![]() In Panel C of his final work, the Atlas Mnemosyne, Warburg articulated his own vision of the bellicose deity in a series of programmatic images, arranged in two rows, simply affixed to a black ground. ![]() What Dix intuited as an artist and from direct experience, Warburg triangulated through the reproduction of images. Among these, Aby Warburg is perhaps the most famous, having constructed a unique research library that enabled his search to uncover the persistence of pagan forms in Western Art. Around the same time that Dix and his contemporaries were working in Germany, researchers were also expanding their understanding of images as epistemological vehicles. Framed as a moral threat, the exhibition’s curators, under the direction of Alfred Rosenberg, invited ridicule and rejection from a public that turned out in droves to see Dix’s works hung beside a host of other talented, “entarte” painters: Emile Nolde, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Max Beckmann, among the displayed. During the Nazi regime he was driven from his teaching post in Dresden and relegated to the realm of the degenerates (Entarte), where his work was upheld as an example of the cultural degradation of Germany. ![]() Strange to think that later, in the Interwar period, his work would track a more humble path. In spite of the harsh realities he and his comrades endured, he seems to have been enervated by the challenges. This kept him busy in the trenches throughout the first World War, where he produced hundreds of works. In his youth he found confidence through the writings of Nietzsche and through his own artistic instinct. He paints himself from without, a god upon the earth.Ĭlaiming once that he had been drawn to art because he loved the smell of paint, Dix prefigured something fundamental about modern art’s engagement with materiality, though he preferred to communicate allegorically. ![]() Embodying here the pagan god of war, Dix seems to amplify the awesome power of the individual psyche. Adhering to the idiomatic gestures of Italian Futurism and Cubism, the result is jarring-a blaring icon, a confident amalgam of chaos and death. The figure merges with its surroundings-or are they memories, visions? In geometric suggestion: teeth, a horse, architectural fragments, fences, bullet holes. Gazing out over his left shoulder from beneath his helmet, the structure of a grave, angular face gathers amidst clashing primary hues of red, yellow, blue, black, and white that suggest the underlying bone structure, muscle, and fascia. If the Renaissance represented the emerging sense of man as an individual capable of exerting his own will through material means, then Otto Dix’s Self Portrait as Mars from 1915 rehearses a striking response, filtered through an existentialist prism. It could be said that one of the major philosophical tasks of the era was the intensive interrogation of the Renaissance worldview. Hundreds of years later, in response to the ripple effects of colonialism, the rise of fascism, and the outbreak of world wars, thinkers and artists called the state of civilization into question, giving birth to what we nominally understand to be Modernism. Historiographically, the Renaissance has been conceived of as the rebirth of reason and liberation of thought, inviting a newly defined sense of subjectivity. Part 2 of Some Thoughts on Love and Memory
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