Otto Dix, b. 1891, d. 1969, Reclining Woman on Leopard Skin, 1927, Oil on wood, 68 x 98 cm, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Gift of Samuel A. Berger, © 2010 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG, Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

By STEVE SHAPIRO

And they say artists are crazy. A recent news report explained how the senior Iranian cleric, Hojateslam Kazem Sedighi, warned that women dressing provocatively had caused the earthquakes around the world earlier this year. Such mendacious claims, alongside those in Italy about foreign workers stealing jobs and in America about immigrants — illegal and legal — cannot but find an outlet in artistic responses. Thus it has been since the turn of the modern century, where modernism in art has weighed in against the crude, rude and rampantly un-modern epithets and lies published, broadcast, and now blogged and tweeted as further evidence civilization does not grow smarter — only its technology.

The recent Internet attack on the creators of the animated South Park series for satirizing Muhammed, with the ominous hint that the cartoonists could end up dead as in the 2004 fatal attack on the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, depicts a world society in bipolar mode: alongside haves and have-nots, faithful and blasphemers, apparently too there are tempters and censors. Whether it be a fatwa against Salman Rushdie all those years ago (how innocent all the official rumblings and book-burnings seem now in an age of female suicide bombers!) or the recent arrest and jailing of Iranian film director, Jafar Panahi, art, so often said to be worthless and useless, retains power. Nothing so riles the authorities as individual prerogative, be it a poem — like the verse Osip Mandelstam wrote comparing Stalin’s mustache to a cockroach — or a Prada miniskirt.

Is it any wonder, then, artists have reacted with dark, dour, depressing art? Mandelstam merely recited his poem to some friends; one evidently went to the police, who arrested Mandelstam and eventually shipped him out to die of typhus in a Gulag. The politics of persecution are without borders. The Nobel laureate, novelist Orhan Pamuk, was served notice by his Turkish homeland in 2005 for supposed subversive comments about the controversial Armenian genocide at the end of the Ottoman Empire. Russian artists attempting an improvised outdoor art exhibition, in 1975, saw it bulldozed by authorities, and Chinese artists’ studios were similarly bulldozed earlier this year. Even here, Richard Serra lost the placement of his towering Tilted Arc because of complaints by federal office workers in New York City.

Nowhere has art been wrung through the ringer like Germany. Its past is forever encroaching on its present; to Santayana’s maxim those who fail to remember the past are doomed to repeat it, German artists who are condemned to remember the past are driven to repeat it. A current exhibition at the Neue Galerie, in Manhattan, •Otto Dix• (running through August 30), presents a prime candidate for the art of despair. Throughout the past century, German artists — from Dix and George Grosz, Max Beckmann and Hannah Höch to Anselm Kiefer — have witnessed, first-hand, the results of demonization; their testimonies of personal experience, in the forms of courageous, often outrageous slaps in the face of official sentiment have led to the destruction of their art, banishment from their studios, exile, confinement, and even death. Paying for the opportunity to try one’s hand at art is modernism’s game of Roulette.

In later years, artists around the world would expand their forms of response to despair, often with photography, video or performance art; but the immediate impact of paintings from the first half of the twentieth century cannot, I think, be bested. The whole flow of European history, both political and personal, circa the fin-de-siècle, took on the raging current of a flood. One can trace this pained path to the end of van Gogh’s career (and life) and Munch’s disturbing portraits of 1893-5, as well as the Expressionist fervor of Franz Marc’s 1913 painting The Fate of Animals. Poets and novelists, too, like animals with their ears to the ground, intuited approaching strife

Trouble in expanding larger cities affected the rhythm and routine of daily life. In Germany, upheaval turned sharper and meaner: Dix, whose career had been tooling along with silky portraits of society figures and nudes, was but one of many artists immersed in World War I (he was a machine gunner). One of the unlucky many to serve in the five-month Battle of the Somme (the British lost 450,000 men, the French 200,000 and the Germans 500,000), he was lucky to survive — though lifelong nightmares accompanied him.

His portfolio of 51 etchings, Der Krieg (War), in 1924, had none of the Dadaists’ anti-war irony or distance. These works cry out. The full range of grinning skulls, men driven crazy, and garish ghoulish images, as in Wounded Soldier: Autumn 1916, Bapaume and the iconic Stormtroops Advancing Under Gas (the scene filled with helmeted soldiers, their faces covered in alien-like gas masks), had to shock the public. War had not yet been fully revealed through the cozy newspapers, the way Mathew Brady’s photographs had done for Americans in the Civil War. After all, the British Army met the Germans still on horseback, while the Germans slaughtered them with machine guns.

Dix’s paintings exude a psyche crumbling under stress, both outer and inner. At the Neue Galerie retrospective where some 100 works are assembled within the tasteful 19th-century Beaux-Arts Fifth Avenue building (once the home of Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt III), his war works mingle freely, or rather uneasily, with his before- and after-war portraits. The portraits, lush and inviting, recall those of Beckmann (who did not go to war) and something of Klimt’s hypnotic sitters. As part of the Weimar Republic’s leading art movement, Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), Otto Dix shared with others, such as George Grosz, the immortality of being among the many artists accused by the Third Reich of corrupting, cosmopolitan (i.e., Jewish) art that culminated, of course, in the 1937 Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition.

The Degenerate Art exhibition was the art community’s Kristallnacht (which came the following year). Hitler’s underlings swept up some five thousand works, from native artists like Beckmann, Dix, Grosz, Ernst Kirchner, and Lyonel Feininger to foreigners such as Chagall, Matisse, Mondrian and Picasso. The works were seemingly thrown together, hung without care, and charged with advancing Modernism, Judaism, and denigrating the ideals of Germany. The idea that the show toured around Germany (it was seen by more than a million visitors: the first museum blockbuster show) seems strange; but the Nazis were anything if not organized. Paintings were accompanied by wall labels that documented the prices paid by museums. Then as now money talks.

The intense works by Dix and Grosz — his earlier painting, The Funeral, depicts a horror-movie-like mob scene that foreshadows the violence-to-come, while his 1920 lithographic suite God With Us (a satire on a propaganda phrase) was destroyed by the Nazis—like the anguished painting, The Wounded Man (oil on wood), by Gert Wollheim, all reflect a way out when there was otherwise no way out. Beckmann, like Grosz and so many other artists, escaped Germany. Some, like Kirchner, killed themselves before their fates could be made with the snap of a thumb.

These works, of a time and a place, set the bar high. Picasso would eventually synthesize all artists’ pain, in 1937, with Guernica. After that, the age of irony would reduce art to art, for the most part; Motherwell’s abstraction series Elegies for the Spanish Republic and Shirin Neshat’s photographic portraits of Iranian women with Persian calligraphy written over their hands and faces have a formalism that intellectualizes the personal. The pain of reproducing a nightmare is an act that runs first from the heart through the head.

George Grosz (1893-1959), Schwimme wer schwimmen kann, und wer zu schwach ist guhe unter (Swim if you can, and if you are too weak go under, from Gott mit uns, 1922.

Otto Dix, b. 1891, d. 1969, Verwundeter (Herbst 1916, Bapaume) [Wounded soldier - Autumn 1916, Bapaume], plate 6 from Der Krieg, Intaglio etching, aquatint, Edition: ed. 58/70.