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Artist or Maker: Otto Dix (1891-1969)
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Literature: S. Pfäffle, Otto Dix, Werkverzeichnis der Aquarelle und Gouachen, Stuttgart, 1991, no. G1915/3 (illustrated p. 261).
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Notes: THE GERSTEL COLLECTION
As an inscription written on the back of a photograph of Weidende Pferde held by the Otto Dix archive indicates, this almost idyllic pastoral scene was made by Dix at the height of the First World War. Dix's inscription reads: 'I made the gouache overleaf during the First World War in either Flanders or Northern France in 1915. The horses are those belonging to our Machine Gun troop (Maschinengewehrbespannung)' (cited in S. Pfäffle, Otto Dix Werkverzeichnis der Aquarelle und Gouachen, Stuttgart, 1991, pp. 261-2).
Dix, who spent the entirety of the war as a soldier serving on both the Western and Eastern fronts, painted continually throughout the conflict with whatever materials he had to hand. Seldom able to paint in oil, the predominant medium he used was gouache. Among his finest works, the many gouaches that he created during the conflict presented an holistic view of the war as both terrifying catastrophe and natural event in which the fate of heaven, earth, man and landscape all seem intertwined. The majority of images that Dix created in these gouaches, made at the front whenever Dix found the time, were of the war as spectacle. The strange new landscapes of No-Man's land, the fireworks of a shell burst, the terror of a bombardment and the insect-like lives of men crawling amidst the protective folds and womb-like crevices of a ravished and transformed Mother-Earth, are all rendered in these colourful war-time gouaches.
Weidende Pferde is one of only a small number of these war-time gouaches to depict a more gentle, pastoral scene of tranquillity. Dix, the realist, painted whatever he saw in font of him no matter how ugly, horrific, terrifying, surprising or, as here, beautiful. Here, evidently during a period of reprieve away from the trenches, he has painted the horses that belonged to his machine gun troop, grazing in a sunny pastoral landscape. The scene is rendered with the same prismatic cubo-futurist technique Dix applied to his other gouaches and similarly conveys an holistic vision as if the whole scene, the horses, the landscape and the sky are mystically linked and intertwined. In the same way this technique lends his depictions of explosions and of the broken landscape of the trenches an apocalyptic feel, here, the integration of equine form with that of the sky and the landscape, speaks, like the cubo-futurist horses of Franz Marc, of a heavenly idyllic world of harmony.
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