Otto Dix (Crown Art Library) 0517564831, 9780517564837

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by Eva Karcher

OTTO

Dix

by Eva Karcher Otto Dix (1891-1969) is regarded as the leading representative of the German New Realism School of the 1920s. Derided in his day as the “scourge of the bourgeoisie, and later misunderstood as a “social prosecutor on behalf of the exploited class? Dix is one of the most brilliant and fascinating personalities in modern art. An artistic outsider, Dix shed a merciless light on contemporary manners through his realistic portrayals of war, prostitution, and life in the big city. He was a passionately keen observer who distrusted preconceived ideas. When his searching gaze alighted on the taboo topics of Eros and death, it produced the tense, brooding figures that haunt Dix’s canvases. The human body, which constituted for Dix the most immediate expression of love and death, is the central focus of his work. Orto Dix explores the life and work of this scrupulous chronicler of his time through the extensive use of source materials and graphic description. It also contains an analytical study of his eminent position as a portraitist and as a member of the “internal emigration” during the Nazi period. Finally, a much-needed presentation and analysis of Dix’s later works are given.

DR. EVA KARCHER worked in various art galleries before entering the world of publishing as a publicist, writer, critic, and editor for various Munich

publishing houses. She played a leading part in organizing two Dix exhibitions, the second of which—the “Otto Dix Retrospective” held in Munich in 1985—provided a comprehensive survey of the artist’s work to date. Karcher’s numerous essays on Otto Dix, which have appeared in catalogues and specialized journals, have contrib-

uted significant new insights into his art.

44 illustrations in color 25 illustrations in black and white Illustration on the Front Cover

THE BIG CITY Center panel of tryptich, 1928 Mixed media on wood, 71/4” x 7834”

(181 x 200 cm)

Galerie der Stadt Stuttgart Illustration on the Back Cover PORTRAIT OF MRS. MARTHA DIX I, 1928

Mixed media on wood, 2358” x 23716”

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Title page: SELF-PORTRAIT (Toy), 1921 Pencil) 22724 x17

(563° 43

2:cm)

Otto Dix Foundation, Vaduz, Liechtenstein

Translated from the German by: JoHN ORMROD

PRINTED IN ITaALy — INDUSTRIE GRAFICHE CATTANEO S.P.A., BERGAMO © 1987 BonFint Press CORPORATION, NAEFELS, SWITZERLAND ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No PART OF THIS BOOK MAY BE REPRODUCED OR UTILIZED IN ANY FORM OR BY ANY MEANS, ELECTRONIC OR MECHANICAL, INCLUDING PHOTOCOPYING, RECORDING, OR BY ANY INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL SYSTEM, WITHOUT PERMISSION IN WRITING FROM THE PUBLISHER ALL RIGHTS OF REPRODUCTIONS BY THE OTTO Dıx FOUNDATION, Vapuz, LIECHTENSTEIN

RAILWAY EMBANKMENT, 1911.

Oil on paper, 14") X 20” (38 X 51.8 cm)

Otto Dix Foundation, Vaduz, Liechtenstein

All art is exorcism

Otto Dix™

“Born on December 2, 1891, in the industrial town of Gera-Untermhaus, Wilhelm Heinrich Otto Dix was the eldest child of the foundry worker Franz Dix (1862-1942) and his wife Louise, nee Amann

(1863-1953).” This, or something like it, is the kind of opening sentence favored by the majority of Otto Dix’s biographers, who place great emphasis on their subject’s working-class and hence underprivileged background. (1) Interview by Otto Wundshammer, in Rheinische Illustrierte, 1946.

As a result, the myth has arisen of Dix the “proletarian.”

’

It is in these terms, for example, that the

painter’s use of language in talking about his art is often seen. However, to label Dix’s candid, downto-earth verbal manner as “proletarian” is quite wrong; his particular way with words is rather the product of a general attitude, a singularly open outlook embracing every aspect of reality, including its negative side. When questioned on one occasion about the “objective” character of his art, Dix replied:

Who is ever objective?... Of course, compared with Expressionism and the later Abstract movements, my kind of representational art does indeed appear to be rooted in the world of “objects.” Perhaps the reason why my work was regarded at the time as “objective” was its strong emphasis on content, on subject matter.” Even

Dix’s

statement

of 1927,

“For

me

at any rate,

the main

thing is the object,”®

is

incompatible with the notion of objectivity advanced by the leaders of the neorealist Neue Sachlichkeit movement which came to prominence in the 1920s. Neue Sachlichkeit— meaning New Objectivity, or New Sobriety —is marked by a tendency to view the world in terms of a programmatic idea of objectivity, hence producing a distorted image of reality. The resulting pictures are often little more than illustrations of abstract concepts; despite, or rather precisely because of, their faithful adherence to the theory of the movement, they fail to render an adequate account of the subject in question. Dix adopted an entirely different approach, insisting on the importance of subjective perception as the basis of his art. At the same time, he was a diligent student of reality, of the world of outward appearances, and had an exceptionally keen eye for details of physical structure and texture. The tone of his paintings is analytical, and they possess a complexity, a multilayered quality, which contrasts sharply with the simplistic message of class hatred seen, for example, in the work of George Grosz, the outspoken rebel whose ambition was to portray the world “in all its ugliness, sickness, and hypocrisy.” Two further aspects distinguish Dix’s art from that of his contemporaries in the Neue Sachlichkeit movement: his unusual degree of concentration on the physical appearance of his human subjects, attending to every last nuance of physiognomic detail, and also his particular sense of humor, which contains a strong element of the grotesque. Dix himself insisted that his work was firmly grounded in established artistic traditions, pointing to German sixteenth-century art as an especially important influence. This constitutes a further argument against the view of Dix as a Neue Sachlichkeit artist. In a manner entirely alien to the spirit of Neue Sachlichkeit, Dix was extremely interested in both the content and the techniques of German sixteenthcentury painting: He particularly admired the smooth, glazed appearance produced by the oil-tempera technique of the German masters. Otto Dix’s own words testify to his status as an outsider in the artistic world of the 1920s:

Over the last few years, the rallying cry of the current generation of artists has been the slogan “Discover new forms!” I am not at all sure that this is really possible. If you look at and immerse yourself in the paintings of the old masters, you always find something there which fits in with your work. For me, innovation in painting means widening the range of its subject matter and refining the forms already used by the old masters.

Otto Dix, the keen observer of contemporary life, ranks together with Max Beckmann as one of the solitary giants of 1920s art. (1) Interview by Maria Wetzel, “Professor Otto Dix, Ein harter Mann, dieser Maler,” in Diplomatischer Kurier, XIV (1965)

18, p. 739.

(2) Berliner Nachtausgabe, 12.3.1927. (3) George Grosz, in Paris-Berlin, 1900-1933, exhibition catalogue, Munich, 1979, p. 196. (4) Berliner Nachtausgabe, 12.3.1927.

9

Dix was indeed born into the working class, but the atmosphere in which he grew up was not typical of working-class life. His mother was fond of music and literature and herself wrote poetry in her youth; Fritz Amann, her nephew from the town of Naumburg, was a painter. Dix encountered art at an early age and his memories of his childhood in Gera, as recounted in 1966, some seventy years later, are dominated by sensory impressions: My uncle kept a shop which smelled of petroleum, coffee, pickled gherkins, and all sorts of things. Smells are generally the things I remember best. My cousin Fritz Amann, who was a painter, sometimes used me as a model. The wonderful smell of the oil paints, together with the aroma of the tobacco smoke from my cousin’s pipe, instilled in me even as a little boy the desire to become an artist. Perhaps smell is a more basic, elemental sense than taste: the primal sense, so to speak.”

In accordance with his general temperament, Dix describes his childhood in a terse, laconic style, but with a strong feeling for significant detail. He refers, among other things, to his eidetic memory, which

enabled him to learn poetry by heart at a glance: “In my mind’s eye, I could see the book in front of me and simply read off what was on the page.”

His childhood appears to have been carefree; as a boy, Dix was fond of nature and loved exploring. His delicate constitution meant that he was frequently ill—he had pneumonia several times—and he was also prone to accidents. However, to make up for his poor health, he was endowed with a remarkable robustness of ‘spirit. According to Dix, painting came entirely naturally to him: I was always able to paint, and never really needed instruction, but of course my old teacher Schunke [his elementary schoolteacher in Gera] did a great deal to help me, by setting me on a path toward artistic freedom.” Schunke secured a scholarship for Dix to attend the Dresden School of Arts and Crafts. There, from 1909 to 1914, he learned what he could from the instruction offered by his teachers, K. Mebert,

M. Rade, and R. Guhr, in the decorative, ornamental, and plastic arts. Apart from this, he continued

studying painting on his own account, paying frequent visits to the Dresden Art Gallery. At the time the city was a lively cultural center and the Art Gallery held regular exhibitions of avant-garde German and French painting. Thus Dix came into contact with Impressionism, Symbolism, and Cubism, together with the paintings of Vincent Van Gogh and the “Briicke” artists. His first paintings, using oils and gouache, date from this period, when he also produced a number of drawings. A series of landscapes, set in Dresden and Thuringia and begun in 1908, was followed in 1912-1913 by Dix’s first collection of self-portraits. From the outset, Dix’s works demonstrate his search for a formal vocabulary of his own. In LennéstrasseDresden, Streetlights, and Railway Embankment (see pages 9, 11, and 5), the emphatic brushwork lends

the surface of the paintings a particular rhythmical quality. Subsequently, in the period up to 1919, Dix explored the dynamic possibilities of line as a device for creating structure and conveying meaning. His eye for formal detail, his feeling for the materiality and plastic qualities of line, and his striking use of color, all point to Dix’s keen sensual awareness. He incorporates sensory impressions directly into the act of painting, translating them into a wide variety of brush movements. The landscape Raihvay Embankment is depicted with bold parallel sweeps of hastily laid-on paint: The brushstroke becomes a means of expression in its own right. The theme of line and its manifold properties dominates the (1) Otto Dix, Errinnerungen an die Kindheit in Gera, Hemmenhofen, April 5, 1966. Quoted in the catalogue of the exhibition, Otto Dix, 1891-1969, Museum Villa Stuck, Munich, 1985, p. 291.

(2) Ibid., p. 291.

painting Sunrise (1913, private collection). In Streetlights, light is viewed as substance; paths of light are represented as materialized bundles and rings of energy. In an increasingly audacious fashion, Dix begins to divide and fragment space into separate and shifting formal structures. This is already the case in Self-portrait Smoking (see page 18) and is especially exemplified by Self-portrait as Mars (see page 19). Without relinquishing content and message, Dix tends more and more to transform the surface of his pictures into scenes of dramatic confrontation between a multitude of simultaneous, interconnecting

events.

The “linearism” of the art of the period, as in Futurism and Cubism, was by no means the only factor involved in this development. A more important and lasting influence was Otto Dix’s experience as a soldier in the First World War.

One or two further comments should be made about Dix’s early work. In his choice of themes, even at the very start of his career, Dix appears to have retained a large measure of independence from contemporary trends. His first subject, landscape, is followed by the self-portrait, his preferred medium of self-analysis and a recurrent feature of his oeuvre; this in turn is followed by the theme of the relationship between Eros and death, which stands right at the center of Dix’s art. This was a subject which allowed Dix to encompass and depict human life in all its teeming variety. It forms the point of departure for the main themes of the 1920s and of Dix’s later work: the urban scene, prostitution, and religion. As in the case with all great artists, Dix’s major themes are present, in a latent form at an early stage, although their specific shape is determined by subsequent historical and biographical influences. With his vital temperament and highly inquisitive nature, Dix was fascinated by the ambivalent tension between Eros and death. In a manner bordering on visual gluttony, he fixed his gaze on every aspect of human existence, declaring on one occasion: One has to say “yes” to humanity as it is and always will be. In exceptional situations, people can behave in the very noblest of ways, but their behavior can also be degraded and bestial.©

And, he added: “You have to be able to identify with what you depict.” There is a definite connection between Dix’s affirmation of life and the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. Dix began to read Nietzsche in 1911 and asserted that his ideas were “the only true philosophy.”® This was the source of many of the painter’s lifelong opinions. In 1912, following his encounter with Nietzsche, Dix produced a green-tinted plaster bust of the philosopher; the work was confiscated in 1937, however, and has never been recovered.

