People whose lives are not a ‘dramatic action’ but a

business sit before the stage and look at strange creatures

for whom life is more than a business? ‘It’s proper that way’,
you say; ‘it’s entertaining that way; it’s culture!’

F.Nietzsche. The Gay Science. Book 2. Part 86. P.86.

Nietzsche’s comments above are a direct criticism of the

socialisation of modern life, to the seemingly natural being made of
the patently unnatural; for Nietzsche, such social control and
softening of reality was to be seen as the principle error of human
kind. Freud offers an alternative view; he is similar to Nietzsche in
that he too believes in man as natural phenomenon, in his
instinctual being, but he differs in his conclusion. Where Nietzsche
sees weakness in our submission to social norms, leading to a
failure to grasp our true state, Freud tells us that civilized society
only exists because of our control, (of the instincts); we must
repress the beast within. The following essay is an attempt to
develop a psychoanalytical viewpoint of three 20th Century artists
-Otto Dix, Max Beckmann and George Grosz.

The three painters have plenty in common, primarily, there was a

devotion to Nietzsche, but there was more, for example, all three
were marked by the Great World War I, as having actually taken
part in the war and each having seen a certain amount of real
human suffering, it can be said, that they were all three at some
point quite literally up to their elbows in the blood and toil of their
epoch. 1Secondly they were all three part of a movement in art
which came to be known as “New Objectivism” and as such, shared
a vision of Germany and German life far less restricted in it’s
expression; they were all three active then in what can be termed,
the late Expressionist period. Above all though, was a distinctive
feeling that they shared, that they, as artists, were not charged with
1
Varios (1979) Historia del Arte (tomo11). México, D.F.: Salvat Editores, pp.137-
142.

1
the duplication, or recording of life, what Nietzsche would refer to as
the pleasant presentation of life, no; they had a responsibility to
produce art as they saw it necessary.

That art should always be as real and fervent as life itself, as true to
life as they could possibly get was the aim of these three artists.
Beckmann himself has said, “My heart responds more to raw
vulgarity, to an art that does not live in a fairytale dreamland but
instead grants access to life’s dreadfulness, its baseness, its
magnificence, its commonplace grotesque banality”.2 This drive
towards closeness with life is what makes all three painters
interesting from the point of view of a Freudian analysis.

What follows then is the Freudian analysis I have been able to

construct; that in their work, coupled as they were to the spirit of
their time, what the Germans know as “Zeitgeist”, they reveal to us
the true struggle of the German peoples during the first decades of
the 20th century, a Germany deformed by war, uncertainty, and
above all, struggling to find a new composure.

Apart from some spurious Dada connections, these artists worked

separately, yet produced work of astoundingly similar creative
urgency and expression. The key here for me is the word spirit, this
idea that they worked within the spirit of their time is an important
one as I believe they were all three embroiled in the crisis of
Germany and indeed all of humanity of the time (and beyond).
Freud has made clear that as humans we are hopelessly enslaved to
two central instinctual drives, one towards life, the instinct of life or
Eros, which is complemented by another drive towards death,
known as Thanatos. Freud is clear, he says:

“Tras largas vacilaciones y dudas, hemos

decidido suponer la existencia de sólo dos
instintos básicos: el Eros y el instinto de
destrucción”.3
2
Diary entry of January 9, 1909.
3
Varios. (1973) Freud y el Psicoanálisis. Barcelona: Salvat Editores, pp.106.

2
The structures are marked; there is a tendency towards establishing
and conserving greater units of life, whilst coupling them with other
important energies (which are heading in the same direction); then,
there is at once, a second drive, which is entirely contra directional,
towards death and destruction; here is a drive to destroy.

The destructive drive is created to move the animated organic being

towards a state of unanimated organism. For Freud, our entire social
evolution can be traced to these instinctual drives. 4 As Karcher
notes, almost all of Dix’s paintings are fascinated by prostitution,
war, the grand city, religion; features where drama is pushed
forward thanks to the instinctual drives of Eros and Thanatos.5
Looking below at one of the first paintings by Dix (Fig 1) we can see
he has successfully stated his grand theme to come. A vase of
flowers, which are in the height of life, is countered by the death
symbol, the skull.

