depicted in this etching. However, in Dadaist fashion, it is a grotesque farce. The veteran is
humiliated by his work. He is ignored and denigrated in equal measure by wider society.
Dix’s argument with this painting is a biting critique of the post -war world that the returning
soldiers found themselves in. His disgust towards the society that threw these men into war
only to abandon them when the war left them incapable of functioning within the post-war
world. This theme of anger and the deconstruction of the image of the returning veteran,
far from the idea of heroes returning from the war, is instead subverted by the reality of
War’s aftermath with the work of Otto Dix.
The First World War, however, represented more than just the death of the old
order of things. The Russian Revolution had sprung from the chaos of the war and new ideas
were sprouting amid the battlefields of the civil war. In the Russian art world this would
manifest itself most prominently with the Suprematism movement's works. A movement
built around concentrating art to geometrical shapes with limited but boldly contrasting
colours meant to distil the spiritual meaning of art down to its most simple form.
It is notable that it emerged from Russia, the only great power to totally collapse
before the First World War’s end. This was a revolutionary style of art; one that was seeking
to create something entirely new from the ashes of the old. The founder of the movement
Kazimir Malevich quotes, in his manifesto of Suprematism: ‘ To the Suprematist the visual
phenomena of the objective world are, in themselves, meaningless; the significant thing is
feeling, as such, quite apart from the environment in which it is called forth’. 8 The world of
Tsarist Russia was one utterly opposed to change and the art it would produce often
reflected this conservative outlook with art often being constrained to the realm of the
8 Kazimir Malevich, Kazimir Malevich: The Manifesto of Suprematism <https://designmanifestos.org/kazimir- malevich-the-manifesto-of-suprematism/> [accessed 6 January 2024] (para. 1 of 63).
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