Like Nietzsche, Dix saw the world as a “monster of force,” a force

beyond good and evil, creating and destroying life in an endless cyclical movement between birth and death. However, this notion of the eternal cycle does not imply an attitude of fatalistic acceptance, but rather the opposite: an opportunity for renewal, for the individual to say “yes” to life, even in the face of death and destruction.

The greatness of Dix’s work rests, in the first instance, on the fact

that he instinctively grasped Nietzsche’s message and was able to translate it into pictorial terms. Certainly, Dix did not “discover” Nietzsche, who was the prophet of a whole generation of artists and intellectuals at the beginning of the twentieth century and especially just before the First World War. Directly or indirectly, his ideas inspired writers such as Gottfried Benn and Ernst Jünger, together with artists such as Rudolf Schlichter and Max Beckmann. Nietzsche’s nihilism and attitude toward moral values (1) Quoted in Diether Schmidt, Otto Dix im Selbstbildnis, Berlin, 1981-2, p. 279.

(2) Ibid., p. 279. (3) Ibid., p. 253.

LENNESTRASSE, DRESDEN, 1910.

Oil on canvas, 17'/2” * 18™/16” (44.4 X 48.1 cm)

Otto Dix Foundation, Vaduz, Liechtenstein

10

3

(i)

ee i

jiI

7

< FLOWER

AND Decay,

1911

Oil on cardboard, 25” X 19'/,” (63.5 X 48.5 cm)

Stadtmuseum, Bautzen German Democratic Republic

STREETLIGHTS, 1913 Oil on paper, 20°/s” X 25/16” (0229) < 64.3°cm)

Private Collection

WOMAN SQUATTING, 1913. Pencil and ink, 9°” X 73/16” (25.3 X 18.3 cm) Städtische Galerie, Albstadt, Federal Republic of Germany. Walther Groz Collection

12

had a decisive influence on the nihilism of the 1920s, especially on the ideology of Neue Sachlichkeit. Dix’s version of Nietzsche, however, was a highly personal one: His assimilation of the core of Nietzsche’ s philosophy took place within the framework of his own skeptical and clear-sighted view of the world, his particular way of seeing, which had become an integral part of his character. One of Otto Dix’s earliest paintings, dated 1911, is entitled Flower and Decay (see page 10). The arrangement of a flowering stem in a vase next to a skull is overly programmatic. These two traditional

motifs of still-life painting are classic symbols of the polar opposition between life and death. The confrontation between them strikes an academic, illustrative note, especially in the composition, with

the arrangement of the two objects together in front of the window.

Nevertheless, the picture clearly

documents the emergence of Dix’s central theme: that of the indissoluble link between Eros and death. In the early drawings and gouaches, such as Woman Squatting or Walpurgis Night (see pages 12 and 15), the explosive power of the way in which Dix wields the pencil, pen, or brush betokens a singular energy and directness in confronting the most elemental forms of human experience: procreation, birth, suffering, and death. Dix’s starting point is always the human body. In his early work, this physical emphasis is located in a generalized mythological context. The bodies are healthy, firm-fleshed, and muscular, unlike those in his work after 1918, where social contradictions are the prime focus of attention. The central feature of these early works is the mythical image of the eternal cycle of procreation, birth, and death. Sensuality and womanhood appear as sources of a mysterious, untamed power, tempting yet threatening. This vision also informs Pregnant Woman (see page 40), which is the first of a series of paintings given over to this subject, continuing well into the 1930s. The work is a celebration of plenitude and fertility, reproducing the bulge of the womb in a number of variations. Dix shapes the body from circles and spirals, using blue and red, the respective colors of heaven and earth, and thereby creates an image which perfectly captures the primal nexus between Eros and life: The spherical form of the woman’s bulging stomach merges into the round shape of the earth itself. This celebration of Eros, lust, and life was changed by the experience of war. Sexual perversion, prostitution, and physical deformity now began to dominate Dix’s work. In 1914, like most of his contemporaries, Dix volunteered for military service. Throughout Europe, the younger generation positively welcomed the war, seeing it as a sign that the old order, with its narrow, repressive outlook, was finally on the way out, and that a new age was dawning. This euphoria was shared by Expressionist poets, such as Jakob Van Hoddis, Johannes R. Becher, and Klabund (Alfred Henschke), and even by

the majority of German university professors, who began furiously writing pamphlets summoning the nation to join in the “struggle,” referring to the war as a “miracle” and “a divine blessing.” For the just war does not only kill, it also creates. It destroys, but it also calls new values into being. The greatest enemy of culture is also the mightiest begetter.”

Such, for example, was the view of Otto von Glerke, one of the leading legal thinkers of his day and the head of the Berlin school of German law. The glorification of war in this way was by no means limited to Germany, however: French intellectuals and artists held similar opinions. Guillaume Apollinaire’s “farewell to a whole period” is a representative example of the French attitude. The Italian Futurists, led by Umberto Boccioni and Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, also saw the war as a purifying influence and an opportunity for a new beginning— war being, as Marinetti put it in 1909, “the world’s only hygiene.” ® In order to understand these notions of war as the great savior of mankind, it is necessary to look at the context from which they emerged. It was at the Emperor Wilhelm’s society —its hidebound (1) K. Böhme, ed., Anrufe und Reden deutscher Professoren im Ersten Weltkrieg. Stuttgart, 1975, p. 67. (2) Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, “Manifeste du Futurisme,” IX, Le Figaro, Paris, 2.20.1909.

13

regimen and restrictive climate pervaded by a moral hypocrisy which the young in particular found obnoxious— that the slogans linking war with progress, dynamism, and energy were directed. The appeal of these images was short-lived, however, for the actual experience of war in all its naked brutality

had an immediate disillusioning effect on the young men arriving in the trenches. In 1914, following the retreat from Grodek, the poet Georg Trakl wrote the following lines, expressing his overwhelming sense of horror at what he had seen: | In the evening, the autumn woods echo with the rumbling Of deadly weapons, the golden plains And blue lakes, in the sky above, the sun

Rolls more darkly; the night embraces Dying warriors, the wild lament Of their broken mouths. The poem is almost a paraphrase of Dix’s painting Dying Soldier (1915, Otto Dix Foundation, Vaduz), in which the agony of violent death is directly translated into form and color. Trakl committed suicide in 1914 in a military hospital in Cracow. The comments of the young Otto Dix on the war, in which he fought in the front line, are remarkably similar to the views he expressed some forty years later. On this evidence, to accuse him of glorifying war is just as inaccurate as it is to label his work as pacifist on the basis of the War cycle of engravings from 1924-1925 and the War triptych of 1929-1932. In 1915-1916, Dix noted in his diary: Lice, rats, barbed wire, fleas, shells, bombs, underground caves, corpses, blood, liquor, mice, cats, gas, artillery, filth, bullets, mortars, fire, steel: that is what war is! It is all the work of the Devil!®

This diary, which, in the words of the Dix specialist Otto Conzelmann, was “scarred by the hailstorms of the war,” was intended as a simple record of the repetitive day-to-day happenings of the war. As a noncommissioned officer, Dix was responsible for drawing up the duty roster, and whole pages of the journal are taken up with lists of soldiers’s names, together with the places, times, and dates of their turns of duty. Between November 1915 and December 1916, Dix saw service in Champagne, in the trenches of Artois, and on the Somme, where he was involved in two major battles. The fortysix postcards from the front (now in the collection of the Gera Art Gallery in the German Democratic Republic) which Dix wrote between 1915 and 1916 form a chronicle of the war, narrated ina series of bare but incisive sketches. Trench warfare often involved endless hours of sitting and waiting in dugouts and underground shelters. Many years later, Dix recalled that it was fun “to be able to draw in the midst of boredom and misery.”“ And he maintained that it was important to have seen the “coldness” and “inhumanity” of the trenches. The postcards, like the war diary, are also significant as biographical documents, illuminating as they do the personality of an artist for whom war was indeed, as Heraclitus said, “the father of all things,” that is, the decisive spur to his creative development.

As well as being a highly sensitive individual, Dix had the restless, inquiring mind of an explorer, probing into every aspect of life. At the same time, there was also a strong critical, skeptical element in his (1) V. W. Killy and H. Szklenar, Georg Trakl. Historisch-kritische Ausgabe, Vol. 1, Salzburg, 1969, p. 167. (2) Otto Dix, War Diary 1915-1916 (now in the collection of the Städtische Galerie, Albstadt), p. 25. (3) Otto Conzelmann, in the catalogue Otto Dix, Bestandskatalog, Stiftung Walther Groz in der Städtischen Galerie Albstadt,

1985, p. 32.

(4) Diether Schmidt, op. cit., p. 261.

14

Walpurgis Night, 1914. Brush, pen and ink, 17'Js" x 1314” (43.5 X 35 cm) Städtische Galerie, Albstadt, Federal Republic of Germany. Walther Groz Collection 19

outlook. This combination of involvement and distance in his relationship with reality is reflected in both his early and his later comments on the war and his drawings, engravings, and paintings on the subject. The combination is also characteristic of the general way in which Dix lived and perceived the world throughout his artistic career. Remarks in his diary such as “corpses are impersonal” ® and “war, too, must be a manifestation of nature”® are echoed in a conversation with friends in 1963 on art, religion, and war:

These were all things that I simply had to experience. The experience of somebody falling down next to me, dead, with a bullet straight through him. I needed that experience, I wanted it. So I am not a pacifist at all. Or perhaps I was an inquisitive person.

I had to see it all for myself. I am such arealist, you know, that I have to

see everything with my own eyes, in order to make sure that it is really like that.

In an interview he gave in 1961, Dix explained: War is horrible: hunger, lice, mud, terrifying noises. It is all completely different. You see, before the early paintings, I had the feeling that there was a dimension of reality that had not been dealt with in art: the dimension of ugliness. The war was a dreadful thing, but there was something awe-inspiring about it: There was no question of me missing out on that! You have to have seen people out of control in that way to know anything about man.“ These comments, made toward the end of the artist’s life, are entirely in keeping with the young Dix’s view of war as a natural phenomenon, the product of sheer human aggression. This attitude toward struggle, suffering, and death can already be seen in Dix’s prewar work, but emerges in a more concentrated form in the paintings, drawings, and sketches of 1914-1915. In depicting the destruction wrought by war, Dix is concerned to grasp and portray events as a whole, rather than to concentrate on individual aspects. A large number of the drawings from this period testify to Dix’s fascination with the image of the earth itself as a victim of the war, with its surface torn apart and its entrails revealed by the bombs and shells. Drawings such as Ruined Homesteads, Village Destroyed by Artillery, and Trench with Flowers (all dated 1915 and in the Walther Groz Collection, Stadtische

Galerie Albstadt) and the gouaches Flare (see page 20) and Evening Sun, Ypres (see page 37) are characterized by an angular, broken line, thickening in places to give a Cubist appearance; the overall impression is one of fragmentation. Rather than being sharply defined, the contours are overlaid with crosshatching which diminishes the plastic quality of the works but generates a spatially expansive effect. The savagery of the war, the sudden, eruptive violence of detonating shells and bombs, night attacks, and ambushes are directly evoked by the technique: The broken, jagged line of the drawing appears to be the result of an explosion. The figures of the men fighting are enclosed in clusters of geometrical lines which establish them as a part of nature, of the destruction surrounding them. In the dugouts and trenches, the soldiers lived in an almost continuous underground darkness. This is captured in the chalk, India ink, or charcoal surfaces of Dix’s drawings, with their careful use of shading to indicate

the nuances of light and dark in the subterranean gloom. Ruined buildings, rubble, Very lights shooting

across the sky, exploding shells, the soldiers’ largely underground existence —in every one of its many aspects, the war conjures up a general image of chaos and disintegration. Dix’s technique was rooted in this experience. The broken lines and tendency toward abstraction in his drawings and gouaches mirror the disintegration of physical and organic unity which confronted Dix on all sides. The war, (1) Otto Dix, War Diary, p. 50.