Both are extremely rooted in the language of the traditional still life
yet they belong explicitly to Dix’s burgeoning vocabulary, a visual
diction which forever walks the fine line between life and death.

Fig 1

Otto Dix. Florecer y

Marchitarse, 1911. Oleo
sobre lienzo, 60,5 x 47, 5
cm. Stadmuseum, Bautzen.

4
Ibid
5
Karcher, E. (1992) Dix. Colonia: Taschen, pp. 7-15.

3
Dix, Beckmann and Grosz were able to characterize their epoch
precisely because all three painters were looking directly at their
subject from within it. What they saw was existence, the human
experience of their time, dominated as it was by conception, birth,
suffering and, of course, death.

Max Beckmann was no stranger to death having lost both parents at

a young age, first his father, when Beckmann was just ten years old,
and then later, in 1909, his beloved mother. In the painting Large
Death Bed Scene, 1906, (Fig 2) we find again the central Freudian
idea of Eros and Thanatos. Beckmann is given a chance to elaborate
his internal pain of death, the death of his own father, via this
working out of his subject; he has here transcended the
autobiographical event to give us an objective view far more
tailored toward a general human relationship with the main
instinctive drives. The mourners are deformed by the event, as
Spieler notes, the dead figure is also deformed by rigor mortis and it
is not clear as to its sex.6 We experience life again in the crouched
figure of the naked girl, her legs are open as though she were to
give birth, yet she is sexualized; she is at once a potential mother
and prospective sexual partner. Her vigour is echoed in the tone of
the red wall behind, that, whilst a symbol of life and vibrancy, also
hints at the emotional inner turmoil of the group.

6
Spieler, R. (1995) Beckmann. Colonia: Taschen, pp.17.

4
The figures are isolated in their grief, the man to the left is lost to
himself, he has lost all control over his appearance as his trousers
collapse away from his naked torso. Meanwhile the figure to the
right, again de-gendered and deformed as in the case of the corpse,
stands in the throws of hysteria, you can almost hear the wails as
the figure tosses back its head. Beckmann himself has said:

“I only know one thing, which is that I pursue the

idea that I was born with, already present – if
only in embryonic form – in the drama or the
death scene, with all the powers I can muster, till
I can do no more”.7

Fig 2

Max Beckmann. Large Death Scene. 1906. Oil on Canvass,

131 x 141 cm. Berlin.

7
Max Beckmann in conversation with the publisher Reinhard Piper
(c.1919).

5
In the words of Helmet Lethen “El objectivismo es la tendencia
anímico-espiritual a actuar no en el orden del interés personal, sino
al servicio de un rango más elevado”.8 Each artist interprets that
which they decide to be the real objectivity in front of them. But as
Lethen correctly says, they are always working out from that which
works above them, that which in the view of the “new objectivists”
was there to be seen and felt, a duality between the outside and the
inside.

George Grosz painted The Funeral (Fig 3) around 1917/18. It is raw

in its depiction of what for him was the then current German
society, riddled as he saw it with excess and debauchery. It is a
picture of hell in procession, a plethora of ugliness and sickness
prevails, the Grim Reaper himself sits atop the coffin, whilst late
stage syphilis has transformed many of the hoard into madmen; the

8
Karcher, E. (1992) Dix. Colonia: Taschen, pp.7.

6
frenzied movement is alcohol fuelled, there are bars and office
blocks everywhere, one club invites “Dance Tonight” which is an
obvious allusion to the dance of death itself. With The Funeral we
are very much in the realm of Freud’s Eros and Thanatos theory. Of
his picture Grosz himself commented:

"In a strange street by night, a hellish procession

of dehumanized figures mills, their faces
reflecting alcohol, syphilis, plague ... I painted
this protest against a humanity that had gone
insane."9

Fig 3

George Grosz. The Funeral.

1917/18. Oil-on-canvas.
140 cm × 110 cm.
Germany.

