Dix's War

One soldier, with a bayonet through his stomach, is cocked for a back-somersault; another goes out upside down on barbed wire (Last Position at Neuville).

A cheery sunrise down No Man's Land; two bedraggled troopers sneaking past a break in the parapet on all fours, their mess kit handles between their teeth (Mess Time, Pilkem).

Two medicos wave hopeless arms beside a row of dirty bodies laid out against an embankment (Gassed).

A head and shoulders rise above a trench, the moonshine setting off its black laughing features (Nightly Meeting with a Madman).

A squad of eight blown out by one shell into a perfect circle, their bodies, dribbling entrails, impaled on a tangle of barbed wire and posts (Dance of Death).

Three attackers in gasmasks resembling nothing so much as the Three Little Pigs (Shock Troops Advance Under Gas).

If Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art wanted to launch a peace campaign, it had ample material on hand in the foregoing excerpts from the etchings of Otto Dix which were put on public exhibition this week. Otto Dix is a skilful German draughtsman who served in the War, remembered it bitterly. Visitors turned away from some of his clinical dissections of haphazard horrors, unaware that in an upstairs office Museum Director Alfred H. Barr Jr. had concealed other Dix drawings considered too strong for public exhibition.

Unseen by Museumgoers, too, was Otto Dix's great oil of War. This mighty work, compared by some to the war paintings of the late Vassili Vassilievich Vereshchagin, was originally hung in a Cologne museum. When Adolf Hitler came into power indignant Nazis spirited it away, whither no man will tell. Approximately 9 x 9 ft., War depicts a jungle-like ravine choked with abandoned corpses and military refuse. Grass grows from skulls that have spilled their brains; hands without bodies clutch vainly after life; a cadaver on the skeleton of a twisted barricade rots in mid air. The whole gives the murky impression of a submarinescape.

Otto Dix is a home-loving father of three, a cafe frequenter who hates to talk war. He saves part of his venom for his frequent studies of circuses, trollops, murders, pregnancies. So pungent was his art that Adolf Hitler removed him last year from a lucrative professorship in Dresden's Kunst Akademie. He has, how ever, painted many a kindly portrait of children, one of which is owned by Mrs. John D. Rockefeller Jr.

In 1925 Dix fell in love with a beauteous sitter named Mutzli Koch, wife of a Duesseldorf doctor and art collector. They ran away together. After her divorce Dix and Mutzli were married and so were Dr. Koch and Mutzli's sister. Now the two families are friends, visit one another.

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