(2) Ibid., p. 107. (3) Quoted in Diether Schmidt, op. cit., p. 255. (4) Quoted in Hans Kinkel, “Der Unerbittliche. Zum siebzigsten Geburtstag des Malers Otto Dix am 2. Dezember,” in Stuttgarter Zeitung, 12.1.1961.

16

BILLIARDS

PLAYERS,

1914.

Oil on cardboard, 20'/16” X 2211” (51 X 56,5 cm) Private Collection



A further important feature of these etchings is the way in which Dix uses the needle to create a wide variety of graphic effects. Continuing in the experimental vein of the 1915-1916 drawings, Dance

of Death, Anno 1917 (Dead Man Salient) is a virtuoso exercise in chiaroscuro (see page 32). The crumpled

bodies of the soldiers, seen from an aerial perspective, are illuminated and exposed in all their pathetic vulnerability by a flickering light breaking through the nocturnal gloom. The limbs are so grotesquely twisted that their appearance has a distancing effect. This sense of alienation is captured in Dance, where a hiatus become apparent between the blind, unthinking act of destruction and its concrete results; perceiving act and result as two separate realities, the human mind is incapable of grasping the connection between them. Dix did not intend his depiction of war as an accusation or a warning; all he wanted to do was unburden himself of his own experiences. Interviewed in 1964 about the war triptych which he painted between 1929 and 1932 in Dresden, Dix explained: I did the picture ten years after the First World War. In the meantime, I had done a lot of preliminary studies, looking at ways of dealing with the war in my paintings. In 1928, after I had been working on the subject for several years, I finally felt ready

to tackle it properly. At that point, incidentally, in the Weimar Republic, promoting a notion of long since been rejected as an absurdity. People terrible suffering that the war had caused. That the triptych.

there were a lot of books circulating heroism which, in the trenches, had were already beginning to forget the was the situation in which I painted

Only a year after the completion of the work, on January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany by the aged President Hindenburg. Dix, who had held a professo rship at the Dresden Academy since 1927, was dismissed without notice and banned from exhibiti ng his work. As early as 1928, there had been indications that the Weimar Republic was on the verge of collapse. From 1929 onward, following a sharp rise in the unemployment figures, support for the Nazi party grew apace. In returning once more to the subject of war and dealing with it on such a monumental scale, the triptych seems almost to contain a premonition of events to come and of Dix’s personal fate. The work received just one public showing, in the 1932 autumn exhibiti on at the Prussian Academy in Berlin. Immediately afterward, it had to be packed up and hidden from the Nazis. Dix’s decision to use the form of the medieval altarpiece was careful ly considered. His intention was to establish an analogy between the religious idea of the Crucifixion and the secular martyrdom of modern man (see pages 30-31). In respect of its structure, the work is modeled to a certain extent on the Isenheim Altarpiece by Mathis Gothart Nithart (better known as Matthias Griinewald). The content, however, is entirely the product of Dix’s imagination. A sense of cyclical succession, evoking the temporal infinity of Hell, is introduced by the morning-noon -night organization of the picture. In the left-hand section, a column of soldiers is marching into battle in the early morning mist. The battle itself, with all its terrible consequences, is depicted in the wooden central panel. A soldier wearing a gas mask, the only survivor from his unit, crouches under the ruined arch of a bridge, on which a corpse is impaled. The scene in the background is an apocaly ptic vision of trenches and craters, reminiscent in its composition of the central section of the Isenheim Altarpiece. The final version of the right-hand section, executed after several sketches, shows Dix himself having escaped from the inferno and having managed to rescue a wounded comrade. On the predella, the base of the work, drama gives way to tranquillity in the image of the exhaust ed soldiers collapsed in a deathlike sleep. As the interpretations of the work have shown, it is particu larly important to consider the technical aspect of the painting. In the course of his preparations, Dix did numerous sketches in pencil and red chalk, and a watercolor sketch of the whole composition, together with a set of full-size cartoons, (1) Interview by Karl Heinz Hagen, Neues Deutsch land, December 1964, quoted in Diether Schmidt, op. cit., p. 262.

24

drawn to the same scale as the picture. As for the painting itself, Dix laboriously applied successive layers of tempera and oil, creating an effect which befits the analytical tone of the picture.

The first artistic expression of the radical shift in awareness produced by the war was Dadaism, an anarchistic, even nihilistic movement attack-

ing every target in sight, including Expressionism, the school of painting which up to the beginning of the First World War had been so self-consciously “revolutionary.” The “1918 Dada Manifesto” jeered: “Have the Expressionists lived up to the notion of an art which could brand the essence of life into our flesh?)

NO,

NOZNOIZDOESimilarly,

Carl

Einstein, one of the most original critics of the time, wrote in 1922: “We are sick of the paintslopping vulgarians, the Gauguins and Van Goghs. Enough of these Dionysian house painters.” ®

The mood of the time favored the politically active and socially critical artists, and the summons

Dying Soldier, 1924 Etching from the series “War,” Book III, Nr. 121

721 x 5®]ıs (19.8 X 14.8 cm)

(1) Quoted by Uwe M. Schneede, “Verismus und Neue Sachlichkeit,” in the catalogue Paris-Berlin, 1900-1933, op. cit.,p. 182.

(2) Ibid., p. 182.

Wounded Soldier (Fall 1916, Bapaume) 1924

Etching from the series “War,” Book I, Nr. 101 Tle A ge (197 % 29 C7)

23

BATTLEFIELD

IN FLANDERS,

1934-1936

Mixed media on canvas, 78/4” X 987/16” (200 x 250 cm)

Staatliche Museen, Preussischer Kulturbesitz

Nationalgalerie, Berlin

27

to assist in establishing democracy met with a wide response. In 1919, the year in which Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus in

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ty, for a sober, realistic view of the world.

The term was introduced to the art world in Postcard from the Front: Machine Gun Post, 1916 Pencil, 3°]; x 3°] (9.2 X 9.2 cm) Kunstgalerie Gera, German Democratic Republic

1925 by G.F. Hartlaub, the director of the Kunsthalle in Mannheim, who applied it to the work of “those artists who have retained, or rediscovered, a fervent commitment

to concrete, living reality.”

According to

Hartlaub, the movement was divided into two wings: “On the right, the Neo-Classicists, so to speak and on the left, the adherents of Verism, such as Beckmann, Grosz, Dix, Drexel, and Scholz.” ®

As a reaction to the extravagant rhetoric and stylistic confusion of Expressionism, Neue Sachlichkeit in art meant a return to the object, to the sober, matter-of-fact depiction of real life. War, the city, prostitution, and lower-middle-class mores were the preferred themes of the movement, which focused its

attention on what it saw as the decadence and hypocrisy of postwar society. Many of the Neue Sachlichkeit artists, especially George Grosz, Rudolf Schlichter, and Georg Scholz,

Postcard from the Front: Lagoerde (Russia), 1917 Charcoal on cardboard, 3°)" x 5°); (9.1 X 13.6 cm) Kunstgalerie Gera, German Democratic Republic

viewed their work as a medium for promoting the cause of revolutionary political and social change, and loudly proclaimed their intentions. Dix, on the other hand, deliberately abstained from making any kind of political statement; indeed, on several occasions, he

openly professed to be uninterested in politics. In 1919, for example, when invited (1) Fritz

Schmalenbach, “The Term ‘Neue Sachlichkeit’,” in The Art Bulletin, XXII (1940),

a

(2) Idid., p. 161.

28

The Breakout, 1917 Chalk, 157" x 16 |

(993 X 413 cu)

Städtische Galerie, Albstadt Federal Republic of Germany Walther Groz Collection

by his friend Conrad Felixmüller, the painter and convinced pacifist, to join the German Communist party, of which Felixmüller was a founding member, Dix replied brusquely: “Do not bother me with

your silly politics. I would rather go to a whorehouse.”“ 1965, he explained:

Many years later, in an interview held in

No, I never got involved with any sort of political program, probably because I could not stand all the jargon. When they came along and started making speeches, I switched off at once. I did not want to get roped in.”

This marked aversion to political ideologies and to all forms of narrow doctrinal thinking set Dix apart from the majority of the Neue Sachlichkeit artists, and directly contradicts the received view of his (1) Conrad Felixmüller, Werke und Dokumente, Archiv für bildende Kunst am Germanischen Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg, 1981-1982, p. 75.

(2) Interview by Maria Wetzel, op. cit., p. 746.

29

(TRIPTYCH WITH PREDELLA) 1929 1952 Mixed media on wood Staatliche Kunstsammlun gen Neue Meister, Dresden German Democratic Republ IC WAR

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Postcard from the Front: Self-portrait, 1917 Pencil, 3°|s” X 5°lt6” (9.2 X 14.2 cm) Kunstgalerie Gera, German Democratic Republic

32

work as embodying a social message. The later interpretation is based largely on the fact of Dix’s workingclass background and his self-consciously proletarian manner. In 1919, Dix went back to Dresden, where he stayed until 1922. Asa pupil in Otto Gussmann’s master class, he had the use of a studio in the state-sponsored Academy of Arts on the Brühl Terrace. In addition, he received the loyal support and encouragement of Felixmüller. It was he who introduced Dix to the “Group 19,” a group of Dresden Secession artists whose members included Will Heckrott, Lasar Segall, Otto Schubert, Constantin Mitschke-Collande, and Hugo

Zehder. Dix’s first contacts with patrons in Düsseldorf and with art dealers were also established through Felixmüller, who thus enabled the young artist to begin earning a modest living. In a 1920 issue of the Düsseldorf magazine “Das Ey,” Felixmiller describes Dix’s Dadaist phase immediately after the war. Prompted by the example of the Berlin circle around his friend George Grosz, Dix took to creating pictures “stuck together out of paper, glass, cloth, wood, fur, lace, seashells,

lumps of iron, cushions, and old family albums; all very BE : i 5 naturalistic and representational.”® This was the time at which Dix was producing works such as Fritz

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Müller, the Sailor from Pieschen (1919, private collection, Turin), Match Peddler I (1920, Württembergische Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart), Altar for Cavaliers (1920,

private collection, Berlin), and Souvenir of Mirrored Halls in Brussels (see page 48). In The Cardplayers (see page 42), Prager Strasse (see page 43), and The Barricade (all from 1920; the latter work was destroyed while in storage in 1954), the war is portrayed as a savage farce. Biting sarcasm is Dix’s response to the brutishness of his fellow human beings as they play their malevolent parlor games which so clearly demonstrate the fact of man’s inhumanity to man. Such cynicism is hardly surprising in one who had recently escaped from the inferno. Dix’s bitter, grotesque humor lent an added sharpness to the Dadaists’ contemptuous rejection of all positive values or ideals. The skat players in The Cardplayers and the cripples in Prager Strasse, formerly one of Dresden’s most elegant shopping streets, resemble clockwork puppets, put together out of spare parts and leftover bits of human debris. Dix establishes a brilliant visual analogy between the figures of the war (1) Peter

Barth,

Catalogue

anaes ee

of Otto

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Dix und die Düsseldorfer

Diisseldorf: Galerie Remmert und

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invalids with their artificial limbs in Prager Strasse and the plaster torsos and busts of the shop-window

dummies behind them: Both, as it were, have been constructed out of odd bits and pieces.

