The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Otto Dix · a triptych with predella, framed as a winged altar · mixed technique, a tempera underpainting worked up in oil glazes, on four wooden panels · a square centre, two upright wings of half its width and a long low predella beneath · about four metres wide and two and a half high · painted in Dresden, 1929 to 1932 · Galerie Neue Meister, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, shown in the Albertinum · the unit scored is the four panels as one altar
Mode
Anti war altarpiece; the Passion and the Dance of Death of the German tradition turned on the industrial war
Mythos
The Passion in four stations: the going out, the place of the skull, the carrying of a body, the entombment; with no resurrection
Phase
One day of war as a life and a death, dawn to night; painted in Dresden from 1929 to 1932, the year before its painter was dismissed
Presentation
Mixed technique, tempera with oil glazes, on four wooden panels: a square centre about two metres a side, two wings of half its width, a predella beneath; framed as a winged altar
Register
Dread and pity; quiet dread in the mist, terror in the centre, one warmth in the carrying, stillness in the dark below
Scale
A column of infantry, a field of the dead, one man carried, a row of sleepers; one war, one day
Governing Proposition
Four panels in the form of a German winged altar, painted with the glazes the old masters used for saints, hold the industrial war from dawn to night: a column marching out into mist, a field of the dead under a burning sky with a corpse hung where the crucifix would be, the painter carrying a wounded man out of the fire, and a row of soldiers laid in a dugout where the dead Christ lies in the tomb. The wager of the work is that the form made to show a death that redeems can be made to hold deaths that redeem nothing, and that the old finish, spent on rot and wounds, makes the horror permanent.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
Otto Dix painted the work in Dresden from 1929 to 1932, while he was a professor at the Dresden Academy. Its title is two words, Der Krieg, the war, and no more: no battle, no place, no year. It was finished in the year before he was dismissed from his post in 1933. The war of 1914 to 1918 had been his ground since 1920; in 1924 he had made fifty etchings under the same title. Those etchings, the other war pictures and the studies are not the work scored here. The work is the four panels as one altar.
The panels are painted in a mixed technique: a tempera underpainting, worked up in transparent oil glazes, on prepared wood. It is the layered method of the German painters of about 1500, and Dix rebuilt it for himself, in the years when the avant garde, and he among them, had left such methods behind. The finish is enamel smooth and holds detail at every distance. The work is framed as a winged altar: a square centre about two metres a side, two upright wings of half its width, and a long low predella beneath, the width of the centre. Unframed, the ensemble is about four metres wide and two and a half high, the size of an altarpiece in a side chapel rather than a high altar.
The four panels are four times of day. The left wing is dawn and the going out; the centre is the day, the field after the bombardment; the right wing is evening and the coming back; the predella is night. They are read from left to right, out, through and back, and then down. A day of war becomes a life and a death, and the last of the four is set in the place an altar reserves for the dead body awaiting resurrection.
Movement II
In the left wing a column of infantry in steel helmets, with packs and rifles, marches away from the viewer into a grey morning mist. The figures are about life size, or a little under. They are whole. The mist dissolves the column as it goes, and the paint dissolves it without blurring a single helmet: the hardest thing in the wing to render is rendered most exactly.
Nothing in this wing is violent. The men are walking into a grey nothing, and the dread of the panel is quiet, the dread of the departure that the viewer, having the other three panels before him, already knows the end of. The column is the only image in the work of the living whole. Take the wing away and the dead of the centre are there with no account of how men came to them.
The light is cool, the light of the beginning of a day. It is the first end of the work’s one law of light and time. The heat of the right wing is the other end, and the same physics of light, body and hour governs both. The cool going out and the red coming back are the two ends of one day.
Movement III
The centre is the battlefield after the bombardment: a cratered ground of mud, wreckage and dead bodies under a burning, smoke filled sky. No one is fighting. What the panel holds is the residue of the fighting, and that is its first disclosure: the war is not a field of action but a machine that consumes men. In the left foreground stands a soldier in helmet and gas mask, the one upright living figure. In the right foreground a body is thrown on its back with its legs in the air, the shins riddled with wounds.
