, a small yet powerful one-room exhibition of two print portfolios, Dix's Der Krieg (War) and Beckmann's Die Holle (Hell) at New York's Neue Galerie reveals analogies between the two, for all their differences of style and approach. Both were steeped in the German tradition of Durer and Grunewald and this helped them to portray the horrors of the war with unusual exactitude. Both had an urge to portray reality in all its facets, however unpalatable.

Entering the room, one is likely to look first at Beckmann's ten-picture cycle, since it is on the closer wall. This may seem incongruous, since Dix's images show the war itself, Beckmann's the immediate postwar period. However, Beckmann's is the earlier cycle, dating from 1919, while Dix's war scenes were produced in 1924. Moreover, the war did not end for Beckmann with the Armistice, no more than it did for others who participated: it pervades the civilian urban scenes of his Hell. Beckmann's war service, as a medical orderly, was enough to provoke a breakdown; this was the only period of his artistic life in which his usual prolific production slowed down.

To portray the harsher reality produced by the war, Beckmann switched from the soft pencil he had previously used to a reed pen, giving him a harder, more precise line. One of the most haunting images, Der Nachausweg (The Way Home), shows Beckmann himself, clutching a wounded soldier's detached and deformed arm. The uniformed veteran looks directly at us through his one seeing eye, dazed by what he has seen. The greater part of his face is horribly disfigured. His back and Beckmann's both emerge from the picture frame as does Cerberus, guardian of the underworld.

Germany was a defeated country and her problems in the midst of economic chaos and widespread unemployment were extreme, some of the solutions proposed drastic. Das Martyrdom (Martyrdom) shows Rosa Luxemburg, the German revolutionary who was assassinated in 1919, her arms and legs outstretched in a clear allusion to the Crucifixion. Much less frenetic but no more reassuring is Der Hunger (Hunger) a scene of a family at dinner with nothing to eat on their plates (Fig. 2). But Beckmann has no specific political programme. Die Ideologen (The Idealogues) of the left-wing intelligentsia have no more to offer than the singers of Das patriotische Lied (The Patriotic Song) on the right. Not everyone was poor, of course, and Malepartus fits our idea of the 1920s, the musicians on the balcony playing jazz, the well-dressed revellers on the floor.

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Most frightening of all is Die Nacht (The Night). 'It looks like the New York Subway', I heard a woman say at the press preview. Indeed it does, with its sense of hurtling movement and people hanging on. But the subway is rarely this bad: one man is being hanged while a woman, her dress slit down the back, has her hands tied before her, her legs forcibly spread apart for rape. Die Letzten (The Last Ones) also looks like a train scene with the inhabitants shooting through the windows. The jumbled cubism of most of the compositions serves the artist's portrayal of a world gone off its bearings into a frenetic topsy-turvy spin, the details of which are not always easily discernible.

Otto Dix's War series might as easily be titled Hell. Some contemporary critics suspected Dix of a pacifistic or revolutionary agenda. He denied this, having no interest in any political platform. He simply put down what he had seen on the front line and what still haunted him years after the Armistice. It is hard to imagine a starker portrayal of war or a more complete indictment of its horrors.

Unlike Beckmann, Dix's pre-war work with its eerie night scenes illuminated by explosions of violent light prefigures what he found as a front-line soldier. A fascination with the extremes of the human condition marked his work and he volunteered for service not for Fatherland, glory or adventure, but because he knew that, in war, he would see human nature stripped to the bone. And, sure enough, 'the skull beneath the skin' is here in profusion, worms crawling in and out of it in one print (Fig. 1), blood spattered in another.

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Germany's post-war economic crisis made prints a practical medium for German artists, since they were less expensive to make and could be sold more cheaply than oil paintings. Even had this not been so, etching was an appropriate medium for this series, as it permitted Dix to portray minute details of physical decomposition. This is the stuff of nightmares. But what if the nightmare is there twenty-four hours and there is no waking from it except into the silence of death? A helmeted sentry still holds his rifle aloft, pointed at what remains of his nose and sits in position, the flesh stripped from his rotting frame to reveal the skull's grin, his ragged clothes and boots barely covering his bones. Troops come toward us, their faces gas masks; a bomber plane dives over the streets of Lens, leaving dead bodies, while those still alive flee toward us. This was the beginning of modern warfare, with its bombings of civilians and lethal gases. We are in No Man's Land with its burnt-out craters in what once were fields, the survivors walking past the corpses of their comrades, the skeletons and tattered coats hanging on leafless trees.