What is this insanity that Grosz speaks of? What is the fabric of
society? What is the difference between a healthy society and an
insane one, driven to sexual depravity perhaps? Driven to murder

9
Wolf and Grosenick. (2004) Expressionism. Taschen, pp.42.

7
and suicide, alcoholism?

Sigmund Freud’s theory of personal control is valid here as a key

entrance point into the understanding of what Grosz, Beckmann
and Dix are getting at in their art. For Freud, there has to come a
renunciation, provoked by repression and the need to control
ourselves in front of the circumstances that prevail. To this end,
each one has of necessity organized a psychological structure, a
personality, which we divide into three separate parts, The Id, Ego
and Super Ego.

The Id contains our primitive drives and operates largely according

to the pleasure principle, whereby its two main goals are the
seeking of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. It does not stem
from any shared sense of reality but wants only to dominate
proceedings for its own ends. The energy for the Id's actions come
from libido, which is the energy storehouse, but more importantly
for our topic here is the fact that this Id has two instinctual drives,
Eros and Thanatos.

Unlike the Id, the Ego is aware of reality and hence operates via the
reality principle, whereby it recognizes what is real and understands
that behaviors have consequences. This includes the effects of
social rules that are necessary in order to live and socialize with
other people. The dilemma of the Ego is that it has to somehow
balance the demands of the Id and Super-ego with the constraints of
reality.

The Ego controls higher mental processes such as reasoning and

problem solving, which it uses to solve the Id-Super-ego dilemma,
creatively finding ways to safely satisfy the Id's basic urges within
the constraints of the Super-ego. The Super-ego contains our values
and social morals, which often come from the rules of right and
wrong that we learned in childhood from our parents and are

8
contained in the conscience.

The Super-ego has a model of an ego ideal that it uses as a

prototype against which to compare the ego (and towards which it
encourages the ego to move). The Super-ego is a counterbalance to
the Id, and seeks to inhibit the Id's pleasure-seeking demands,
particularly those for sex and aggression.10

What happens when we have a crisis, when something we have in

mind is not convenient to the Super-ego? At this point we need to
turn to our in built defense mechanisms – one of which is important
to art - sublimation. Freud has called this the most productive of all
our defense mechanisms.

What happens is we simply channel the libidinal energy away from

the anti-social behaviour towards a more socially acceptable and
estimable form of expression. 11

Before we go on to discuss what kind instinctual drives may have

been surging in Germany in the inter-war period, I would like to
move towards a notion of art as presented by the Russian film
maker Tarkovsky. It is important for me here as it touches exactly
on my point of view, that artists are always working within their
particular milieu, they are shaped by it, at all levels, that is -
subconsciously and consciously, no matter what they might think
about their production, it is always deeply rooted in their time.

10
Varios. (1973) Freud y el Psicoanálisis. Barcelona: Salvat Editores, pp.101.
11
De Tavira, F. (1996) Introducción al psicoanálisis del arte. México, D.F.: Plaza y
Valdés/Universidad Iberoamericana, pp.76-77.

9
In such a relationship, the art produced is so much more powerful
when it is able to move or disturb the viewer at the level of their
soul, that is to say, that they feel something extremely vital is afoot.
In the words of Tarkovsky:

El artista es quien recoge en mayor plenitud su

época y su mundo, se convierte en la voz de
quienes no están en condiciones de reflejar y de
expresar su relación con la realidad. En este
sentido, el artista realmente es la voz del pueblo.
Y por eso es también llamado a servir a su
talento y a su pueblo.12

To reiterate, the artist is then, part and parcel of the whole of their
time. The work, and the receptor, form one unique whole, nothing
that is divisible, yet something that is organic in that it is part of the
same nervous system. The artist and public feel a crisis in this
system, it is something that is beyond art as it relates to conflicts,
and these conflicts between various parts in this grand system
require treatment and care.

