Card Players (Kartenspieler)

1920

Otto Dix served in World War I, earning an Iron Cross, but the destruction and trauma of modern mechanized warfare and its aftermath greatly affected him. This print depicts three of the 1.5 million wounded and disabled soldiers who filled German streets after the conflict.

The war’s bodily devastation and disintegration are sharply delineated in details such as a mechanical jaw, a missing nose, a glass eye, and an ear tube emerging directly from a misshapen skull. Among the three men, there is only a single shirt-sleeved and cufflinked leg—repurposed, like the other soldier’s mouth, to hold cards. The other prosthetic legs and the contraption supporting the torso of the figure on the left are nearly indistinguishable from the chair and table legs. These figures play cards and smoke cigars as they may have done before the war, but in this image of truncated, mechanized men, Dix shows how the war machine remade the world in its own image.