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Lot Essay
Kampf (Battle) is one of two major paintings of the First World War made by Josef Dobrowsky in 1918. Depicting the violence and mayhem of the conflict as a chaotic youthful rampage run riot, the painting, like much of Dobrowsky's art, lies half-way between the official art of the mainstream and that of the avant-garde. In keeping with the more sanitised official war art produced by government-sponsored war artists charged with producing images of the war to boost morale, Dobrowsky here avoids depicting the gruesome reality of the war in favour of a powerful, disturbing but ultimately allegorical image.
Kampf was formerly part of the collection of the important Viennese collector Dr Heinrich Rieger, a dentist who, through his practice of exchanging works of art for treatment, built one of the finest collections of modern art in Vienna in the years between the wars. The cornerstone of Dr Rieger's collection was a large number of important works by Egon Schiele. Schiele and Dobrowsky had studied together under Professor Christian Griepenkerl at the Vienna Academy, but whereas Schiele and Griepenkerl often found themselves at odds, Dobrowsky absorbed into his own work many of the classical painting techniques that Griepenkerl taught. Foremost among these was the practice of painting in a fresco-like manner using a mixture of distemper and glue on a chalk background that he has used here in this painting.
The fresco technique that Dobrowsky favoured at this time lent itself to the epic nature of history painting and something of this quality emanates from Kampf, though this is no painting of heroism and derring-do but more of a Lord of the Flies-style nightmare. Neither classical nor heroic in its imagery and composition Kampf is infused with the kind of informal naturalism that distinguishes the work of Pieter Breughel, an artist whose finest works - all in Vienna - had a profound influence on Dobrowsky. Indeed in this work there is clearly something of Brueghel's Blind leading the Blind (fig. 1) in the stumbling downward diagonal progression of the figures as well as a vicious parallel of his painting of Children's Games.
Depicting young boys in military uniform, as young as some of those who participated in the Great War, Kampf, for all its apparent classicism of technique and history painting pedigree is a viciously real portrait of the inherently violent nature of men. Dobrowsky himself had spent much of the war fighting on several fronts, was wounded in 1917 and won the Karl Truppenkreuz before, in 1918, applying to the Kriegspressequartier (War Press Office) in Vienna to become an official War artist. Kampf and Tote in Schützengraben (Heeresgeschichtliches Museum, Vienna) are the two best-known paintings Dobrowsky made at this time.
Couched in the pictorial language and painterly technique of epic history painting, both paintings are extraordinarily gruesome, each displaying the universal madness and mayhem that reigned on the front line while largely adhering to the censor's restrictions of what could and could not be shown. In Kampf for example, it is not the predominantly mechanised nature of the conflict, nor the new alien lunar landscape of the frontline - so common in the work of artists on the Western Front - that is depicted, but the fierce primal reality of hand-to-hand fighting. Maintaining faith with cohesive images from nature when so many artists were rejecting naturalism as unfit to describe the war and its apocalyptic impact, the subject of this painting is, in typical Viennese fashion, the inner nature of man.
Kampf displays the vicious human nature of the war rather than the dehumanising aspects which so many other artists of the time concentrated upon. Like an horrific mediaeval altarpiece of death, at its centre are dead and dying enemy French troops while above them an attack of Austrian soldiers appears to have the upper hand. Such is the chaos of the scene however that no victor can be discerned. In another part of the picture high up on another hill unknown silhouetted figures dancing in a mad orgy of violence and death may signify a victory for the enemy. Nothing is certain, only that this horrific panorama of violence is being performed not by the dehumanised mechano-men who populate the pictures of Fernand Léger, Otto Dix, Percy Wyndham Lewis or Paul Nash, but by fresh-faced boys and young men. It is the apparent youth and innocence in the faces of these young lads engaged in acts of horrific violence that really disturbs in this work and throws into contrast supposed nobility of their actions.
Kampf was formerly part of the collection of the important Viennese collector Dr Heinrich Rieger, a dentist who, through his practice of exchanging works of art for treatment, built one of the finest collections of modern art in Vienna in the years between the wars. The cornerstone of Dr Rieger's collection was a large number of important works by Egon Schiele. Schiele and Dobrowsky had studied together under Professor Christian Griepenkerl at the Vienna Academy, but whereas Schiele and Griepenkerl often found themselves at odds, Dobrowsky absorbed into his own work many of the classical painting techniques that Griepenkerl taught. Foremost among these was the practice of painting in a fresco-like manner using a mixture of distemper and glue on a chalk background that he has used here in this painting.
The fresco technique that Dobrowsky favoured at this time lent itself to the epic nature of history painting and something of this quality emanates from Kampf, though this is no painting of heroism and derring-do but more of a Lord of the Flies-style nightmare. Neither classical nor heroic in its imagery and composition Kampf is infused with the kind of informal naturalism that distinguishes the work of Pieter Breughel, an artist whose finest works - all in Vienna - had a profound influence on Dobrowsky. Indeed in this work there is clearly something of Brueghel's Blind leading the Blind (fig. 1) in the stumbling downward diagonal progression of the figures as well as a vicious parallel of his painting of Children's Games.
Depicting young boys in military uniform, as young as some of those who participated in the Great War, Kampf, for all its apparent classicism of technique and history painting pedigree is a viciously real portrait of the inherently violent nature of men. Dobrowsky himself had spent much of the war fighting on several fronts, was wounded in 1917 and won the Karl Truppenkreuz before, in 1918, applying to the Kriegspressequartier (War Press Office) in Vienna to become an official War artist. Kampf and Tote in Schützengraben (Heeresgeschichtliches Museum, Vienna) are the two best-known paintings Dobrowsky made at this time.
Couched in the pictorial language and painterly technique of epic history painting, both paintings are extraordinarily gruesome, each displaying the universal madness and mayhem that reigned on the front line while largely adhering to the censor's restrictions of what could and could not be shown. In Kampf for example, it is not the predominantly mechanised nature of the conflict, nor the new alien lunar landscape of the frontline - so common in the work of artists on the Western Front - that is depicted, but the fierce primal reality of hand-to-hand fighting. Maintaining faith with cohesive images from nature when so many artists were rejecting naturalism as unfit to describe the war and its apocalyptic impact, the subject of this painting is, in typical Viennese fashion, the inner nature of man.
Kampf displays the vicious human nature of the war rather than the dehumanising aspects which so many other artists of the time concentrated upon. Like an horrific mediaeval altarpiece of death, at its centre are dead and dying enemy French troops while above them an attack of Austrian soldiers appears to have the upper hand. Such is the chaos of the scene however that no victor can be discerned. In another part of the picture high up on another hill unknown silhouetted figures dancing in a mad orgy of violence and death may signify a victory for the enemy. Nothing is certain, only that this horrific panorama of violence is being performed not by the dehumanised mechano-men who populate the pictures of Fernand Léger, Otto Dix, Percy Wyndham Lewis or Paul Nash, but by fresh-faced boys and young men. It is the apparent youth and innocence in the faces of these young lads engaged in acts of horrific violence that really disturbs in this work and throws into contrast supposed nobility of their actions.