Art Is a Communication Tool to Alert People to Society’s Problems

Art is a communication tool to alert people to society’s problems. This can be seen through the use of violence and political unrest. Otto Dix was a German painter and etcher, most of whose works were created in World War One, World War Two, and Post War Germany. He was both a successful painter during his lifetime, having many works which commented on German social conditions of the time. He lived through war and created art that told about the horrors he saw it causing. For example “Triptychon Der Krieg” a 4 panel artwork painted with oil on wood, show us a story traumatic scenes saw in world war 1. The second artwork known as “The Seven Deadly Sins” represents the politic situation in Germany at the time when Hitler came to power in 1939.

In the early part of the 20th century Dix was taught by a landscape painter called Carl Senff. Then he started painting his own landscapes.Then during the war, Dix kept a diary and a sketchbook with which he recorded his experience. Dix was profoundly affected by the war. He described a recurring nightmare in which he crawled through bombed out houses. His experience with war and its aftermath became a dominant theme in the art he produced after 1914. His main years of art making was between 1916-1969 when he died.

Otto Dix works show ideas of violence through the use of war in his works as well as responding to political unrest. Based upon his own war time experiences in the trenches of the First World War that showed him the horrors of war this can be seen in his artwork “Triptychon Der Krieg” made from 1929-1932. This artwork is made up of 4 panels, violence can be seen in the central panel of the triptych shows the devastation and appalling misery of the battlefield as dix’s remembered it. Dix painted this work using egg tempera and oil on wood. The painting shows a village shattered and burning, trees blasted into splinters, and everywhere and parts of soldiers, rotting in the mud.A soldier's bare white legs can be seen sticking out of a pile in the upper right corner, and a corpse impaled on twisted steel bars above the scene of chaos and despair. Dix created many such artworks based on his wartime memories. At the time Dix painted The War Triptych, the ruling leaders of Germany were attempting to popularize militarism. Fascists were promising to rebuild Germany with "Blood and Iron", it was not a time for pacifist images saying that war was bad. A year after Dix created this painting Adolf Hitler came to power. Dix was accused by the Nazis of creating art that took away "the will of the German people to defend themselves." Dix was then immediately fired from his teaching position at the Dresden Academy of Art and he was prohibited from exhibiting his works. Instead, the Nazis included the works of Dix in propaganda exhibits designed to criticise modern art. Dix was ridiculed in no less than three such exhibits. Political unrest is depicted is shown through the state that Germany was at after the First World War as Germany as a society was degrading due to the loss of ww1.

“The Seven Deadly Sins” is