Hell and afterwards: prints by Otto Dix and Max Beckmann depicting World War and its aftermath make a powerful, unsettling exhibition at the Neue Galerie in New York

Although Otto Dix and Max Beckmann are sometimes seen as contrasting artists, a small at the same time powerful one-room exhibition of sum of two units print portfolios, Dix's Der Krieg (War) and Beckmann's Die Holle (Hell) at novel York's Neue Galerie reveals analogies between the sum of two units for all their differences of turn of expression and approach. Both were abrupted in the German tradition of Durer and Grunewald and this helped them to portray the horrors of the war with unusual exactitude. the one and the other had an urge to portray reality in all its facets, however unpalatable.

Entering the extent one is likely to gaze first at Beckmann's ten-picture period since it is on the closer wall. This may have the appearance incongruous, since Dix's images present to view the war itself, Beckmann's the immediate postwar period. However, Beckmann's is the earlier revolution of time dating from 1919, while Dix's war spectacles were produced in 1924. Moreover, the war did not extremity for Beckmann with the Armistice, no more than it did for others who participated: it pervades the civilian urban exhibitions of his Hell. Beckmann's war service, as a medical orderly, was enough to awaken a breakdown; this was the single period of his artistic life in which his usual prolific production slowed down.

To portray the harsher reality produc by means of the war, Beckmann switched from the yielding pencil he had previously used to a re compose giving him a harder, more precise line. individual of the most haunting images, Der Nachausweg (The Way Home) displays Beckmann himself, clutching a hurted soldier's detached and deformed arm. The uniformed veteran direct the eyes directly at us through his single seeing eye, dazed by what he has seen The greater part of his face is horribly disfigured. His back and Beckmann's the one and the other emerge from the picture frame as does Cerberus, guardian of the underworld.

Germany was a defeated region and her problems in the midst of economic chaos and widespread unemployment were utmost some of the solutions propos drastic. Das Martyrdom (Martyrdom) present to views Rosa Luxemburg, the German revolutionary who was assassinated in 1919 her arms and leg outstretched in a clear allusion to the Crucifixion. a great deal of less frenetic but no more reassuring is Der craving for food (Hunger) a scene of a family at dinner with nothing to eat upon their plates (Fig. 2). on the contrary Beckmann has no specific political programme. Die Ideologen (The Idealogues) of the left-wing intelligentsia have no more to tender than the singers of Das patriotische Lied (The Patriotic Song) upon the right. Not everyone was poor, of course, and Malepartus fits our idea of the 1920 the musicians upon the balcony playing jazz, the well-dressed bacchanalians on the floor.

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greatest in quantity frightening of all is Die Nacht (The Night). 'It direct the eyes like the New York Subway', I heard a woman say at the pres preview. Indeed it does, with its faculty of perception of hurtling movement and nation hanging on. But the subway is rarely this bad: single man is being hanged while a woman, her dres slit down the back, has her hands tied before her, her leg forcibly spread apart for rape. Die Letzten (The Last Ones) also direct the eyes like a train scene with the inhabitants shooting end the windows. The jumbled cubism of greatest in quantity of the compositions serves the artist's portrayal of a world gone not upon its bearings into a frenetic topsy-turvy spin, the details of which are not always easily discernible.

Otto Dix's War series might as easily be titled Hell. a certain quantity of contemporary critics suspected Dix of a pacifistic or revolutionary agenda. He denied this, having no interest in any political platform. He simply set down what he had seen upon the front line and what still haunted him years after the Armistice. It is hard to imagine a starker portrayal of war or a more consummate indictment of its horrors.

Unlike Beckmann, Dix's pre-war work with its eerie night views illuminated by explosions of violent light prefigures what he set as a front-line soldier. A fascination with the most remotes of the human condition marked his work and he presented for service not for Fatherland, glory or adventure, on the other hand because he knew that, in war, he would diocese human nature stripped to the bone And, confident enough, 'the skull beneath the skin' is here in profusion, worms crawling in and on the outside of it in one print (Fig. 1) vital fluid spattered in another.

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Germany's post-war economic crisis made prints a practical medium for German artists, since they were les expensive to make and could be sold more cheaply than oil paintings. smooth had this not been in the way that etching was an appropriate medium for this series, as it permitted Dix to portray minute details of physical decomposition. This is the material of nightmares. But what if the nightmare is there twenty-four hours and there is no waking from it do not include into the silence of death? A helmeted still holds his rifle aloft, pointed at what remains of his nose and sits in position, the muscle and fat stripped from his rotting frame to reveal the skull's grin, his ragged clothes and advantages barely covering his bones. numbers come toward us, their faces gas masks; a bomber plane dives above the streets of Lens, leaving dead bodies, while those still alive turn tail toward us. This was the beginning of recent warfare, with its bombings of civilians and lethal gases. We are in No Man's Land with its burnt-out craters in what one time were fields, the survivors walking past the corpses of their comrades, the skeletons and tattered coats hanging upon leafless trees.