In a pen-and-ink drawing, the Dadaist self-portrait of 1920 (private collection), Dix depicts himself in a mood of contemptuous nihilism, occasioned by the circumstances of the time. Various visual pointers are built into the picture, in addition to the word “Ahoy,” painted in large letters, and the sentence “That is Dix, i.e. Alpha and Omega, beyond time and place.” The back of the drawing bears the caption “I shall exact revenge for the sins and virtues of my forbears. Dix.” “Attack” was Dix’s watchword in the postwar years. As Carl Einstein declared in 1923, the aim was to attack: In a sober, austere manner, without thrusting into the foreground the kind of false personality that deals in mildly humorous puns rather than statements of fact. Dix boldy confronts the world of kitsch, the ludicrous world of the stupid and cunning bourgeois, wading fatly in stifling mediocrity.” Despite the idealism that set him apart from Dix, Felixmiiller continued to watch over and assist his protégé from the sidelines. It was Felixmiiller who taught Dix the techniques of etching and lithography, enabling him to send off his first set of etchings to the Galerie Ey in Düsseldorf in the summer of 1920. The works were quickly sold. Dix wrote a number of letters to the art dealer Johanna Ey, listing his “art consignments,” as he called them. At this point he was already looking for a studio in Düsseldorf. In October 1921 he visited the city at the invitation of Johanna Ey and Dr. Hans Koch, the physician, art collector, and first husband of Dix’s future wife Martha Koch. Düsseldorf, where Dix lived and worked from 1922 to 1925, took on a decisive importance in terms of his career and his personal life. In a frequently quoted passage in her memoirs, “Mother” Ey describes Dix’s arrival in Diisseldorf: All the finest food and drink I could muster was assembled ready for the reception. And presently he arrived, in a flowing cape and a large hat, and kissed my hand in greeting, which was an unusual thing for me in those days. In the morning he unpacked his box to reveal patent leather shoes, a variety of perfumes, and a hair-net: all kinds of grooming equipment.”

Dix’s dandyish appearance, his brilliantined, slicked-back hair and American-style suits, again sharply contradict the myth of the proletarian artist. On the contrary, Dix was an arrogant patron of bars, a charmer and seducer, and a superb dancer. He made an immediate impression on Martha Koch, whose marriage to Hans Koch had already entered a serious crisis. Together with her husband, she ran a graphics gallery called the “Kunsthandlung von Berg,” which mainly dealt in French artists such as Georges Bracque, Maurice de Vlaminck, and Marie Laurencin, but also featured the work of Macke, Georg Schrimpf, Ernst Seehaus, and Emil Nolde. When Dix showed his pictures August to Hans Koch, the gallery owner promptly bought Sa/on I (1921, private collection) and Salon II (1921, missing) and commissioned Dix to paint his portrait. Martha recalled her first encounter with Dix as follows:

Before I saw him, I imagined him as a young man with blond hair and covered in spots. His hair really was blond, and above all he was a very lively person. I discover ed that he was a stunningly good dancer. Hans found dancing silly and went to extra lengths to be awkward. It was dreadful. I was wildly keen on dancing, and we decided to get a phonograph. We drank as well. From great big glasses, holding a quarter of a liter of wine. (1) Carl Einstein, “Otto Dix,” in Das Kunstblatt, VII (1923), pp. 97-102. (2) Anna Klapeck Mutter Ey, Eine Düsseldorfer Künstlerlegende, Düsseldor f, 3rd ed., 1978, p..28: (3) Lothar Fischer, Otto Dix, Ein Malerleben in Deutschland, Berlin: Nicolaische Verlagsbuchhandlung,

34

1981, p. 30.

Whore with War Cripple, 1923 Pen and ink, 19" x 14" (47 X 37.3 cm) Westfälisches Landesmuseum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte, Münster

oe

Unlike Martha, though, Dix had a weak head for alcohol. Together, they were the perfect couple, at least on the dance floor. At one stage, they even planned to enter public competitions together even if the main motive for this idea was to improve their financial position. Dix’s favorite dance was the shimmy, one of the fashionable new American dances which came over with the Charleston. At that time, Europe was in the grip of a dance craze. Jazz had emerged from the southern states of the U.S.A. to conquer the world. Americanism was all the rage; to young artists and intellectuals,

America

seemed

like the

Promised Land. The products of the U.S. mass entertainment industry — stage spectaculars and revues, Broadway comedies, and the films

of Charlie Chaplin— were gaining increasing acceptance in Germany.

Dix’s passion for dancing the shimmy earned him the nicknames “Jim” and “Jimmy.” “Toy” was another sobriquet for Dix, who followed the cult of Americanism in his customary ironic fashion. His involvement with Martha Koch grew steadily more intense, and Hans Koch Apotheosis, 1919 insisted on petitioning for divorce. A year Woodcut, 11's” X 73/4” (28.2 X 19.8 cm) passed before the divorce proceedings were Private Collection completed, but at last, in February 1923, Otto Dix and Martha Koch were able to marry, at a civil ceremony attended only by a small group of close friends. Neither of them was in favor of noisy celebrations: “We simply bought some stuff in a shop, made a chilled punch, and that was it,” was Martha Dix’s subsequent comment on the event.”

Unlike her new husband, Martha Dix came from a wealthy, upper-middle-class background. Born in Cologne on July 19, 1895, she grew up in Mannheim and Frankfurt, surrounded by governesses and servants; she had learned music and several languages from tutors.

Her father, Bernhard Lindner,

was the director of an insurance company. Together with her two older brothers andasister, Maria, with whom she had aparticularly close relationship, Martha spent her childood and youth in the carefree atmosphere of a liberal, cosmopolitan household. The family took a close interest in the latest literary and cultural developments, and Maria, a supporter of the pacifist cause, subscribed to the left-wing journal “Die Aktion,” edited by Franz Pfemfert. Martha Dix ridiculed any suggestions that she and Dix were mismatched. Marriages between partners of different social classes were by no means uncommon in the 1920s, with self-assured, emancipated women from wealthy families generally taking the initiative in forming attachments with men from the proletariat. With her strong personality and critical intellect, Martha Dix was well equipped to cope with Dix’s awkward personality. Before finally settling with her husband in Diisseldorf, she accompanied him on a trip to Dresden. Both she and Dix were in

(1) Ibid., p. 50.

36

EveEnıng Sun, YPrEs, 1918. Gouache, 15°)” X 16'/,” (39.2 X 41.3 cm) Städtische Galerie, Albstadt, Federal Republic of Germany. Walther Groz Collection

ah

an exuberant mood, despite their perpetual money worries, and Dix attacked his work with renewed zest and inspiration. He did a series of sketches of himself and “Mutzli,” as he affectionately called his wife; these, like the letters and postcards to Hans and Maria Koch (Hans had meanwhile married Martha’s sister, Maria), mirror the happiness and joie de vivre of the young couple. In a drawing done in 1921 and dedicated to “Mutzli Koch, as a memento” (see page 62), Dix contrives, using only a few fine pencil lines and alittle shading, to characterize his wife in all her elegance, with her large, expressive eyes and remarkable aura. A month later, he drew a self-portrait as a companion piece, showing himself as “Toy,” eager for action, with jutting chin and slightly narrowed eyes, gazing boldly out at the viewer (see title page). One of the most important works of the early 1920s was The Artist’s Parents I (see page 47), which was painted in 1921 and bought by Johanna Ey. She hung the painting in the window of her gallery, and later described the reaction of the public: “People laughed at it and said things like ‘A fine set of parents they are!’”® As always in Dix’s portraits, the hands and faces are heavily emphasized. The two old people are seated at an angle to each other, dressed in simple working clothes. Their arms, heavy but relaxed, rest on their knees; the broad hands bear the marks of manual labor. Tired,

but resigned to their lot, the father and mother have a somewhat reflective air as they sit and stare. There is no message to be found here about the exploitation of the working class; instead, Dix simply shows two people who have struggled all their lives to earn their daily bread. Continuing, in a series of variations, to exploit his central theme of the relationship between Eros and death, Dix devoted the majority of his attention to the outcasts of society, depicting the exotic and hence antibourgeois world of the fairground, the brothel, and the circus, and seizing on taboo subjects such as sex killings, sadomasochism, or the sexuality of old people. It was precisely the unpleasantness and forbidden character of these subjects, seen in bourgeois terms, that brought Dix’s debunking, liberating humor to the fore. Zuleika, The Tattooed Wonder, an oil painting done in 1920, is positively packed with instances of Dix’s salacious and grotesque wit (see page 57). As Martha Dix explained, Otto “was very interested in tattoos; he bought a book from a master on the craft, containing all the crude patterns he used.” The painting, however, was not based on the book. The woman in the picture did actually exist: She appeared in German seaports and in the Near East under the name of Maud Arizona. Until the First World War and even during the war itself, tattooed performers of this kind were objects of fascination to a sensation-seeking public.

Their bodies, decorated from head to foot, were the

deliberately provocative expression of a world diverging from the norm.

Zuleika’s tattoos transform her into a work of art: Her skin is embellished with a multitude of images and symbols. With evident relish, Dix imitates and ironizes the folk art techniques of tattooing, exploiting its entire repertoire of motifs. The picture contains images with political implications, such as that of the imperial eagle poised on the globe of Europe, with the various national flags hanging down by

its side, the Iron Cross, the cross on a soldier’s grave, and the rear view of a soldier with a Prussian helmet and a death’s head. The other tattoos include a bareback rider, a balancing act and other acrobats,

a ship in full sail and a couple embracing; together with common symbols of good luck, such as the sun, the little baroque angels, a rose, a pierced heart, and a wheel of fortune; signs of the zodiac, and animal images such as the snake, the butterfly, and the horse’s head. The symbols Dix used were the ones to which he had a personal relationship. They are the icons of a private mythology, elements of which are already to be found in the early self-portraits, such as in Self-portrait Smoking (see page 18). In the painting Longing (see page 23), Dix’s “secret” symbols—the sun, the moon, the rose (1) Catalogue, Otto Dix und die Düsseldorfer Künstlerszene, 1920-1925, op. cit., p. 41. (2) Martha Dix, Letter to the author, 3.31.1981.

38

with the face inscribed on it, and the bull’s head— appear to emerge directly from the artist’s head,

and are grouped around it like trophies. The rose, the moon, the sun, angels’ wings, the death’s head, and the wheel of fortune are constantly recurring motifs in the self-portraits of the period up to 1923.

There is a comic element in Zuleika, derived from the tortuously affected pose in which the subject is captured. Standing on her pedestal, Zuleika twists her body upward in an “artistic” manner, splaying her fingers in all directions, in order to emphasize the elaborate decoration which makes her such an exceptional attraction. In the midst of the coarse fairground atmosphere, however, Zuleika also embodies the dream of sensual fulfillment, of a life centered on sheer physical pleasure. Dix recognized that there is a close relationship between humor and sensuality. In an interview he gave in 1965 he explained: Yes it is wonderful that the world is so grotesque, so dialectical! On the one hand, solemnity, and on the other, comedy.

So contradictory!

