Wounded Soldier, Otto Dix, 1916

Born in 1891, Otto Dix grew up as the son of an ironworker and dreamt of becoming a painter. He at first was enrolled in the Dresden School of Arts and Crafts, later learning how to paint on canvas. Much later in his life, Otto Dix enrolled as a machine gunner in World War I and was sent to the front lines. The piece, Wounded Soldier, was one of many art works by Dix in an attempt to showcase the atrocities of war. When asked in an interview why he had joined the first world war, he responded by saying, “I had to experience how someone beside me suddenly falls over and is dead and the bullet has hit him squarely. I had to experience that quite directly. I wanted it. I’m therefore not a pacifist at all – or am I? Perhaps I was [just] an inquisitive person. I had to see all that myself. I’m such a realist, you know, that I have to see everything with my own eyes in order to confirm that it’s like that. I have to experience all the ghastly, bottomless depths of life for myself…”(The Art Of War) After “experiencing” war in such a way, Otto Dix was repulsed by the idea of war. He continued with his studies post-world war I, and later found himself teaching at the academies of Dresden and Dusseldorf. “Together with George Grosz, he was one of the leading exponents of the artistic movement Die Neue Sachlichkeit [New Objectivity], a form of social realist art which unsentimentally examined the decadence and underlying social inequality of post-war German society.” (The Art of War) As he continued to make blatant reflections of politics through his artwork, Otto Dix was asked to leave the academy as a teacher.

The significance of this piece, but more importantly the significance of Otto Dix as an artist, lies behind the intent of the art. As mentioned before, society was amidst an awful and tumultuous war, one that that shook the outlook many had on society. How could the emphasis on things such as science and perfection lead to this? Otto Dix, among many other people during this time period, started to question society, and themselves. Relativity was beginning to make its appearance. Because objective truth universally defined mankind leading up to the World Wars, subjectivity began to rule supreme after them.