The grotesqueness of their prostheses marks them with bitter irony as monstrous holdover of an authoritarian system. The grotesqueness of their prostheses as representatives of the war machine. In Disability in Twentieth-century German Culture, Carol Poore Interprets the painting as “a freak show” in its effect because of the “radically negative manner as representatives of the war machine.
The table and chairs and the coat rack in the background have more legs and arms than the men, who are put together from scraps of collage, an artistic act analogous to the patchwork faces and bodies. He shows a collage of current newspapers, suggests that the players have retired to a reading room. And yet they are not exactly exiled in Dix’s painting. The artist saw them playing in a “back room,” out of view of the main room of the café. It is interesting that the wounded veterans, offices all, still proudly wearing their medals, are playing by themselves, suggesting that they can be comfortable only in the company of others like themselves. Newspapers above their heads are also real, and the blue jacket worn by one of the players is actual cloth.” The cards the players hold are real, pasted onto the canvas. Only upon closer examination does the viewer note that this is not simply a painting but a collage. The three players are horribly disfigured, and portrayed in the surreal style Dix often favored. The first impression the picture makes is grotesque. According to Stephen Kinzer, “After coming across three mutilated veterans playing skat in the back room of a Dresden cafe one day, he retired to a studio in the art school he was attending and painted The Skat Players. Skat is a game of trickery rather than skill. The most famous of the quartet of prosthesis-wearers by Dix is perhaps The Scat Players (Die Skatspieler), showing a painful card game carried on by soldiers. By dealing with maimed veterans, Dix could displace his personal experience yet still vent his unspeakable frustration.” But his famous four paintings came about as a reaction to “The enormous number of maimed veterans peddling or begging on the streets of every German city was constant reminder of the war.The war may still have been too close in 1920 for artist-veterans to have come to terms with their personal experiences. We were left with a black and white image of government failure to attend to the needs of the military, even those with only a 45% “Work Capacity.” According to Dennis Crockett in German Post-Expressionism : The Art of the Great Disorder 1918-1924, Dix “worked like a lunatic” in 1920 and produced The Trench, a very large work, and The Barricade. The Dresden Stadtmuseum purchased War Cripples but put the painting out of sight, until the Nazis later destroyed the painting, as they did with any work of art that had an anti-war message. The “cripples” are four veterans, torn apart in body and mind, marching down the street, an ordinary sight in Germany after the war.Īlthough the painter Otto Dix, who dedicated his post war work to calling attention of the German people to the plight of returning soldiers, insisting upon showing the social and political condition of those brave and neglected men, the public did not want to see these unfortunate victims, not on the streets and not in art. War Cripples (1920) was also known as 45% Work Capacity, a term that indicated how benefits were allocated: on the amount of the body lost to the war.
#History of card game skat windows
In Prague Street, Dedicated to My Contemporaries (1920), two disabled veterans sit, like The Match Seller, on the sidewalk, begging in front of shop windows displaying commodities for the able-bodied, with one shop offering artificial limbs available to those who can afford them. The veteran of The Match Seller I (1920) is blind he has lost his arms and his missing legs were replaced by two pegs. “Under no circumstances could I miss it! It is necessary to see people in this unchained condition in order to know something about man.” Dix said, “War is something so animal-like: hunger, lice, slime, these crazy sounds.” He continued, “War was something horrible, but nonetheless something powerful.” Dix spoke of the war as if it were a unique experience, but one that, as an artist and a student of human nature, he did not regret. Although these paintings are often referred to as the “prosthesis-wearers series,” what is striking is not the presence of prosthetic limbs but the absence of replacement arms or legs. In each of these paintings, the men, mutilated and dismembered by war are missing multiple limbs. In 1920, the German artist Otto Dix, an eager volunteer who fought for his country and was wounded multiple times, produced four paintings of disabled veterans.
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