That the two are so closely

linked, is a kind of ... well, it is not exactly something I discovered singlehandedly, but they seemed to me to be connected. No, I always took pleasure in the fact that life was like that; that is the whole point, that everything is not candy-colored and wonderful. You can see people as big, or very small, or even as animals. Human nature would not be complete without that. No, I was not at all troubled by realizing all this....

After all, there is humor.”

As further examples will show, humor was a fundamental part of Dix’s view of the world. Interconnected contradictions, the proximity of the solemn to the comic—these were insights which Dix found liberating rather than disturbing. In two series of etchings done in 1922, Circus and Death and Resurrection, Dix once more pays homage to the imagery of an “opposing world.” Maud Arizona, the Zuleika of the painting, appears twice in Circus; the series also features a troop of acrobats, an absurd balancing act in which a young woman balances a fully laid table on the root of her nose, an equestrian act (see pages 50 and 51), and a humorous skit. The six etchings in the series Death and Resurrection— The Sex Murder, The Suicide (see pages 54 and 55), Pregnancy, The Barricade, Dead Soldier, and The Burial—boldly confront the fact of

death, even in its most violent forms. Dix skillfully walks the tightrope between horror and comedy, such as in The Sex Murder, in which he shows two dogs copulating in front of the woman’s mutilated corpse. The message of the piece, conveyed in highly emphatic visual terms, is that extremes converge, that life implies death and vice versa. At this juncture in his career, Dix was eager for confrontation. Often enough, his wish was granted, to a greater extent than he really wanted. In the etching Girl at Mirror (see page 53), Dix makes powerful use of a motif which perfectly encapsulates the ambivalence of the relationship between beauty and ugliness, youth and age, health and decay, reality and appearance, and which has fascinated artists and poets ever since classical times. The mirror reveals the true physical state of a woman who, seen from the back, could indeed be taken fora girl, as the title ironically calls her. An aging whore is desperately trying to make herself look younger in order to keep on attracting customers. She has adorned and arrayed her worn body, with its sagging breasts, in the way that she used to do in her youth. Standing stooped in front of a large full-length mirror, she is captured as she raises her right hand to her temple, perhaps in order to smooth down a stray lock of the hair she has so artfully arranged around her head. She wears a vertically striped corset whose plunging decolletage is trimmed with lace: a garment which clearly displays her ravaged, age-shriveled breasts in the reflection of the mirror. Any erotic expectations which might have been aroused by the sight of the cross-lacing and decorative (1) Interview by Maria Wetzel, op. cit., p. 743-744.

„>

PREGNANT

WOMAN

LOM

Oil on canvas a I (133) XX WZ Gin)

Collection Dr. F. Valentien Stuttgart

40

trimmings on the back of the corset are promptly dashed by the revelation of the front view. The mirror pours derision on the woman’s wretched condition, but at the same time it also calls attention to her more glamorous past. Not just one, but two controversial themes can be seen in the picture: on the one hand, the subject, otherwise largely excluded from art, of the aging human body, and on the other, the almost equally taboo subject of prostitution. The mirror, doubly suspended from its usual conservative function, is allotted the task of revealing ugliness, and is, as it were, itself defiled in the process. Dix was, and indeed still remains, one of the few modern artists who have been bold enough to depict the decaying human body. Referring to this picture and to a number of others with the same theme, such as Venus in the Age of Capitalism (1921, private collection, U.S.A.), Dix commented, “Before

the early picture I had the feeling that there was a part of reality that had not been depicted: ugliness.”® Shortly before his death he qualified this statement, explaining: “I was not really seeking to depict ugliness. Everything I saw was beautiful.” Here we have a further illustration of Dix’s fundamental commitment to an ethos of open-minded, dispassionate observation. He was not in the least interested in conventional value judgments about beauty and ugliness. In addition to the etching of Girl at Mirror, Dix did a painting in 1921 with the same title, which was later lost. The painting closely resembled the etching. It triggered off a public outcry, and Dix was prosecuted on a charge of “circulating obscene pictorial matter.” The court eventually found in Dix’s favor—after his friend Lovis Corinth had testified on his behalf—and ruled that the state should bear the prosecution costs. Dix faced reactions of this kind on several occasions, culminating in his being officially labeled a “degenerate” artist in 1933. The year 1922 was especially productive. Dix did a pencil-and-watercolor drawing entitled Myself in Brussels (see page 60) and the painting Homage to Beauty (see page 45). Here, Dix portrays himself in the nonchalant pose of a salon dandy, one hand thrust into his pocket and the other holding a telephone receiver, against the background of a dancing hall decorated in the pseudoclassical manner. A certain irony is apparent in Dix’s painstaking attempt to convey an air of frigid aestheticism and pure surface. This picture is generally held to be a precursor of Dix’s second major work of the 1920s, the triptych of city life dating from 1927 to 1928. In the drawing Myself in Brussels, Dix is featured in army uniform, with a cigarette in the corner of his mouth and a look of salacious appraisal on his face as he stares after a young woman. She is walking in front of him, with head held high and a confident air, deliberately lifting her skirt with her right hand. The theme here is that of the woman as seductress, making a commercial bid for the man’s sexual interest. A number of other drawings and paintings in this vein—self-portraits of Dix together with either imaginary or real-life women—date from the same period. These works all point to a definite tension in Dix’s relations with women, to a conflict between desire and a resistance motivated by fear. Dix’s theme of the link between Eros and death is seen here as a vehicle for expressing highly personal, private concerns.

Between 1921 and 1923, a period in which Dix explored a wide range of different techniques, he did about four hundred watercolors, many of which, unfortunately, have since been lost. The individuality displayed in the use of color in these works places them among Dix’s finest pictures of the 1920s. Again, Dix turns to the lower depths of society for his subject matter, dealing mainly with prostitution and sexual crime. His portraits of prostitutes —E/lis (Walther Groz Collection, Städtische Galerie Albstadt), The Madame (Otto Dix Foundation, Vaduz), and Whore with Red Cheeks (Walther Groz Collection, Städtische Galerie Albstadt), for example — demonstrate a quite exceptional skill in the (1) Quoted in Diether Schmidt, op. cit., p. 279 ff. (2) Ibid., p. 279 12.

41

THE CARDPLAYERS, 1920 Oil and collage on canvas Asa

5a

(110 x87

PRAGER STRASSE, 1920 Oil on canvas cm)

é

Private Collection, Constance, Federal Republic of Germany

39°," & 314s (101'X Sf cm)

Galerie der Stadt, Stuttgart

43

application of color. By dint of the spontaneity and the translucent quality of their coloring, the pictures perfectly capture the seamy atmosphere of the demimonde. It was during Dix’s Düsseldorf years that his career as an artist began to take off. This was to a large extent the work of Johanna Ey, whose coffee shop near the Academy of Art was the favorite meeting place of a group of revolutionary artists known as the “Young Rhineland.” Its members included Gert Wollheim, Otto Pankok, Hermann Hundt, Arthur Kaufmann, Adalbert Trillhaase, Karl Schwesig, Jankel Adler, the poet Herbert Eulenberg, and the illustrator Adolf Uzarski. Unperturbed by the frequent uproar in the café and the offensive nature of much of her protégés’ art, Johanna Ey regularly exhibited their work in her window. And so the art dealer Johanna Ey was born, the great discoverer of young unknown talents, including “Dadamax” Ernst (Max Ernst), whose painting La Belle Jardiniére was later sold to the Kunstmuseum in Düsseldorf by “Mother” Ey. Dix was on particularly close terms with

Wollheim, Pankok, and “Manne” Hundt, and also with Kaufmann, the leader of the “Young Rhineland”

group from 1921 to 1925. It was Kaufmann who helped Dix out when he was broke, which was frequently. Martha Dix recalls how, on his first visit to Düsseldorf:

[Kaufmann] bought the picture Young Girl, a nude, got Dix to paint his portrait, and made him a present of one of his own suits in order to smarten him up. Dix had a permanent hole in the seat of his trousers, which was patched up every evening by Frau Ey, with whom Dix was lodging at the time, but he was so thin and bony that he invariably wore through the patch in the course of the following day.” Later Dix lived with his family in a house with a balcony and spacious rooms at 3 Hindenburgwall, which belonged to Trillhaase. Dix shared a studio with Wollheim for a brief period, then he was allotted a studio reserved for especially gifted young artists by Heinrich Nauen at the Academy of Art. It

was not Nauen, however, who influenced Dix’s development, but Wilhelm Herberholz, who taught

printing and graphic art at the academy. As Dix himself later said, Herberholz provided him with an opportunity “to try out all kinds of different techniques,” ® to experiment not only with etching but also with lithography, and thus enlarge his technical repertoire.

Dix’s portraits of his colleagues and friends, such as the painters Adolf Uzarski (see page 66), Jankel

Adler, and Arthur Kaufmann, the Trillhaase family, and the diminutive painter Karl Schweig, seen

with a model, are magnificent examples of his gift for the genre. What makes his portraits particularly exceptional is his talent for characterization, in presenting not only the individual but also the generally typical traits of a given subject. A number of Dix’s many portraits from the 1920s are ranked among the most important works in his euvre. His statements on portraiture provide significant hints about his approach:

Seeing is the basis of a good portrait. A person’s appearance is always an expression

of character; the exterior expresses the interior; in fact, the outside and the inside

are identical. This means that even the folds in a person’s clothing, his posture, his hands, his ears, all tell the painter something about his subject’s psychology. The ears are often more revealing than the eyes or the mouth.®:

A second comment, in a similar vein: “The exterior surface of things is important to me: It is by depicting the outside that one gets at the inside.” And on a further occasion: “The first impression is always the right one and has to be preserved in its original freshness. I only want to see the outside; (1) Martha Dix, Letter to Miriam Etz, daughter of Arthur Kaufmann, 2.17.1983. (2) Diether Schmidt, op. cit., p. 280.

(3) Ibid., p. 220.

(4) Otto Dix, “Gespräch im Wartezimmer.”

44

Quoted in Diether Schmidt, op. cit., p. 222.

EN

HomaceE to Beauty, 1922. Oil on canvas, 55'/s” x 48” (140 X 122 cm) Von der Heydt Museum, Wuppertal, Federal Republic of Germany

Portrait OF Dr. HEINRICH STADELMANN, 1922. Oil on canvas > 33. Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto

46

23 ‘/s” (90.8 X 61 cm)

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consumption,

striving

to

create a perfect illusion of happiness through wealth. The group of women in the righthand section, marching down an imaginary staircase, has the abstract appearance of a decorative pattern, an effect which is heightened by the ornamentation of the wall. These are high-class whores, with an air of almost military determination, bent on selling themselves at the highest price they can get. Dix inserts a blatant reminder of the commodity nature of sex by arranging the red cape and fur stole of the woman in the foreground in the shape of the female genitals. The woman behind her, whose largely bared breasts appear to continue into the flowing folds of material at her wrists,

represents the second major sexual symbol. ieee left-hand :

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milieu st the

common tart is evoked by the cobbled street, the red brick pier of the bridge which serves the prostitutes as their business premises, and the bargain-basement glamour of the women’s cheap dresses. Here, sexuality appears in its most blatant form. At the same time, it is wholly dominated by the cash nexus: The market mechanism already seen operating in the other two sections of the triptych is reduced to its barest, most elemental form. The figures in the left-hand section relate to their bodies with a frankness which society and the intellect tend to neutralize. In the period up to 1933, Dix did a number of other self-portraits, together with his portraits of the poet Theodor Daubler (Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Cologne) and the actor Heinrich George (see page 83), and the painting Melancholy (Otto Dix Foundation, Vaduz). When Hitler seized power in 1933, Dix was summarily dismissed from his post at the Prussian Academy of Arts in Dresden, on the official grounds that his pictures had offended the moral sensibilities of the German people and undermined the nation’s military morale. In Dix’s own words:

I was told that I was not to set foot in the Academy again. All my paintings were still in the building. But I had to get out immediately! Things have got bad in Saxony. The people there are particularly fanatical, although at the same time they have an easygoing side to them.” As late as the summer of 1933, Dix was able to score a considerable success with a selection of his portraits of children, which were shown in an exhibition by the New Dresden Secession. Nevertheless, (1) Lothar Fischer, op. cit., p. 98.