Above, at the top of the panel, a corpse hangs over a broken, shot through arch. It is where the crucifix hangs in an altarpiece, and it is placed there: the Crucified, on the field of the dead, in a crucifixion that saves no one. Only the altar form makes that reading possible, and the work is built for it. The eye descends from the arch to the riddled legs, and the descent is controlled; the burning sky is a summit of dread, high and cold.
The centre is also where the work is weakest. Its density of wreckage, entrails, wire and timber is part catalogue; several of its corpses could be fewer without loss; its accumulation of horrors is at moments additive, a law of inventory beside the wings’ law of the single figure, and the clutter sometimes defeats its own legibility. The panel gives up new particulars at each look. The same density that rewards the return is the density that is too much.
Movement IV
The right wing is evening, in a red and smoking landscape. A soldier carries a wounded comrade out of the fire, while other men crawl or lie. The carrier has Dix’s own features. It is the one act of a living man in the work, and the one warmth: a terrible pity, set against the fire.
The carrying is a Deposition and a Christopher at once, the body taken down and the body borne through, and the bearer is the painter. The witness who survived takes the bearer’s part. It is not a heroic image: the deed is the only living act left, and the predella below undercuts any triumph. It opens the question of the painter’s own relation to the war, which his etchings complicate and do not settle.
Set beside the left wing, the right completes the day: the going out in mist, the coming back in fire; whole men leaving, and one man carried. The two wings carry together as much of the painted surface as the centre does. Between them the field holds the dead, and from them the eye turns down.
Movement V
In the predella soldiers lie side by side in a dugout, under a covering, in a low dark box: night. Whether they sleep or are dead the panel does not say, and that is its argument. They will wake to go out again, or they will not wake. The place is the lowest of the altar, where the German tradition laid the dead Christ in the tomb, and Holbein laid one body in a long low box. Here the one body is a row of men.
The tomb in the predella is the place of the resurrection to come, and the work gives no resurrection. The inversion is given by the structure, by what lies where, and is not developed further in the panels; but it is the last word of the cycle, and it closes it. Made in Germany from 1929 to 1932, against the hero cult of the war dead that the right was building, an altar of deaths that redeem nothing was a proposition, and a dangerous one. Its painter was dismissed in 1933.
The work began its public life late, in the German Democratic Republic and then in reunified Dresden, and it stands now in the Albertinum, in the Galerie Neue Meister. The four panels survive whole, about ninety-four years after their completion, the glaze on wood chosen for permanence and held. The Weimar argument that produced it is over. The column still goes out into the mist, and the row still lies under the covering in the dark.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged panel by panel, the structure resists subtraction. Take away the left wing and the war has no beginning: the dead of the centre are there with no account of how men came to them, and the march into the mist is the only image of the living whole. Take away the right wing and the work holds no act of a living man, no carrying out. Take away the predella and the cycle does not close: night, sleep and the grave in one image are the last word, set in the altar’s lowest place. The centre cannot go. What yields is inside the centre: its wreckage, entrails, wire and timber are part catalogue, and several of its corpses could be fewer without loss.