Enter then the sublimation theory of Freud. Why is it that so many

of the paintings produced during the inter-war years by Grosz,
Beckmann and Dix are so filled with violence, often coupled with
sexual content? Why the dark sense of humor? Let us begin our
analysis of this grouping of some of the more violent images with a
quote from Fidel Maccio, who has remarked:

“El estado creativo es, disponer de ese “adentro”

del inconsciente y sobre todo de un pensamiento

12
Tarkovsky, Andrei. (1996) Esculpir en el tiempo. Ediciones Rialp, Madrid,
España, pp.192.

10
 libre sin la influencia del pensar racional fijado a
las secuencias que fundamentan cada paso, cada
avance”.13

It is then, as in the dream state, a more unconscious moment, as

the artist has free reign over his imagery; he allows his lower nature
to come to the surface, or, moreover, his subconscious state is
permitted to gather force.

Freud says that in the dream state the super-ego loses some of its
power over our subconscious state, therefore permitting darker
parts of our nature to emerge; that which we have repressed as
being socially unacceptable comes into the view of our conscious
mind, if only in glimpses and often transformed or distorted by the
Super-ego’s attempts to make things more palatable.

Art works in a similar way. The artist, in the creative moment, is as

we have noted, part and parcel of the greater nervous moment of
the time. He has organized himself so to become the transmitter of
those live messages that are dredged up from his subconscious, in
the words of Freud, the artist possesses “sensibilidad para percibir
los movimientos animicos secretos de los de mas y valor para dejar
hablar en voz alta su propio inconsciente”14 (1910); and there, with
the freedom of the canvass, he is able to sublimate the most anti-
social elements of his nature; but this, if we agree with Tarkovsky, is
at once a communal event, in that it is always part of the artist’s
society too.

In Asesino Por Placer (autoretrato), 1920, (Fig 4) Dix pictures himself

in a grotesque yet somewhat comedic scenario. Whilst it is
obviously designed to cause the upmost disturbance for the average
13
Maccio, Fidel, Citado por: De Tavira, F. (1996) Introducción al psicoanálisis del
arte. México, D.F.: Plaza y Valdés/Universidad Iberoamericana, pp.105.
14
Freud, Sigmund, citado por: De Tavira, F. (1996) Introducción al psicoanálisis
del arte. México, D.F.: Plaza y Valdés/Universidad Iberoamericana, pp76.

11
bourgeois viewer, it is also full of the kind of sublimation noted by
Freud. There is an exaggerated disregard for the female human
body which has been cut up and disfigured, limbs hang in the air
and the killer is in the height of excited frenzy, he is pure
unadulterated Id.

Fig 4

Otto Dix. El Asesino Por Placer (autoretrato), 1920.

Alemania.

12
Here Dix elaborates his own inner destructive nature, he exercises
some of the processes produced by the Id in such a way as to cause
no direct social harm yet at once he is offensive; for Dix, art has this
moral duty to move the viewer. Dix, after painting himself as a
slasher murderer of women commented to a friend “I had to get it
out of me – that was all”.15 In this painting we have a direct link
between Dix’s own aggression towards women and a sexual content
linked to the Id. Only through painting it out of himself does Dix
prevent the actual acting-out of his own repressed aggression.

Fig 5.

George Grosz, as Jack the Ripper, Self-Portrait with Eva

15
Tartar, Maria. (1995) Lustmorde: Sexual Murder in Weimar Germany, Princeton,
USA, pp.15.

13
Peters in the Artist’s Studio, 1918.

In the self-portrait photograph of George Grosz as the ripper, again

there is this playing with subconscious/conscious reality; the visual
joke is heavily charged with its own signification in regards to
sublimation. Freud notes that the joke situation itself is another way
that the subconscious can rise up into the conscious world. Through
jokes the subconscious has made a kind of breakthrough, and is
permitted to show itself by the ego.16

Freud notes that due to the presentation of certain material in the

nature of a joke, the usual limitations of the mind may be put on
hold; it becomes disconnected from the conditions of the controlling
structure and can pierce through momentarily into consciousness.
Grosz and Dix are playing a game, yet at the same time they are
also allowing some of their darker content to come into the light.