62

the situation was becoming increasingly dangerous for him and his family. The first exhibition of “degenerate” art, entitled “Reflections of Degeneracy,” was opened in Septemb er in the Dresden town hall. In the same year, there was an exhibition with the title “The Spirit of November: Art in the Service of Demoralization.” These efforts were followed in 1937 by the traveling exhibition of “Degenerate Art” organized by the cultural section of Goebbels’s Ministry of Propaganda and shown in Munich, Berlin, Dresden, and Diisseldorf. Dix was banned from exhibiti ng in 1934, and two hundred and sixty

of his works, including the paintings The War Cripples and Trench Warfare, were confiscated from various German collections. In the autumn of 1933, Dix and his family moved from Dresden to the shores of Lake Constance. After spending three uncomfortable years at Schloss Randegg near Singen, they settled house of their own in the village of Hemmenhofen. At the end of 1933, Dix began work in a newly built on the allegorical painting The Seven Deadly Sins (see page 70). Here the personified vices have joined forces and banded together as a group to lead humanity down the path of destruction. Avarice is represen ted by the bent figure of the old witch. The dwarflike creature perching on her back—whose Hitler moustache is of course a later addition made after 194 — stands 5 for Envy. Behind the pair comes

the rest of the infernal band: Sloth allied with Death, Anger in the shape of the Devil, Lust symbolized by the woman, Pride with a mouth resembling an anus, and abizarre figure wearing a kind of pot on its head representing gluttony. Written ona crumbling wall is the sentence from Nietzsche’s “Thus Spake Zarathustra”: “Die Waiste wachst, weh dem, der Wüsten birgt!? (The desert grows, woe to him

who harbors deserts!). No further commentary is required in order to detect the critical intentions behind the allegory. In another painting, Triumph of Death, done in 1934-1935

(Otto Dix

Foundation,

Vaduz),

Dix again launches a pictorial broadside against a world which has seemingly gone mad. Two other pictures, The Temptation of St. Anthony, done in 1937, and Lot and His Daughters, dated

Mad Woman, 1925 Pencil, 17416’ X 13® 16’ (43.4 X 35.2 cm) Galerie der Stadt, Stuttgart

1939 (Stadtisches Suermont-Ludwig-Museum,

Aachen), also use allegory as a means of social criticism. Dix’s distaste for the megalomania of the period is reflected in the deliberately overstated coloring with its strong hint of kitsch, the excessively sentimental portrayal of the female figures, and the bombastic depiction of the landscape, which is redolent of the operas of Wagner. In the background of Lot and His Daughters, Dix presents an imaginary vision of Dresden in flames: The Briihl Terrace, the dome of the Frauenkirche, and the slender tower of

the Hofkirche are clearly recognizable. Just six years later, in 1945, Dresden did indeed go up in flames. In the 1930s and ’40s, Dix’s career entered an

interim phase dominated by personal and artistic problems caused by the political circumstances of the time. His pictures were branded as degenerate. Apart from a small number of paintings on biblical themes and occasional portraits done on commission and executed with scant

63

64

< NELLY WITH Toy, 1925

Tempera on wood AN 15h: DAX 395°em) Private Collection

NELLY AMID FLOWERS, 1924

Oil on canvas 31s % 2175 (81 X 55.5 cm) Private Collection

65

< PORTRAIT OF THE PAINTER ADOLF UZARSKI, 1923 Oil on canvas

43° X 29°) (110 X 76 cm) Kunstmuseum, Düsseldorf

SELF-PORTRAIT WITH Muse, 1924 , . Oil on canvas S14 XK 37a (8X 95 cm)

Museum Karl Ernst Osthaus, Hagen Federal Republic of Germany

67

PORTRAIT OF THE JOURNALIST SYLVIA VON HARDEN, 1926 Mixed media on wood, 47'/4” X 34°/s” (120 X 88 cm)

Musée National d’Art Moderne.

Centre National d’Art et de Culture Georges Pompidou, Paris

enthusiasm, Dix poured all his energy into landscape painting. The resulting works, painted with enormous care and precision, are technically superb. They are accompanied by a number of drawings, some of which are preliminary sketches and others compositions in their own right, done in India ink, pen-and-ink, and silver point, often touched up with red and white chalk. In 1938, while traveling in Switzerland, Dix took up watercolor painting again for the first time since the 1920s. These pictures formed the basis for no less than ten subsequent oil paintings. That Dix concentrated on painting in what he called the “old German exact style” is in itself an indication of the strain under which he was laboring. Landscape painting afforded a means of escape, a relatively value-free sphere in which to carry on working. Despite the mastery of their execution, the works produced in this period bear the signs of an internal conflict, of injuries inflicted by history. The injuries in Dix’s case are not those of a victim of political persecution. His suffering was rather the product of his view of life, with its semiromantic sense of homelesssness and hunger for meaning. Isolated as he was, Dix felt insecure and vulnerable. The style and manifestly traditional technique of Dix’s landscape paintings are to some extent attributable to the constraints imposed on the artists by the Nazi cultural policy. The Nazi art propagandists recommended the work of the late medieval Danube school led by Albrecht Altdorfer and the Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich as “exemplary models” of German landscape painting. Altdorfer and Friedrich were seen as providing suitable illustrations of Nazi ideas about the German soul and the nation. An example of this doctrine is to be found in the introduction to a portfolio of reproduction entitled “German Landscape Artists” and published in 1941: Romantic art is dominated bya landscape painting, especially by the work of C.D. Friedrich, who strove to find a new style of painting in which the countryside appears as a space between time and eternity.... No artist since C.D. Friedrich has succeeded in bringing the countryside to life in such a vivid fashion. Thus Caspar David Friedrich’s highly complex, dialectical presentation of nature is reduced to the status of popular genre art. At the time, a large number of landscapes were in fact painted which present trite and hackneyed renderings of motifs from Friedrich’s work. The majority of these pictures are mood pieces, in which the dominant perspective —a favorite device of Romantic painting —is that of a solitary observer, looking out over lush meadows and rolling fields toward the distant horizon. Otto Dix could hardly fail to be aware of the Friedrich cult and the official endorsement of the Danube school. He was undoubtedly familiar with Hitler’s laudatory references to “our German Romantics” in his speech at the opening of the First Exhibition of German Art in the newly built House of German Art in Munich. Dix, however, used the formal vocabulary of late medieval German and Romantic landscape painting in a manner entirely different from that of the Nazi epigones. In his work, traditional motifs are always clearly identified as historical references; they are thus deprived of their immediacy and held up for critical examination. By covert means, Dix attempted in his landscapes to express his rejection of the officially approved Nazi style. The nebulous character of the Nazi doctrine, with its ill-defined notions of soul and inwardness, left the individual artist a certain amount of room for

maneuver, which Dix exploited for his own purposes. The deliberately exaggerated technical perfection of his pictures is also a form of protest against the circumstances of the time. His landscapes are to be viewed as melancholy evocations of a Romantic sensibility which has now expired and passed into history. In the summer of 1934, Dix was joined in the Hegau, near Lake Constance, by Franz Lenk, an old friend from his student days in Dresden. The pair spent the summer months drawing and painting (1) W. Westecker, Introduction to the portfolio Deutsche Landschaftsbilder, I/II, ed. by Franz Eher, “Beauftragter des Fuehrers

für die Überwachung der gesamten geistigen und weltanschaulichen Schulung und Erziehung der NSDAP,” Central Publishing House of the NSDAP

(National-Socialist German Labor Party), Munich, 1941.

69

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UNEQUAL CouPpLe, 1925

Tempera on wood LO ite 239] (180 X 100 cm)

Galerie der Stadt, Stuttgart On extended loan from the Ministry of Culture of Baden-Wurttemberg

>.

(3) Ibid., p. 53.

12

Tue Dancer ANITA BERBER, 1925 Tempera and oil on plywood, 47'/4” X 257/16” (120 X 65 cm) Otto Dix Foundation, Vaduz, Liechtenstein

73

Riesengebirge, and Shattered Tree bear eloquent witness to this shift in attitude. The craggy mountain slopes and lowering skies which also feature in Dix’s paintings from the years 1940-1941 provide a further indication of the crisis through which he was passing.

It was at this point that Dix found an opportunity to see and explore the countryside of the Riesengebirge, on the border between Saxony and Czechoslovakia. At the invitation of a Silesian industrialist called Haselbach—a relative of the Bienert family, who were friends of Otto and Martha Dix—the artist paid several visits to the area in 1941 and 1942, painting such works as Aupa Valley (private collection, Munich), Small Pond (Prince von Reuss collection), and Great Valley (private collection).

While on

one of those visits, Dix was commissioned to do a series of pictures of the Riesengebirge with human figures in the landscape. This was a new departure for Dix, whose previous landscapes had excluded any human element. He carried out the task in his usual masterly fashion, but with little enthusiasm. His real concern as a painter lay elsewhere. In his landscapes, he was attempting to establish a temporal and spatial domain entirely removed from the hostile present; the countryside and the comforting routine of the changing seasons seemed to offer a refuge from the storm. Hence the meditative atmosphere of his pictures, in which the countryside becomes a private sanctuary catering to religious needs for which no other outlet is available.

Dix himself summed up his experience of the 1930s and ’40s in his usual laconic manner: In the Nazi era I painted landscapes by the score. There was nothing else to paint. So off I went into the countryside, drawing one tree, a couple of tress—things like that. I was banished into landscape. At first it was new to me. Now I have seen so much of it that I do not notice it anymore. It does not really interest me very much. It is people, people I am interested in.” The tone of world-weary resignation is immediately apparent. Dix may have never recovered from the psychological damage sustained during the Nazi period. For over a decade, his previously unbounded zest for life was throttled, and he even lost his characteristic sense of humor.

Dix was fortunate enough to remain more or less unmolested by the Nazis.

A dangerous situation

arose on one occasion, however, when Dix and his friend Friedrich Bienert were arrested in Dresden

on suspicion of being implicated in the attempted assassination of Hitler in the Biirgerbraukeller in Munich on November 8, 1939. The two men were interrogated for two weeks in a Gestapo prison, but were eventually allowed to go free. Former First World War comrades had testified in Dix’s favor, citing his honorable military record. The reason for Dix’s arrest lay in his past activities as a member, from 1927 to 1933, of the so-called Hirschen-Club (Stag Club) in Dresden. Founded by Bienert, an influential industrialist, the Hirschen-Club was a discussion group and social circle attended by, among others, Count Seebach, the director of the Dresden State Opera House, and the poet Paul Adler. By virtue of their membership of the club, which the Nazis considered suspect, Bienert and Dix were both on the Gestapo’s list of leading figures of the “Systemzeit,” the Nazi deprecatory term for the Weimar Republic. In February 1945, Dix again found himself in difficulties when he was conscripted into the “Volkssturm,” the ragtail home guard which was hastily recruited in the last months of the

war for the last-ditch defense of the Reich. When hostilities ceased, only a month later, he was interned for a year and a half in a prisoner-of-war camp in Colmar, Alsace. However, after a French officer had recognized him as the famous artist Otto Dix, he was transferred to a group of painters, where duties were lighter. Thereupon he was detailed off to Robert Gall’s body painting shop, where he was able to paint, mainly carrying out works on commission, such as the triptych Madonna in Front of Barbed Wire for the camp chapel.