Score: 8.4 / 10
What is disclosed can be stated, through image, and it holds. Modern war is not a field of action but a machine that consumes men: the column goes out whole, the centre holds no fighting, only its residue, and the one deed left is to carry a man out. And the form of sacrifice is turned against the ideology of sacrifice: the altar, where a death was shown to redeem, holds deaths that redeem nothing. Made from 1929 to 1932, against the hero cult of the war dead that the right was building, that is a proposition and not a mood, and it holds beyond Germany and the Western Front. Held below the top because Dix’s own etchings of 1924 and the war books of those years made it first, and in ways more sharply.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Elevation of the dreadful kind, and it recurs. The burning sky over a ground of the dead is the terror the eye cannot hold, and the corpse spread over the broken arch, at the top of the panel where a crucifix would hang, is a summit of horror, high and cold. It rises again in each wing: the column dissolving into mist, men walking into a grey nothing, is quiet dread; the red fire and the carried body of the right wing give the work its one warmth, a terrible pity. The predella closes it low and dark, sublime by stillness. Held at 8.5 because the register is one, the centre’s crowding at times reads as inventory rather than transport, and the enamel smooth finish keeps the viewer at a distance from the fire.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Myth built, and load-bearing at every point. The work is a Passion: the going out, the place of the skull, the carrying of a body, the entombment, each set where an altarpiece sets it. The hung corpse over the arch is the Crucified, in the crucifix’s place. The carrying in the right wing is a Deposition and a Christopher together, and the carrier is the painter: the witness takes the bearer’s part. The predella is the dead Christ in the long low tomb of the German tradition, multiplied into a row of soldiers, and the Dance of Death of the same tradition stands behind the dead of the centre. The particular stays particular: the helmets, the gas mask, the riddled shins are 1916, not Golgotha. Held below 9 because the inversion, no resurrection, is given by the structure and not developed further in the panels.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The turn is real and double. Dix takes the Christian winged altar of the German painters of about 1500 and fills it with the industrial war, secular and without consolation; and in the age of the avant garde, and after his own Dada and Verist work, he goes back to the glaze technique of the old masters, a swerve against modern painting itself. The stake was real: a large anti war altarpiece made in Germany as the nationalist right rose, by a professor at the Dresden Academy who was dismissed in 1933. But the departure is partly a return. The triptych was already in use as a modern secular form (Beckmann began his first in 1932), the war had been Dix’s ground since 1920, and the old master manner was the common currency of the Neue Sachlichkeit.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Change the form and the work can no longer say what it says. As a single canvas the war would be a scene; as an altar it is a sequence and a liturgy, four panels as four times of day, read out, through, back, and down to the night of the grave, so that a day of war becomes a life and a death. The altar form makes the argument against sacrifice possible: only in the crucifix’s place can the hung corpse be read as a crucifixion that saves no one, and only in the predella can the sleeping men be the entombed Christ. The technique is part of the knowledge: the glaze by which the saints were made eternal is spent on rot and wounds. Held at 9.0 because the centre is crowded beyond what the form demands.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The work yields on return, and it has had about nine decades to show it. The density of the centre gives up new particulars at each look. The relation of the four panels to their sources, the Isenheim Altarpiece of Grünewald, Holbein’s dead Christ in the tomb and the Dance of Death, has been a continuing subject. The self portrait on the bearer opens questions about the painter’s own fascination with the war, which his etchings complicate rather than settle. Its place between the war books of 1929, the Nazi years and the German reckoning after 1945 keeps it in discussion. Held below the high eights because its centre of meaning, once grasped, is stable: it rewards close looking more than it changes, and its literature is narrower than that of the century’s most examined pictures.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Intrinsic force is high. The work shows that the altarpiece, the oldest public form of Western painting, could carry the modern catastrophe at full scale and full finish, and that the old master technique could be turned to witness; within German painting it is the summit of the war picture, and it stands beside Grünewald, its own model. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: real but narrower. Finished in 1932, the year before its painter was dismissed, it began its public life late, in the German Democratic Republic and then in reunified Dresden. It is a fixed point in the history of anti war art, of the Neue Sachlichkeit and of the German use of the triptych for historical catastrophe after 1945; but it did not redirect the field as Guernica did, nor as Dix’s own etchings did. The late start is credited and discounted.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The work has survived whole, about ninety-four years from its completion. Form: the four panels stand as painted, and the glaze on wood, chosen for permanence, has held. Presence: it is in a public collection in Dresden, among the most visited works of its galleries, and a standard image of the war. What keeps it at 9.0 and no higher is presence: its public life began late, so that its first years left a gap, and its reach, though wide, is not the widest. Its surface is not fixed to its moment. It has outlived the Weimar argument that produced it and reads as a statement on every war since.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Command of the medium at a very high level, and load-bearing. Dix rebuilt for himself the layered technique of the German painters of about 1500: a tempera underpainting, worked up in transparent oil glazes on prepared wooden panels, with a finish that holds detail at every distance. The command shows in the range of what it renders: mist that dissolves a column of men without blurring a single helmet; a sky of fire; flesh in every state from the living to the liquefied; mud, wire, cloth and bone, each with its own surface. The descent of the eye from the arch to the riddled legs, and the lighting of each wing as its time of day, are fully controlled. Held below the highest marks because the centre’s clutter sometimes defeats its own legibility, and the means, however masterly, are revived rather than extended.
