Nearly a century ago, much of Europe waited with trepidation for war to break out. In August 1914, the conflagration that would become World War I finally erupted, and the German artist Otto Dix was one young volunteer who eagerly headed to the front. An avid reader of the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, the 19th-century philosopher who had championed an ideal "superman" or "overman" who would overcome the limitations of mere humanity as it had evolved thus far, Dix would soon find his illusions shattered. In the words of the German art historian Matthias Eberle, the drawings Dix "jabbed on paper at the front [were] images not of supermen but of sub-men." READ MORE