(1) Ibid., p. 48.

74

On his return to normal life, Dix, like the rest of his compatriots, encountered considerable hardship. In order to keep body and soul together, he took to doing portraits of the wives and children of soldiers in the French army of occupation and painting small watercolors and landscapes which could be exchanged for food and cigarettes. In recent years, a number of these pieces have reemerged. At this point, an important change can be seen in Dix’s work, with his final abandonment of the time-

consuming oil-tempera technique. In 1944, Dix had already begun painting landscapes in the freer, mote spontaneous style of his pre-1919 pictures. As in his early landscapes, the brushstroke and use of line take on a steadily increasing importance. This return to an alla prima technique hada definite liberating significance for Dix, as he himself pointed out: The change in technique (that is the wrong word; what has happened is that I have found a new way of seeing) has hadalot of strange results. At all events: 1. My painting has become more spontaneous, and there is no more of all that awful caution involved in putting on successive layers of paint; 2. Everything has got ROUGHER, thank God. I have spent the last twenty years painting far too much with only the tip of

the brush, and now I have gone back to the point when I did my first war picture; it is like being let off the leash. 3. Color, rather than shape, is becoming the main spatial element, and the colors are coming to be a kind of “music.” 4. 1 have thrown ideal proportions, the Golden Section, and all that Renaissance stuff overboard and paint

freely. And as I write this, I realize that I cannot possibly explain it all; although the pictures are freer, they have more form.”

In addition to landscape painting, which continued to interest him right to the end of his life, Dix once more turned his attention to the subject of war and its effects. His works from the immediate postwar period reflect a sense of relief at the ending of a political and personal nightmare. Masks in

Ruins, Carnival in the Ruins, Gang of Fools, Masquerade, and Mask with Quince all strike a note of hope

at the prospect of a new beginning. The painting And New Life Springs Forth out of the Ruins (see page 87) may be regarded as the most attractive work in this series. Dix’s later work exhibits an increasing tendency toward abstraction and thus echoes the stylistic leanings of his youth. In his depiction of the human body, for example, Dix tends more and more to replace the precise draftsmanship of his 1920s paintings with a mode of characterization based on the use of pure form and color: The structure and texture of the paint itself take on a central significance. However, the grotesque humor of the early paintings is missing. Melancholy, rather than gaiety and laughter, is the dominant mood of the carnival pictures. The self-portrait as a prisoner of war done in 1947 can be seen as symptomatic of this mood (see page 90). The disjointed brushwork, the frayed and pitted surface of the canvas, and especially the depiction of the face, all serve to convey the bitterness and exhaustion of the time. The painting testifies to an anonymous and inhuman fate, when man was nothing more than a number. Nevertheless, Dix kept on working, unchecked by the postwar gloom. The subjects which now occupied him — self-portraiture, landscape, and especially religion —hark back to his beginnings, although his approach is now more sober and relaxed than in his hot-headed youth. He was no longer under constant pressure to prove himself as a painter. Dix saw no reason to concern himself with the political and social issues of the day; instead, he concentrated on his immediate surroundings, on his beloved grandchildren, who feature in many paintings and lithographs, the inhabitants of the village where he lived, and the countryside about him.

(1) Ibid., p. 56.

iD

NEWBORN BABY WITH UMBILICAL CorD (Ursus), 1927 Mixed media on wood, 23°/s” X 195Js” (60 X 50 cm) Otto Dix Foundation, Vaduz, Liechtenstein

76

CHILDREN PLAyınG, 1929

Mixed media on wood, 28°)” x 36°/3” (72 x 93 cm) Private Collection

a

THE Bıc Cıry (Trıprych), 1927-1928 Mixed media on wood Galerie der Stadt, Stuttgart

78

Central panel, 1928, 71'/” x 791)” (181 X 201 cm) Left side panel, 1928, 71'/4” x 39°/4” (181 X 101 cm) Right side panel, 1927, 711 x 5924. (181

101 em)

12

Portrait OF Mrs. Martua Dix I, 1928 Mixed media on wood, 23°/s” X 237/16” (60 X 59.5 cm) Galerie der Stadt, Stuttgart (on loan)

80

From 1946 onward, Dix turned to “Bible stories,” as he called them, as a source of thematic inspiration for a series of oil paintings, pastels, and lithographs. In an interview given in 1966, he explained how, as a child, he had populated his private world with Biblical characters— “and I knew the spot where Joseph’s brothers threw him into the well.” And his account ends with the significant remark: “It was always a picture—the rest, the moral part, did not interest me at all.” The focus of Dix’s religious painting is the story of the Passion, with its message of redemption through the acceptance of suffering. Even here the strong sensual streak in Dix’s nature leads him to accentuate the physical dimension of the subject:

They hang him on the cross looking like a ballet dancer, all nice and clean and polished. And then when you read a description of what a real crucifixion is like—it is horrifying, terrible. The limbs swelling. The suffocation. The face going purple. A gruesome, a really gruesome way to die. And they show him up there as a beautiful boy. So it is all humbug, pure humbug. And if he was atall man, then the pain must have been even worse. He was really tortured. He broke down and fainted... It was worse than in the war. He was alone, he had to go through it all on his own. Nobody helped him. Nobody was near him. A magnificent image of man alone. Magnificent. A man of genius, alone in the world... He is not meek and mild. He is compassionate. He understands, he understands a great deal. But nevertheless, he is a hard, uncompromising man. You only have to read the New Testament to see that.

In its physical emphasis, Dix’s attitude to Christ is remarkably similar to that of Nietzsche. Although Nietzsche vehemently criticized Christianity and Christian morality, he viewed the figure of Christ himself in rather different terms, stressing his human aspect and referring to him as a “free spirit,” an “anarchist and holy fool,” and a “divine man.” To some extent, his image of God coincides with the notion of the Dionysian god, representing the affirmation of life and the world of flesh. The insistence on Christ’s humanity and physical suffering is characteristic of Dix’s much discussed realism, which clearly dominates his approach to biblical themes: The idea for the Christian pictures was not hatched in the studio. My own life gave me plenty of opportunities to see the Passion acted out or to experience it myself. “Job,” “St. Christopher,”

“The Prodigal Son,” “St. Peter and the Cock That

Crowed” —it was not just a passing interest that led me to those themes. They are all parables of my own experience and that of humanity as a whole. That is what prompted me to deal with them. But apart from that, there is another thing that fascinates me: the task of creating something new out of subjects that have been done to death, of renewing art in the same way that Christianity is continually renewed. Christian motifs offer complete artistic freedom. Everybody knows and understands them, the only requirement is that they should be seen in a new way, rooted directly in experience, in life itself, rather than reproducing picturebook illusions. Christian themes are relevant to the present, as well as the past and future: They have a timeless quality, a Christian Apollonian classicism. There is one thing you should avoid, though, which is simply to superimpose the new on the old. These statements clearly demonstrate the continuity in the set of attitudes underlying Dix’s work. His interpretation of biblical themes is shaped by his characteristic skepticism and his desire “to be everything (1) Interview by Maria Wetzel, op. cit., p. 743.

(2) Ibid., p. 743.

(3) Otto Dix, On Art, Religion, and War.

Conversation with Friends, December 1963, op. cit., p. 282.

(4) Eugen Biser, Gottsucher oder Antichrist, Nietzsches provokative Kritik des Christentums, Salzburg, 1982, pp. 72-85. (5) Dieter Hoffmann, in Neue Rundschau, Dresden, 1960s.

81

PORTRAIT OF THE DANCER TAMARA

DANISCHEWSKT,

Mixed media on wood, 317)” x 25” (81 X 63.5 cm).

1933

Galerie der Stadt, Stuttgart

PORTRAIT

OF THE

ACTOR

HEINRICH

GEORGE

(AS FRANZ BIBERKOPF),

Mixed media on wood, 39°)” x 33'h” (100 x 85 cm).

1932

Galerie der Stadt, Stuttgart

Jewish Cemetery at Randegg, 1934 Pencil of silver, 19!" x 20°] Städtische Galerie, Albstadt

Federal Republic of Germany

84

(48.6 X 53.2 cm)

RANDEGG IN SNOW WITH Crows, 1935 Mixed media on wood, 31!/2” X 27°/16” (80 x 70 cm) Otto Dix Foundation, Vaduz, Liechtenstein

85

> BETTINA IN ARMCHAIR, 1951 Oil on canvas 3358 2974 (85.5 X 75.5 cm) Private Collection

86

Anp New Lire Sprincs FORTH OUT OF THE Ruins, 1946

Oil on plywood 3971s x 31.5. (100.280 cm) Otto Dix Foundation, Vaduz, Liechtenstein

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and experience everything myself.”® The problems explored in the 1920s pictures in an explicit social setting are now reformulated in biblical terms, with the basic theme of Eros and death still present in a sublimated form. Following a series of striking pictures, done in 1948, of scenes from the life and Passion of Christ, The Great Resurrection of Christ II, dated 1949 (Otto Dix Foundation,

Vaduz) indicates a shift in Dix’s outlook. For the first time since the war, his spirits had begun to lift again. Christ, seen very much as a human figure, has emerged triumphant over death, although the marks of his wounds are still clearly visible. The brilliant blues of the picture strike an almost hymnal note. David and Saul II (Otto Dix Foundation, Vaduz), painted nearly ten years later, in 1958, also highlights the human aspect. Standing at the center of the picture, with the boy David attempting to pacify him by playing the lute, King Saul is characterized through the use of angular, aggressi ve patches of red and gold. These form a sharp contrast with the softly shaded pinks, light yellows, blues, and greens which Dix employs to depict David’s gentle face and graceful body, together with space surrounding him. In 1948, Dix did an exceptional series of pastels dealing with religious subjects. His technique there involved the repeated overdrawing and overpainting of the basic linear structures. By visibly superimposing successive grids and networks of lines on each other, Dix creates a striking effect of depth and conveys a general sense of vulnerability. Gethsemane (Walther Groz, Städtische Galerie Albstadt) is a prime example of the use of this layering technique, which bears a definite similari ty to the oil-tempera technique of the earlier paintings. In 1960, Dix did a series of pencil, pen, and India ink drawings in the course of his preparations for a cycle of thirty-three lithographs based on St. Matthew’s Gospel.

Dix received three substantial commissions in 1959 and 1960. The first was for three large stainedglass windows in the Protestant Church of St. Peter in Kattenhorn by Lake Constance, entitled

St. Peter as Fisher of Men, Graze Thou My Sheep, and St. Peter’s Denial of Christ. Second, Dix was asked

to do a mural for the rear wall of the council chamber in the town hall in Singen. This work, painted in 1960, was conceived by Dix as, in his own words, “a synthesis of everything I have been trying all my life to do in my art”:® Once more, he returned to his central theme of Eros and death.

Measuring 15’ by 36’, the mural, which bears the title War and Peace, is a truly monumental work.

Following this, in the same year, Dix did a set of frescoes for the registry office which is also housed in the town hall. Three walls of the small room are adorned with scenes from Paradise, including a version of Adam and Eve with the Animals. On the whole, however, Dix was denied the acclaim he deserved. Quite rightly, he felt a sense of injustice at the indifference of both German states—the Federal Republic and the German Democratic Republic—to his work. In the postwar period, the West German cultural scene completely ignored representational art. In East Germany too, the official attitude was one of rejection. Dix’s art did not fit in with the tenets of Marxist ideology. Dix was not asked to return to his professorship in Dresden, and the works he submitted to the Third German Art Exhibition of 1953 were rejected. In 1956, however, he was appointed a corresponding member of the German Academy in Berlin, and a year later he was granted permission to exhibit. Following this initial gesture of reconciliation, Dix at last began to receive the national and international recognition which was his due, in the shape of a long list of honors and prizes. In 1966, he was made an honorary citizen of the towns of Gera and Singen, and he was elected an honorary member of the Carl-Gustav-Carus Medical Academy in Dresden and the Academia delle Arti del Disegno in Florence (both 1964), the German Democratic Republic Artists’ Federation (1966), and the State Academy of Arts in Karlsruhe (1968).