Fig
6

16
Freud, S. (1905) El chiste y su relación con lo inconsciente. Buenos Aires:
Aguilar

14
Otto Dix. Asesinato Por Placer, (Lustmorde) 1922. Germany.

In almost the same way as the joke, the dream or the act of painting
itself, subconscious elements may come to light through the
elaboration of a well known theme, as in the case of lustmorde, or
lust murder. As Maria Tartar has noted, both Dix and Grosz made
several depictions of sexual murder and rape. 17

There can be no doubt to my mind that the events they witnessed

during the war and the general unconscious energy in Germany at
that time contributed to their imagination in depicting such
aggression towards women. Beckmann, Dix and Grosz all
experienced first hand the bitterness of the war, the trenches and
the gory details that they no doubt witnessed are recounted for us
time and again in their depictions of aggression towards the female
figure.

17
Tartar, Maria. (1995) Lustmorde: Sexual Murder in Weimar Germany, Princeton,
USA, pp.3-20.

15
Fig 7

Otto Dix, Scene II (Mord) [Scene II (Murder),, 1922, water color

on paper, 25 5/8 x 19 5/8 inches. Germany.

As Tartar notes, the war seems to have continued for them, but on
another plane. Here, one form of violence seemingly legitimizing a
different form of violence. 18

For Grosz and Dix, its as though the destruction of the female body
becomes a vent, not only for their own aggression but that of their
countrymen. Of course we are naturally disgusted by these images,
but in pre-WW2 Germany there was a great deal of aggressive
energy, a great deal of new hatred towards women as new
emancipatory measures took a hold in society and added pressure
to the already incredibly confrontational post WWI situation.
18
Ibid

16
Economically and socially, women and men were at a new chapter
in the history of the sexes.

It is highly possible that the social interest in the lustmord topic was
fuelled by a rise in misogyny, but it is equally possible that the
horrors of war had forced the painters to look at humanity itself in
an entirely different light, as something hopeless perhaps.

Fig 8

Otto Dix. Asesinato

Por placer,
(Lustmorde) 1922.
Oleo sobre lienzo.
165 x 135cm.
Germany.

Tracing back to the womb and the biological construction that is

woman, the birthplace of humanity, the artist may have found the
perfect figure against which to paste his deep-seated aggression
towards life itself, his own Eros-Thanatos crisis. After seeing friends

17
disfigured before his eyes, wouldn’t this be an easy step for the
artist to make?

Looking above at the Dix representations of lustmord (Fig 6,7,8) we

can see that the genitals have been completely destroyed in two of
the images, all of the aggression has been centered on the
destruction of the womb, the very epicenter of human reproduction.
Such destruction is I think linked to a subconscious exercising of the
Thanatos drive; there is a desire to destroy the whole of humanity,
something that must have seemed a distinct possibility after having
witnessed the grim realities of front line trench warfare. As for
Freud’s take on the matter, the instincts that govern humanity are
neither “good” nor “evil” they just are. As a civilized society, we
name these behaviours; we classify them in order to meet our own
demands for a human community.

Without control, there is only chaos. For example, selfishness,

cruelty, brutishness, all fall into the category we might deem evil.
What happens is a lengthy process of social development, only then
may these instinctual drives become controllable in the adult human
being. Here as we have seen, they are inhibited, repressed and
redirected. As Freud says “it is not until these vicissitudes to which
instincts are subject have been surmounted that what we call the
character of a human being is formed”.19 A man is then seldom all
good or all bad; he is just sometimes more and sometimes less - in
control of his primitive urges.

The civilized society is one of deep repression. What happens then

19
Freud, Sigmund. (1915) Thoughts On War and Death. Presented in: Freud, S.
(2009) On creativity and the unconscious. The psychology or art, literature, love,
and religion. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Thought Edition, pp.214.

