Soldat mit Tabakspfeife

'The war was a horrible thing but there was something tremendous about it too (and) I didn't want to miss that at any price. You have to have seen human beings in this unleashed state to know what human nature is.' (Otto Dix quoted in D. Schmidt, Otto Dix im Selbstbildnis, East Berlin, 1978, p. 255)

For Otto Dix, who served for four years, throughout World War I, on both the Western and Eastern fronts, oil paints and canvas were difficult to procure during the conflict. As a result, between 1914 and 1918, Dix painted predominantly in gouache. Soldat mit Tabakspfeife (Soldier with Pipe) of 1918 is one of the finest of the great series of gouache paintings of the war that Dix made during his active service. Possibly a self-portrait, this boldly executed painting depicts the virile, nervously energised form of a soldier smoking his pipe while sheltering in a dug-out. Rendered in rich, colourful Cubo-Futurist fragments of form, the painting is a portrait that attempts to present a holistic picture of both a warrior and his experience of conflict through a single, integrated image of a soldier and the war-torn environment he inhabits.

It is in this respect that Soldat mit Tabakspfeife can be considered as a more realistic reworking, borne from the actual experience of war, of an earlier self-portrait that Dix had made in 1915. This was Dix’s famous, self-aggrandizing self-portrait as the god of war, Mars, painted while he was in training to be a machine gunner on the Western Front. In that painting, now in the Stadtische Kunstsammlung im Haus der Heimat in Freital, Dix had presented himself as a Nietzschean-inspired warrior-god: a steel-helmeted vortex of chaos and an almost mythical figure capable of bestriding and embodying all that the war might have to throw at him. In Soldat mit Tabakspfeife, Dix has made use of similar heightened colours and Cubo-Futurist form to depict a more ordinary figure shown weathering this 'storm of steel.' Dix painted himself as a soldier with regularity during this period, not only as the war-god Mars, but also as a bare-headed warrior, an artillery man, as sheltering under fire, a face in his shaving mirror and, perhaps most ironically, as a shooting target.

In its composition, Soldat mit Tabakspfeife echoes an earlier work that Dix had painted of himself smoking in 1912, while the prominence of the bold signature ‘DIX 18’, visible through the door or window of the shelter in this work, also appears to announce a self-depiction. But whether or not the present painting is indeed a self-portrait, what was of primary interest to Dix in this work is the representation of the figure as a portrait of the experience of war. Dix, as he frequently recalled, wanted to go to war in order to observe the true nature of man under such extreme conditions. "I had to go to war," he said, "I had to live through it. I had to experience what it was like when someone near me was suddenly hit by a bullet and fell... I am such a realist, I had to see it all with my own eyes... the hunger, the fleas, the mud, the shitting in one's pants with fear... To be crucified, to experience the deepest abyss of life... If you want to be a hero, you also have to affirm the shit: only through being there and experiencing for yourself can you become a hero" (Otto Dix, quoted in Otto Dix, exh. cat., Munich, 1981, p. 280).

In Soldat mit Tabakspfeife Dix presents an integrated vision of this experience as if it could be read in the hardened features of the soldier’s face. In many of Dix’s gouaches of this period, the artist anthropomorphised the landscape of the Front, depicting it as a wounded corpse or as a tortured Earth Mother. Here, he has done the reverse. Using Cubo-Futurist fragmentation, he depicts the soldier’s features as if it were a war-torn landscape. The furrows on his brow look like barbed wire, his teeth like barricades, the folds in his flesh, ravines and shell craters. Here, man and landscape have once again become one, but instead of observing ant-like creatures struggling over the ravaged body of Mother Earth, what we are presented with here is the figure of a man who has been made by the landscape he inhabits.