Art Deco, August Sander and Otto Dix, National Gallery of Australia

War delivers different perspectives: to the victor and vanquished, but also whether waged in aggression or self-defence.

August Sander's portrait of Otto Dix and his wife Martha. From Sander's People of the 20th century series. Showing at the National Gallery of Australia.

Two concurrent exhibitions at the Nationa­l Gallery of Australia, one devoted to Australian art between the wars and the other to a pair of significan­t German artists of the same period, remind us of the very different ­experiences of victory and defeat in war. There are many examples of this through history, perhaps none more striking than the surge in self-confidence of the Greeks after they defeated two massive assaults by the Persian superpower in 490BC and 480BC. The flowering of fifth-­century classicism in art, architecture, literature, philosophy and history ensued, and continued into the following century despite the disaster of the Peloponnesian War.

On the other hand, France experienced, not surprisingly, a profound sense of depression after the defeat of Napoleon in 1815, and because­ romanticism took root in France in that generation, French romantic art and literature are marked by gloom and pessimism.

Nowhere is this better expressed than in Alfred­ de Musset’s La Confession d’un enfant du siecle (1836) where, in the second chapter, he contrasts­ the glorious Napoleonic epoch, in which he was born in 1810, with the dismal bana­lity of the time in which he grew to manhood. Boys were raised then, he says, by anxious mothers, schooled amid the rolling of drums, occasionally seeing their bloodied but ­be­medalled fathers between campaigns, anticipating their own part in the epic of conquest. Then it was all over and, like a traveller who realises his fatigue only when he stops to rest, the whole country sank into exhaustion and misery. Self-interest and greed, as well as debauchery and hypocrisy, flourished in the ensuing climate of demoralisation.

Barbara Tribe‘s Lovers II 1936-37, cast 1988. Showing at the National Gallery of Australia.

These two examples hint at another and all-important factor. Victory is no doubt inherently always positive and defeat always negative, but it also matters whether the war was one of aggressi­on or of self-defence. The Greeks were victorious in fighting for their freedom; the French were defeated in what had become a campaign of conquest, although it may have started as self-defence after the revolution, and Napoleon liked to frame his campaigns as wars of liberation to bring the new world of liberty and equality to the oppressed people of Europe­. But as we know from paintings such as Goya’s The Third of May 1808 (1814), forcible liber­ation by others can be hard to distinguish from tyranny. And, as Musset himself wrote: “There was but one man alive in Europe in those days; the rest strove to fill their lungs with the air that he had breathed.”

Australia was fortunate, in this respect, to be on the morally right and also the victorious side in both world wars. This was particularly un­mistakeable in World War II, fighting against unambiguous fascist aggression. But even in the first war, where the moral positions were more complex, there is little doubt that we, and the British Empire as a whole, were fighting to resist the aggression of a militaristic German regime, and our involvement had been triggered by the invasion of neutral Belgium.

The same is true of the Americans, so that the whole of the English-speaking world has grown up, in the past century or so, with the presumption that we are on the right side of ­history and have inherited the mantle of the ­defenders of freedom. Clearly this is simplistic and has led us to make several mistakes in the past half-century, but it is interesting to reflect­ that, with a few shameful exceptions such as the Opium Wars in China in the 19th century, the British have not engaged in major wars of aggression for centuries. In the 17th and early 18th centuries, British military involvement in Europe was intended to contain the expansi­onism of Louis XIV; in the late 18th and early 19th it was again to contain the French; then in the 20th century it was to resist German aggression.

Even the vast British Empire was built up with what can be considered a relative minimum of military engagement, except perhaps in India, where the situation of the collapsing Mughal­ Empire and competing Indian states was complex and British hegemony was established by the East India Company and not by the state itself.

Hence JR Seeley’s famous, if of course debatable, observation in 1883 that “we seem, as it were, to have conquered half the world in a fit of absence of mind”.

Stormtroopers, by Otto Dix. National Gallery of Australia.

After the war, Australia had lost a great many young soldiers, and had been through the very divisive experiences of the failed campaigns for conscription and the ill-timed Great Strike of 1917. But despite residual bitterness and long-lasting grief there was a sense that the newly independent commonwealth had been tested in the harshest trial of warfare and had emerged triumphant. Earlier anxieties about the convict taint — could the dregs of humanity really be redeemed? — had been assuaged, and many began to believe that Australia, with its favourable climate and its pastoral trad­ition, could breed a new race of healthy, happy and noble men and women.