18
in war? Can war change our control mechanisms? Freud says it can:

Thus the transformations of instinct on which our

cultural adaptability is based, may also be
permanently or temporarily undone by the
experiences of life. Undoubtedly the experiences
of war are among the forces that can bring about
such regression.20

Freud is clear, this temporary state, which brings about the highly
“uncivilized” behaviours, will return to a controlled state once the
aggression of the war has run its course. We should not judge man
to have fallen to hard because in Freud’s theory, he had never been
so far from his own destruction anyway. Man is not as civilized as he
likes to think he is. Freud says of man in war, and our
disillusionment attached to him, that:

That the greater units of humanity, the peoples

and states, have mutually abrogated their moral
restraints naturally prompted these individuals to
permit themselves relief for a while from the
heavy pressure of civilization and to grant a
passing satisfaction to the instincts it holds in
check.21

In contrast to the images of Dix, where there is a concentration on

the genitals of the victims, on the destruction of the womb, Grosz
seems to prefer the severing of the head (Fig 9 & 10). Below, we
see the head has been removed entirely and may relate to Grosz’s
own shame regarding the cause of his lust. By removing the head it
becomes a featureless being, he has removed its power. As Tartar
notes, Grosz often referred to women as swinish, (like pigs) that
20
Freud, Sigmund. (1915) Thoughts On War and Death. Presented in: Freud, S.
(2009) On creativity and the unconscious. The psychology or art, literature, love,
and religion. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Thought Edition, pp.218-220.
21
Ibid

19
women who danced or flirted were seen as “swine”, indeed his own
wife he refers to as his “swinishly voluptuous sweet maid”.

Fig 9
George Grosz,
John the
Woman Killer
(1918)
Germany.

Fig 10
George
Grosz,
Murder on
Acker
Street,
(1916)
Germany.

20
Throughout his letters, anything even slightly sexual is viewed as
“swinish”, and he openly admitted that when he and his wife were
alone together they behaved as “swine”. Grosz’s attitude towards
female sexuality suggests that he sees it as something bestial. The
removal of the figures head alleviates the need to feel these
“swinish” lustful impulses any longer.22

Fig 11
George Grosz. The Suicide, 1916. Germany.

22
Tartar, Maria. (1995) Lustmorde: Sexual Murder in Weimar Germany, Princeton,
USA, pp.98-132.

21
In the painting above, titled The Suicide, Grosz has decided to give
us a didactic image, which warns of the emptiness of a life led by
drinking and the pursuit of prostitutes. The dog like figures, as in the
case of the copulating dogs seen in Dix’s Lustmorde (Fig 6) remind
us of the lower nature of humanity, the animal instincts, and they
are connected here to the dead figure sprawled on the curb. There
is no pity or remorse for the dead man, the prostitute is cold and the
man next to her holds an empty smirk as accompaniment.

The visual lesson is clear, such a life leads to hell, only hell could be
as brightly red, the figure of the prostitute is bold and accepting,
another potential suicide figure hangs in the background, while the
drunken suicide is plastered against the floor, his corpse well
degenerated already, we get the feeling he has lain there in this
alleyway for days, pissed on and stepped over as the night brings
an ever more desperate flow of lost people. There is a small church
in the background. This is for me a symbol of the Super-ego. This is
Grosz, beseeching the general populace, in the hope that they may
engage their control; he is, subconsciously perhaps, appealing to
the communal Super-ego; in this painting Grosz presents a warning,
that unless we decide to listen to our little church of the mind, we
are to duly come un-stuck; it is though, a matter of fact image which
is free of any temptation towards sympathy, there is no sympathy, it
is what it is.

For Freud then, human aggression as witnessed in the times of

Beckmann, Dix and Grosz can be viewed as a regression to a more
basic state, the allowing to the fore our innermost repressed desires
toward destruction and death, parts of our human life which are

22
ever present, but in more civilized times, ever repressed.

For a time at least, we unleash the full energies of Thanatos, we

allow the repressed Id to control our processes. This of course
happens on mass as it does in the individual. Freud has also paid
some attention to mass dynamics and the affirmation of
subconscious elements. Groups may be formed automatically based
as they are on a shared illusion. What if that illusion was destruction
itself?

