BOOK PROJECT: OTTO DIX: WAR, ART AND SOCIETY, 1914-1934

This book project, supported by a Royal Irish Academy Charlemont Grant, explores the role of Otto Dix’s confrontational pictures in shaping the memory of World War I in Germany during the years 1914-34, analysing how their meaning as war memory was defined by the visual culture of war that surrounded them, Dix’s artistic peers and critics. In a country that struggled to produce a shared, universal memory of the war and where the relationship between art and politics was unusually close, the book also considers how the pictures’ reception was affected by Germany’s fractured war commemoration, significantly complicating the terms by which they were understood. Each chapter provides a case study of the first public showing of one or more of Dix’s war pictures at key exhibitions and shows how their reception was subjected to changing socio-political and cultural conditions as well as divergent attitudes to the lost war. Offering substantial new research that also makes numerous primary sources available to an English readership for the first time, the book examines the pictures within the broader visual culture of war in order to assess how they functioned alternatively as cutting-edge modernist art and transgressive war commemoration.

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PROSTATE CANCER AND MASCULINE IDENTITY IN THE WORK OF RICHARD MEAGHAN

This new body of work by Richard Meaghan, ranging from delicate pieces on paper composed in ink, watercolour, graphite and pastel to large works in oil and mixed media, reflect on the artist’s recent diagnosis of prostate cancer and his psychological navigation of its consequences. At first glance, looking at these works simultaneously, they exude jouissance; colour, often riotous, and  sensuous line cause to eye to travel excitedly at first, before eventually, and only very gradually, absorbing a complex, deeply personal dialogue on confronting the threat to one’s masculinity and life as a sexual being. Read more…