These themes appeared in painting, sculpture and even travel posters, in which the figure of the lifesaver became a modern substitute for the warrior. The beach became an important place, not only for recreation but for exercise and the outdoor life that could turn office workers into models of physical development. The ideal seemed more achievable in an age when hardly anyone was overweight and obesity in young men and women was extremely rare. Australia was also a more egalitarian place, both in aspirations and in reality, and differ­ences of income and way of life between the classes, although real, were much less extreme than they have become since then.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the art of this time is the celebration of the body and of sexuality that we find so rarely in Australian art. As I have observed before, the erotic note is uncommon in the 19th century and, from the Angry Penguins onwards, sexuality is unhappy and tortured or, later still, poisoned with ideo­logy, guilt and resentment. Exceptions, from Charles Conder to Carol Jerrems, are all the more notable. It is almost only in the period just before World War I, with the work of Norman Lindsay, and the decades after that erotic energy­ is repre­sented in a positive way as a life-affirming force.

Nowhere is this more prominent than in the work of Rayner Hoff, who became the director of the National Art School and whose great achievement was the sculptural decoration of the War Memorial in Hyde Park. Hoff was a vital­ist, and evidently communicated his sense of the energy of life to his pupils at the art school, especially to a group of young women, including Jean Broome-Norton and Barbara Tribe. Hoff is represented here by several works, including an early relief of Heracles and Achelous (1920), who the hero defeated to win Dejaneira, and which he made in England before­ taking up his position in Sydney in 1923.

Otto Dix‘s Wounded soldier Autumn 1916 (Baupaume) (1924). National Gallery of Australia.

The biggest of Hoff’s works in the exhibition is an enormous, impressive but chaotic mural titled­ Deluge — ­stampede of the lower gods (1927), ostensibly representing a collection of chthonian and nature deities fleeing from immine­nt destruction, but really a celeb­ration of the primal and instinctual drives they represent. Of particular interest are a couple of goat-footed fauns who have been given Aboriginal features.

Of his pupils, Broome-­Norton is represented by Hippo­lyta and the Amazons Defeating Theseus (1933) and by her relief Abundance (1934), her diploma piece at the National Art School. It represents a young mother, of about the same age as the artist, as effectively the head of a family group that includes her child and her husband, who brings home armfuls of wheat from the harvest. Tribe represents a passionate embrace in Lovers II (1936), a variation on a theme treated more literally and less dramatically by Hoff in The Kiss (1923).

Germany in the aftermath of the war could hardly have been more different from Australia. The kaiser abdicated, the government fell, the economy collapsed, epidemic disease broke out and hyperinflation destroyed the savings of the middle classes. Fighting erupted between extremist­s of the left and the right. Finally the situation was stabilised under the Weimar Republic­, which eventually got inflation under control and allowed the economy to start to rebuil­d. Although the government was widely criticised as weak, ­ineffectual and corrupt, German­y in fact began to recover strongly and the arts, stimulated by the disruption, flourished until the rise of the Nazis and Adolf Hitler’s seizure of power in 1933.

But art in the Weimar Republic, from dada to the new real­ism, was far from happy and celebratory. Fear, neurosis and angst predominate; sexuality is more prominent and more explicit than in Australian art, but it is not joyful or fruitful; themes of violence, sadism and perversion predom­inate.

In the show devoted to Otto Dix and August Sander, however, the focus is elsewhere. Dix is represented by a selection of prints from his great series Der Krieg(1924). The artist had ­enlisted as a volunteer and had been more ­fortunate than many others, such as Franz Marc, one of the founders of Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) movement in Munich, who was killed at the Battle of Verdun in 1916.

There is probably no starker set of images of the horrors of war than Dix’s series, although it belongs in a powerful tradition, exemplified particularly by Jacques Callot in the 17th century and Francisco Goya in the early 19th. But Dix particularly dwells on the specific horrors, which he knew from experience, of war in the age of mechanisation: the fields of barbed wire, the faceless soldiers attacking in their gas masks, the mud filled with the decaying limbs of men mowed down in their thousands. The last of the works in the show is a monstrously and pitifully disfigured veteran, one of countless ­victims of terrible shrapnel wounds.

Sander knew Dix well, and one of his photographs here is of the artist and his wife. But Sander’s work makes no overt reference to the war. His images are from another kind of serie­s, an encyclopedic survey of the people of his time, Menschen des 20 Jahrhunderts, ­People of the 20th century. It is a fascinating series­, classified by social roles and occupations, yet full of glimpses into the minds and experience­ of indiv­iduals, some appealing, some pathetic, some obtuse. In the present selection, however, it is hard not to see them collectively as samples of the people who have survived one failed war and are about to be swept up into anothe­r, even more materially and especially morally dis­astrous for their nation.

Art Deco.

National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, until December.

August Sander and Otto Dix

NGA, until June.