Humans acting together in groups very quickly form a kind of

shared soul, Freud says:
The more energetic is this mental homogeneity,
the easier it is for certain individuals to form one
psychological whole, and thus all the easier it
becomes to observe manifestations of one
common collective soul.23

Once grouped together, acting as one, humans are quite capable of

allowing all kinds of emotions to sweep through them unchecked by
the ego or super-ego. The individual loses the power to maintain
their critical awareness of the matter at hand. They are infected by
the group ethos, and they are thus capable of grossness and
atrocities not before present in their conscious life. It is as though
the coming together has provided a permit for the exhibition of
parts of the subconscious. But this state only lasts as long as the
group is in place; it quickly dissolves again once the individual has
restored his usual thought patterns.

Following MacDougal, Freud is able to note that:

The group is overly excitable, impulsive,

23
Freud, S. (2008) Psicología de las masas. Más allá del principio del placer.
Madrid: Alianza Editorial, pp.21

23
 passionate, versatile, unconscious, lacking in
consequence and indecisive, whilst being
extraordinarily easy to convince, superficial in
their judgments, only able to assimilate the most
basic of arguments and conclusions, the most
imperfect ideas, while remaining easy to mobilize
and encourage.24

In short, whilst moving within a group the human sheds all

responsibility, they become free to roam the darker parts of
existence, the night of the soul.

In Max Beckmann’s aptly titled The Night (Fig 12), we see such
group dynamics at work. A family is visited in the night by a bunch
of murderers and rapists who have descended on this bourgeois
attic idyll. They come in a gang, and it is clear that they have
completely lost their minds to the frenzy of group violence. The
father is hung from the rafters by one, as another breaks his arm.
Another is about to throw the child through the window, the
woman’s clothes are torn, her legs split, her hands tied as she is
clearly about to be raped. What is interesting is the inclusion of the
man on top of the table, as he is dressed in a very middle class
regular way, with tie and waste-coat, his pipe hangs from his mouth,
he comes though barefoot, as a beast, and his head bandage hints
at war damage, could experience of the horrors of war have turned
this man to violence? Here, everybody it seems is capable of
atrocity, once inside the mind of the group, regression to a more
primitive state ensues.

On the ground is a gramophone, and it is almost as if the whole

scene springs forward from the great round speaker, it is
24
Ibid, pp.23

24
unthinkable that Beckmann would have left it there without good
reason. The shrillness of the scene makes us think of the immediacy
of sound, as does the screaming dog which howls in the bottom left
of the painting. The gramophone also appears in Fig 10, where a
serial killer is washing up his utensils after butchering a young
victim. Both Grosz and Beckmann have, subconsciously perhaps,
alluded to the fact that music is the most immediate of arts and is
able to drop into our subconscious mind with the upmost of ease.
Music is closer to our basic nature, to the law of Eros and Thanatos,
to the raw building material that is humanity in all its capabilities.
Rising from the mouth of this gramophone is the most horrible of
scenes, the impulse for such violence comes from within, it is as
though Beckmann is saying, “this is the music of life”, and “this is
what we are capable of!”

Fig 12

25
Max Beckmann. The Night (1918/19) Oil on Canvass, 133 x
154 cm. Germany.

Conclusion
For me, the violence, which permeates the work of Beckmann, Dix
and Grosz, springs forth from their time. The effects of World War I
left all three painters deeply emotionally scarred.

In the words of Grosz, who himself attempted suicide the year of his

26
discharge from the army in 1916:

What can I say about the First World War, a war

in which I served as an infantryman, a war I
hated at the start and to which I never warmed
as it proceeded? I had grown up in a humanist
atmosphere, and war to me was never anything
but horror, mutilation and senseless destruction,
and I knew that many great and wise people felt
the same way about it.25

Dix was neither a man of war nor pacifist. For him the war
represented a unique opportunity to observe humanity, but he
admits:

I felt fear, like the young man I was, when the

front advanced, and in this hell of fire and
artillery, one shits ones pants.26

Of his war paintings Dix would say:

I have painted the war only to dam it, all of art is

repulsion. I have also painted dreams and faces,
faces and dreams of my times, the dreams and
faces of men.27

That all art is repulsion is as we have seen part of the psychological

process of sublimation, it is the removal of that which causes
discomfort, that which is held in the shadows of our being, that
which we need to expel, to discharge harmlessly into art. That he
paints the dreams of men is telling, as it is this shared
subconscious, which is behind all of the work.

