Otto Dix and German Expressionism at MoMA

For my first post I will be writing in English, but I hope that will change very soon as I become more comfortable with Deutsch! I am a first year PhD student in the History of Art department at the University of Michigan, and I suspect many of my posts will relate to art historical topics. Before beginning my degree, I worked in the Print department at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. While I was there, my department received a grant to catalogue and research the collection of prints and drawings related to German Expressionism (although it eventually encompassed all German works on paper from the first three decades of the twentieth century). The cataloguing project turned into an exhibition called "German Expressionism: The Graphic Impulse," which is now on view at MoMA.

Although German art is not my specialty, I am fascinated by this period of art and I hope that my acquisition of German reading skills will give me more access to the art and culture of this time. In particular, I am moved by Otto Dix's print portfolio Der Krieg (War). This series of fifty prints portrays the catastrophic results of World War I from the perspective of someone who served in it (and as an artist, Dix was well-equipped to visualize the horrors of war). The prints include images of battles, soldiers with missing body parts, prostitution, devastation, you name it. Here is a link to the portfolio on MoMA's website: http://www.moma.org/collection_ge/browse_results.php?object_id=63259. The exhibition will only be up for three months, but the website is a treasure trove of historical and cultural information on this period and includes extensive research relating to the over 3,000 German Expressionist works in the collection. I highly recommend it!