No one saw the depraved underbelly of post-war Weimar-era Germany as surely as Otto Dix.

His famous triptych Metropolis set dismembered veterans alongside bourgeois revellers and femme fatales.

A year later, in 1928, came the dehumanised, androgynous Portrait Of The Journalist Sylvia von Harden, a masterpiece currently held in Paris.

But it is a series of 50 prints titled Der Krieg (The War), made ten years after the beginning of the First World War, whose unerring focus is pertinent as the world commemorates the centenary of the start of machine-led, industrial-scale killing.

Dix had volunteered enthusiastically and served on the frontline at the Battle Of The Somme. He later fought at the Western Front in Flanders, where his work gunning down British troops earned him the Iron Cross.

On returning to Berlin, nursing a wounded neck and a head filled with traumatic memories, seeing crippled and despairing men walking the streets, convinced Dix to spent the rest of his life painting anti-war art and allegories.

He was sacked from his post at the Dresden Academy and the Nazis included his works The Trench and War Cripples in its Degenerate Art exhibition.

Both paintings, believed to have been burned, were made before Der Krieg, which is now held by the British Museum and on loan to Bexhill’s De La Warr Pavilion.

Curator David Rhodes explains the works were modelled on Spaniard Francisco Goya’s series of etchings, The Disasters Of War. Goya had seen horrific things during the Napoleonic invasion and the 1808-1814 Spanish War of Independence.

Rhodes worked at the British Museum and discovered Dix’s work after studying Goya. He was key to their arrival on the South Coast.

“I liked these works because they felt contemporary to me, even though they were 70 years old. The kind of imagery Dix used and the way he employed printmaking techniques was revolutionary and it still stands up and looks contemporary.”

He calls the 19 works the gallery has been loaned a “stark, unmediated expression of the horrors of the First World War”. They are a “monumental series”, too, not only because of the subject but the labour it would take to make 50 etching plates.

Crater Field Near Dontrien Lit Up By Flairs looks almost lunar and abstract, with its magnificent command of technique matched by a grim vision of blackened bomb holes.

Mealtime In The Trenches makes the harrowing and extraordinary feel prosaic. A wrapped-up and bandaged solider gulps a meal with a frozen skeleton for company.

“Skin Graft is fantastic,” says Rhodes. “It’s just an image of a soldier who has been horribly injured and they have tried to stitch him back together in his pyjamas in a hospital bed. It’s very simple but very striking.

“The First World War is seen as the first machine war, and in this picture this guy’s head has been sliced up. We’ve made lots of technical advances in one area but in another we were way behind. For me it says everything about the futility of the war.”

Almost as rare as the opportunity to see these prints exhibited is the fact we are given a view of the war from the other side of the divide: Dix’s vision is devoid of jingoism, it refutes the idea that war is glorious – it is balanced.

And Rhodes has chosen the pieces to reflect Dix’s entire collection.

“It’s not just about what goes on in the battlefield. There is a skull with worms coming out of its eye sockets, images of towns being bombed and one of whores in the bath. It tells the whole story of the portfolio.”