Otto Dix and the Memorialization of World War I in German Visual Culture, 1914-1936 (Visual Cultures and German Contexts) - Hardcover

Murray, Ann

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1350354627 ISBN 13: 9781350354623

Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2023

Synopsis

The harsh realities of wartime and Weimar-era Germany called for a new kind of art. Dada, followed by Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), confronted social and political issues in new and bold ways. This book highlights how Otto Dix (1891–1969) – one of the leading artists connected to these artistic movements – employed these new approaches to reveal the injustices of wartime and post-World War I Germany. Having spent 38 months on the frontline, his pictures revealed the brutalities of the conflict and helped establish him as one of Europe's leading modernists.

Offering substantial new research and presenting numerous primary sources to an English readership for the first time, the book examines Dix's war pictures within the broader visual culture of war in order to assess how they functioned alternatively as cutting-edge modernist art and transgressive war commemoration.

Each chapter provides a case study of the first public display of one or more of Dix's war pictures at key exhibitions and explores how their reception was subjected to changing socio-political and cultural conditions as well as divergent attitudes to the lost war. It pulls together a number of key approaches and texts: contemporary reviews, contemporary cultural productions (such as novels and cartoons), and theoretical and historical approaches from history, memory studies and art history.

Bringing a unique perspective and original scholarship to Dix's war works, this book is essential reading for art historians of World War I and the visual culture of Weimar Germany.

About this title

About the Authors

Ann Murray is an independent scholar from Ireland. She is the editor of Constructing the Memory of War in Visual Culture since 1914: The Eye on War (2018).

Deborah Ascher Barnstone is Professor and Head of Architecture at the University of Sydney, Australia. Barnstone is a licensed architect in Germany, holds a Master of Architecture degree from Columbia University, and holds a PhD from TU Delft. Her recent monograph works include Beyond the Bauhaus: Cultural Modernity in Breslau, 1918-1933 (2016), Art and Resistance in Germany (2018), and The Break with the Past: Avant-garde Architecture in Germany, 1910-1925 (2019). She co-edits Bloomsbury's Visual Cultures and German Contexts book series.

Thomas O. Haakenson is Associate Professor in Critical Studies and Visual Studies at California College of the Arts in San Francisco and Oakland, USA. He is coeditor of the book series Visual Cultures and German Contexts and has been published widely, including in New German Critique, Cabinet, Rutgers Art Review, German Studies Review, and the anthologies Legacies of Modernism, Spectacle, Representations of German Identity, as well as Memorialization in Germany Since 1945. He has received awards and fellowships from the United States Fulbright Program, the Social Science Research Council, the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst, and the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies.

Edition details

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Publication date: 2023
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1350354627
• ISBN 13: 9781350354623
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 240