25
George Grosz, (1955) Autobiography of George Grosz .
26
Karcher, E. (1992) Dix. Colonia: Taschen, pp.30.
27
Ibid.

27
It is of course all turning on the power of Eros and Thanatos, as
Beckmann was only too aware, we read in a letter from the front:

My life here is so savage and strange, I’ve never

been so conscious of its contradictions…My will
to live is stronger than ever, although I have seen
terrible things and have died several deaths in
sympathy. The more one dies, the more
intensively one lives.28

Painting becomes for all three a way to cope with the disasters of
war, the calling is a social duty, and one which of necessity calls
upon the subconscious, Beckmann noting:

In real life, painting devours me. I can live only in

dreams, poor wretch that I am.29

We have seen then that the collective mind is one that finds it
easier to allow atrocities, yet we can see that Beckmann, Dix and
Grosz have sought to find a way to sublimate these drives both
inside themselves and inside their society. Their art is one giant act
of sublimation, by which it might serve to alleviate not only the
suffering of their own impulsiveness towards death and destruction
but that of their country. In the words of Beckmann:

I have to do it. Every living form and shape must

be squeezed out of my head, then it will be a
pleasure to be rid of this dammed torture.30

28
Spieler, R. (1995) Beckmann. Colonia: Taschen, pp.27.

29
Ibid
30
Ibid

28
As Freud notes, this torture comes from within, from the shadows of
our minds. To get rid of these images there was only one way these
artists knew how.

Let us leave it here with the words of Grosz:

Whenever I had a moment to spare I would vent

my spleen in sketches of everything about me
that I hated; the brutal faces of my comrades,
badly mutilated war cripples, arrogant officers,
lascivious nurses.31

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
---------

BIBLIOGRAFÍA

Appignanesi, R. y Zárate, O. (1995) Freud para principiantes.

Buenos Aires: Era Naciente.
De Tavira, F. (1996) Introducción al psicoanálisis del arte. México,
D.F.: Plaza y Valdés/Universidad Iberoamericana.
Freud, S. (1905) El chiste y su relación con lo inconsciente. Buenos
Aires: Aguilar
Freud, S. (1899) Interpreting Dreams. London: Penguin Books
Freud, S. (2009) On creativity and the unconscious. The psychology
or art, literature, love, and religion. New York: Harper Perennial
Modern Thought Edition.
Freud, S. (2008) Psicología de las masas. Más allá del principio del
placer. Madrid: Alianza Editorial
Gedo, J. (1996) The artist and the emotional world. Creativity and
personality. New York: Columbia University Press
Gombrich, E. (1971) Freud y la psicología del arte. Barcelona: Barral
Editores.
Grosz, George (1955) Autobiography of George Grosz .
Karcher, E. (1992) Dix. Colonia: Taschen.
Kuspit, D. (2003) Signos de Psique en el arte moderno y
posmoderno. Madrid: Akal.
Schneider, D. (1974) El psicoanalista y el artista. México D.F.: Fondo
de Cultura Económica.
31
George Grosz, (1955) Autobiography of George Grosz .

29
Schneider, L. (1993) Art and Psychoanalysis. New York: Icon
Editions.
Spieler, R. (1995) Beckmann. Colonia: Taschen
Sprengel Museum (1999) Max Beckmann. Hannover: Druckgraphik
Prints.
Tartar, Maria. (1995) Lustmorde: Sexual Murder in Weimar
Germany, Princeton, USA.
Thomas Ammann Fine Art Exhibition. (1992) Max Beckmann.
Zurich: Thomas Ammann Fine Art Museum.
Varios. (1973) Freud y el Psicoanálisis. Barcelona: Salvat Editores.
Varios (1979) Historia del Arte (tomo11). México, D.F.: Salvat
Editores.
Vigotsky, L. (2005) Psicología del arte. México, D.F.: Fontamara.

30
31