Score: 9.2 / 10
One law governs the whole: everything is rendered with the same unflinching exactness, and every panel answers the altar’s order. Take the most distant elements, the grey march of the left wing and the red fire of the right, or the crowded day of the centre and the still night of the predella: they obey the same physics of light, time and body, and the same refusal to look away. The cool of the dawn and the heat of the evening are the two ends of one day. The range is wide, from the living column to the decayed dead, from a single deed to a heap of bodies, from a sky on fire to the dark of the dugout. Held below 9 because the centre obeys the law less strictly than the wings: its accumulation is at moments additive, a law of inventory beside the wings’ law of the single figure.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The work holds several orders in one structure: the body, from whole to destroyed; the collective, in the column and the sleeping row; the natural order, a landscape annihilated, a sky set on fire, the cycle of a day from dawn to night; the sacred, in the altar form and the Passion it inverts; history, the industrial war of 1914 to 1918 in its gear and its methods; and the self, the painter as witness and bearer. The form integrates them; they are not listed. What holds the axis lowest is what the work leaves outside its frame: the order behind the war, the state, the home, the family, labour beyond the soldier’s. That is its choice, and it narrows what is encompassed. A large holding for a painted work.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.6 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Made at 9.2, then The Living Form and The Imperishable at 9.0. A glaze technique of about 1500 rebuilt and spent on the modern dead, holding mist, fire, flesh and mud each in its own surface; an altar whose order of panels is the argument, four times of day read as a life and a death, with the corpse in the crucifix’s place and the dead laid in the predella; and four panels that survive whole as painted.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 8.0: the body, the collective, the annihilated landscape, the sacred, the war and the self are held in one structure, but the order behind the war, the state, the home, the family and labour, is left outside the frame. Above it, Pressure on Tradition at 8.2, high in force but late in reach, and The Swerve at 8.3, a large wager made partly as a return to forms and a manner already in use.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.4 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.0, The Made at 9.2, The Inner Law at 8.8, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 9.0, The Archetypal Deep at 8.8 and The Unconcealment at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Swerve at 8.3 falls two tenths short, the departure being in part a return to the winged altar and the old master manner, and Pressure on Tradition at 8.2 falls three tenths short, its public life having begun late and its reach being narrower than the century’s widest. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.2, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.0. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The twelve sum to 103.2, an average of 8.60, four tenths short of the 9.0 the summit requires; the aggregate holds the altar in Tier IV, and the Epochal Gate would withhold the summit besides.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the triptych as it stands, held well in its composition, its four parts and its technique, and more loosely in the small detail of the centre panel. No image or written source was consulted. The work scored is the triptych with predella, four panels in tempera and oil glazes on wood framed as a winged altar, painted by Otto Dix in Dresden from 1929 to 1932 and now in the Galerie Neue Meister of the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, shown in the Albertinum. Not in the unit, and neither scored nor credited: the fifty etchings Der Krieg of 1924, the lost painting The Trench (Der Schützengraben, 1920 to 1923), the studies and Dix’s other war pictures, which are context. The Isenheim Altarpiece, Holbein’s dead Christ in the tomb and the Dance of Death are named as sources, not scored. Dimensions are given as approximate. The only words quoted are the title. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them the year and manner of the work’s acquisition by the Dresden collections, where the panels were kept through the Nazi years and the war and how they escaped the confiscations of 1937 and the destruction of Dresden in 1945, a full scale cartoon said to precede the painting, the condition of the panels beyond their survival whole, the material of the broken arch and of the covering in the predella, a skeletal arm said to point across the centre panel, and Mantegna as a source for the predella’s dead.