maschera antigas_2024

Maschere antigas nell’arte e in primis nella pittura diOtto Dix.

Otto Dix was one of the millions of young European men, who enthusiastically rushed to enlist of the outbreak of fighting in 1984. And he went on to spend three years in the mud and the slime of the trenches, serving on both the western and the eastern France. At one point, he served in a machine gun unit, wielding ultimate industrial weapon, the literal fusion of the gun and the machine. And throughout all of this, Otto Dix produced sketches, hundreds of them that graphically recorded what these new weapons did to the flesh and the bone of his dooms generation.

War was no longer about conquering supposedly backward peoples for the glory of enlightened European empires, the lie was exposed just as Dix’s masks exposed the impersonal savagery and mutilation, the old world had come to inflict upon itself. Industrial warfare had transformed the soldier from warrior to victim, emaciated and cowering like a wounded animal. Otto Dix’s most definitive artistic statement on the futility of war, it was painted after it was over while Germany buried its dead and languished under the harsh terms of peace.

The soldier is dragging a wounded comrade off the battlefield through the broken bodies, but the soldier in Otto Dix himself. His face utterly traumatized. But it’s the central panel that’s the most powerful and the most shocking. It is the central panel that’s the most powerful and the most shocking. It is the great putrid skull of mud and decaying rotting flesh that’s been cut across the face of Europe. This skeletal figure leering over the battlefield is a reference to the crucifixion. As is this figure with his ghastly bullet ridden legs shooting up into the sky and his handout stretch with the bullet through his palm, this is the work of a man who was trapped inside his own recurring nightmare. Otto Dix and his generation had borne witness to these horrors. But they had also been witness to the death of the 19th century faith in inevitable unstoppable progress, savagery, and barbarism weren’t (inaudible) external to be found only in the colonies, but inside all of us. They had seen that industry, and progress, and this opposed triumph of enlightenment rationalism did not guarantee the survival of civilization and it was them the poets, and the artists, and the painters of the trenches who best understood what you had been through and who best foresaw the horrors that lay ahead.

Now a very different kind o mask would come to symbolize this new barbarism, as the generals try desperately to break the stalemate of trench warfare. The gas mask represented the terrifying flipside of technological power and the flawed ideals of empire as Europe now turned on itself.
Otto Dix was one of the millions of young European men, who enthusiastically rushed to enlist of the outbreak of fighting in 1984. And he went on to spend three years in the mud and the slime of the trenches, serving on both the western and the eastern France. At one point, he served in a machine gun unit, wielding ultimate industrial weapon, the literal fusion of the gun and the machine. And throughout all of this, Otto Dix produced sketches, hundreds of them that graphically recorded what these new weapons did to the flesh and the bone of his dooms generation.
War was no longer about conquering supposedly backward peoples for the glory of enlightened European empires, the lie was exposed just as Dix’s masks exposed the impersonal savagery and mutilation, the old world had come to inflict upon itself. Industrial warfare had transformed the soldier from warrior to victim, emaciated and cowering like a wounded animal. Otto Dix’s most definitive artistic statement on the futility of war, it was painted after it was over while Germany buried its dead and languished under the harsh terms of peace.
The soldier is dragging a wounded comrade off the battlefield through the broken bodies, but the soldier in Otto Dix himself. His face utterly traumatized. But it’s the central panel that’s the most powerful and the most shocking. It is the central panel that’s the most powerful and the most shocking. It is the great putrid skull of mud and decaying rotting flesh that’s been cut across the face of Europe. This skeletal figure leering over the battlefield is a reference to the crucifixion. As is this figure with his ghastly bullet ridden legs shooting up into the sky and his handout stretch with the bullet through his palm, this is the work of a man who was trapped inside his own recurring nightmare. Otto Dix and his generation had borne witness to these horrors. But they had also been witness to the death of the 19th century faith in inevitable unstoppable progress, savagery, and barbarism weren’t (inaudible) external to be found only in the colonies, but inside all of us. They had seen that industry, and progress, and this opposed triumph of enlightenment rationalism did not guarantee the survival of civilization and it was them the poets, and the artists, and the painters of the trenches who best understood what you had been through and who best foresaw the horrors that lay ahead.