His prizes included the Lichtwark-Preis of the city of Hamburg (1966), the Hans-Thoma-Preis awarded by the federal region of Baden-Wiirttemberg, the Lindner-Preis of the city of Wuppertal, the Medaglia (1) Otto Dix, On Art, Religion, and War. (2) Fritz Löffler, op. cit.., p. 73.

Conversation with Friends, December 1963, op. cit., p. 280.

89

d’Oro dei Paschi di Siena (all 1967), and the Rembrandt-Preis of the Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Foundation in Salzburg (1968).

Dix continued working up to the end of his life, doing mainly landscapes and portraits. In 1953, he journeyed through the south of France, southern Italy, and Alsace.

This was followed by a trip to

Greece in 1967. Although he suffered a stroke in November 1967, which left his hand partially paralyzed, he still managed to draw and paint. It was at this point that he produced the terrifying lithograph Self-portrait as Death’s Head, which he dedicated to Jean Cassou (see page 91). On July 19, 1969, he had a second stroke. Standing on his easel was his last painting, a Bunch a Flowers. Six days later, he died in a hospital in Singen.

Self-portrait as Prisoner of War (Sketch for the painting), 1947 Pencil, 107 x 127), (255 xX 328 cm) Städtische Galerie, Albstadt, Federal Republic of Germany. Walther Groz Collection MEN

ae

90

Self-portrait as Death’s Head (Tribute to Jean Cassou), 1968 Color lithograph, 10%” x 8!4s” (26.7 x 22.2 cm) Städtische Galerie, Albstadt

Federal Republic of Germany Walther Groz Collection

91

LAKE IN WINTER, 1951 Oil on plywood, 23°/3” X 317/s” (60 X 81 cm) Otto Dix Foundation, Vaduz, Liechtenstein

BIOGRAPHIGAL NOTES

1891

Born on 2 December in Untermhaus near Gera, Germany.

1905- 1909

Apprenticeship as painter and decorator in Gera.

1910- 1914

Student at Dresden School of Arts and Crafts.

1914- 1918

Military service on French and Russian fronts.

1919- 1922 Student at Dresden Academy of Art, attends classes of Max Feldbauer and Otto Gussman. Co-founder of the Dresden Secession “Gruppe 1919”.

lithographs are printed. Travels to the south of France, Southern Italy, and Alsace. 1967

Journey to Greece. In November, suffers a stroke which leaves his left hand paralyzed.

1968

His last set of lithographs is printed by the Erker-Presse in St. Gallen.

1969

Otto Dix dies on July 25 in Singen.

1922- 1925

Student at Düsseldorf Academy of Art, taught by Heinrich Nauen and Wilhelm Herberholz. Becomes a protégé of the café proprietress and art dealer Johanna Ey; joins the “Young Rhineland” group. Marriage to Martha Koch, née Lindner, in 1923. 1923-24: “War” cycle of etchings. Travels to Italy and Paris. 1925: joint exhibitions at the National Gallery in Berlin and in the Staatliche Gemäldesammlungen, Munich.

1925- 1927

dorf.

Moves

to Berlin.

PRIZES AND DISTINCTIONS 1931

Member of the Prussian Academy of Arts, Berlin.

1954

President of the Upper Swabian Secession / Lake Constance. Member of the West Berlin Academy of Arts.

1955 1956

Corresponding member of the German Academy of Arts in East Berlin.

1957

Honorary senator of the Dresden School of Arts.

Contract with Galerie Nieren-

1926: group exhibitions at the Galerie Neumann-

Nierendorf, Berlin, and Galerie Thannhauser, Munich. 1927- 1933

Awarded the Bundesverdienstkreuz by the West German government. Cornelius Prize of the city of Düsseldorf. President of the Baden-Württemberg Artists’ 1963-1967 Federation.

1933- 1945 Dismissed from the Dresden Academy, banned from exhibiting. Works by Dix included in the Nazi exhibitions “Reflections of Degeneracy” (Dresden 1933), “The Spirit of November: Art in the Service of Demoralization” (Stuttgart 1933), and “Degenerate Art” (Munich 1937). Moves

1964

Honorary member of the Accademia delle arti del disegno, Florence, and the Carl Gustav Carus Medical Academy, Dresden.

1966

Lichtwark Prize of the city of Hamburg. Martin Andersen Nexö Prize of the city of Dresden. Honorary member of the GDR Artists’ Federation. Honorary citizen of Gera. Ring of Honor of the city of Singen.

Professor at Dresden Academy of Art. Exhibitions outside Germany, e.g. in New York. 1929: group exhibition at the Galerie Wolfsberg, Zurich. 1930: exhibitor at the Venice Biennale.

to Randegg near Singen, then to Hemmenhofen by Lake Constance. 1935: works featured in exhibitions at Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh. 1938: group exhibition at the Galerie Wolfsberg, Zurich; in the same year, 260 of Dix’s works are confiscated from public collections.

1959

1967

Hans Thoma Prize, Baden-Württemberg.

Lindner Prize,

Wuppertal. Medaglia d’oro del Monte dei Paschi di Siena.

1939

Arrested and briefly imprisoned by the Gestapo on suspicion of being involved in an attempt to assassinate Hitler. 1945: conscripted into the “Volkssturm” home defense force.

Honorary member of the State Academy of-Arts, Karlsruhe. Rembrandt Prize of the Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Foundation, Salzburg. Guest of honor at the Villa Massimo in Rome.

1946

After his release from a French prisoner-of-war camp, Dix returns to Hemmenhofen. Subsequently: numerous exhibitions both in Germany and abroad. From 1949 onward, Dix pays annual visits to the Dresden Academy, where his

Reproduced with the kind permission of the Galerie der Stadt Stuttgart from: Otto Dix — Menschenbilder, Gemälde, Aquarelle, Gouachen, Zeichnungen, Galerie der Stadt Stuttgart, 1981-1982.

1968

Thanks are due to the Otto Dix Foundation, Vaduz, Liechtenstein

for their kind assistance and their permission to reproduce the illustrations used in the book.

93

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A SELECTION OF BOOKS AND JOURNAL ARTICLES. Barton, Brigid S. Otto Dix und die neue Sachlichkeit 1918-1925. Ann Arbor, Michigan: UMI Research Press, 1981. Beck, Rainer. « Dix, ein Fanatiker der Wahrheit »: Welteunst, 41. ORIN

a2 Onion L235Sy ete

—. «Zwei notwendige Korrekturen, »: Weltkunst, 43, 1973, Nr. 15,

8. 1215 ini. —.«Boccioni und Mailand,»:

p. 3274 ff.

Weltkunst,

53, 1983,

Nr. 22,

LOT ae mT Mee

—. Otto Dix - Graphik aus fünf Jahrzenten. Leipzig, 1978. —, Otto Dix, Werkverzeichnis der Gemälde. Recklinghausen, 1981. LÜDEcKE, Heinz. Otto Dix. Dresden, 1958. MancoLp, Walter. Otto Dix - spate Lithographien und Pastelle. Constance,

—. «Dionysos Dix,» Weltkunst, 54, 1984, Nr. 10, p. 1411 ff. BELLM, Richard (Texts by). Otto Dix - 25 Bilder, Farblichtbildreihe H 49. Published by the Landesbildstellen Baden und

Württemberg, 1972. CONZELMANN,

KLEInE-NArtror , H.E. and LÖFFLER, Fritz. Die Medizin im Werke von Otto Dix. (Special issue). Dresden, 1962', 1968?. LÖFFLER, Fritz. Otto Dix - Leben und Werk. Dresden, 1960', 1967’,

Otto. Otto Dix. Hanover,

1968.

—. Otto Dix - Handzeichnungen. Hanover, 1968. —. Der Fall Otto Dix - Fritz Loffer: Otto Dix in Dresden. Special

Realist. Ann Arbor, Michigan: UMI Research Press, 1981. OELLERS, Adam C. Ikonographische Untersuchungen zur Bildnismalerei der neuen Sachlichkeit, 1983. P£RARD, Rudolf. Otto Dix - Religiöse Gemälde und Graphik. Darmastadt, 1961. Rou,

Evntartete Kunst.

Kunstbarbaret

im Dritten

Reich.

1962.

SALMONY, Alfred. «Dix als Portratist.» Der Cicerone, 17, 1925,

—. Otto Dix - Weiber. Special issue 2001, Frankfurt, 1976. —. «Otto Dix - Handzeichnungen, Pastelle, Lithographien, » Die Kunst und das schöne Heim, Munich, 1976. CONZELMANN, Otto and LÖFFLER, Fritz. Ansprachen zur Eröffnung der Ausstellung «Menschenbilder». Special issue of the Galerie der Stadt Stuttgart, 1981. CONZELMANN, Otto. Der andere Dix - Sein Bild vom Menschen und vom Krieg. Stuttgart, 1983. Duse, Wolf Dieter. Der Expressionismus in Wort und Bild. GenevaStuttgart, 1983. EinstEm, Carl. Die Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts. (Propyläen Kunstgeschichte), Berlin, 1926, 19313. FISCHER, Lothar. Otto Dix, ein Malerleben in Deutschland. Berlin, 1981.

GLASER,

Franz.

Hanover,

issue of the series of the Hans-Thoma-Gesellschaft, Reutlingen, ale

1961.

McGreevy Linda F. The Life and Works of Otto Dix, German Critical

Curt.

«Otto

Dix,»

Kunst

und Künstler,

25,

1927,

pan Omer. GUNTER, Otto and Dicker, Hans. Otto Dix, Bildnis der Eltern: Klassenschicksal und Bildformel. Frankfurt a.M. Fischer Verlag, 1984.

Hurt, Wolfgang. Deutsche Malerei und Graphik im 20. Jahrhundert. Berlin, 1969. KARCHER, Eva. Eros und Tod im Werk von Otto Dix, Studien zur Geschichte des Körpers in den zwanziger Jahren. (Dissertation, Munich, 1982), Munster, 1984).

Karscu, Florian. Otto Dix - das graphische Werk. Hanover, 1970. KINKEL, Hans. Otto Dix - Protokolle der Hölle. Hamburg,

1968.

p. 1045 ff.

SCHMALENBACH, Fritz. Die Malerei der Neuen Sachlickeit. Berlin, 1973:

SCHMIDT, Diether. Otto Dix - Maler und Werk. Dresden, 1977. —. Otto Dix im Selbstbildnis. East-Berlin, 1978.

SCHMIDT, Paul Ferdinand. Otto Dix. Cologne, 1922. SCHMIED, Wieland.

Neue Sachlickeit und magischer Realismus in

Deutschland, 1918-1933. Hanover, 1969. SCHUBERT, Dietrich. Die Elternbildnisse von Otto Dix aus den Jahren 1921 und 1924. Städel-Jahrbuch, Neue Folge, Nr. 4, Munich, 195%

—. «Rezeptions- und Stilpluralismus in den frühen Selbstbildnissen des Otto Dix.» Studien zur Kunst des 19. Jahrhunderts, 38, Munich,

1977.

—. Otto Dix in Selbstzeugnissenn und Bilddokumenten. Rowohlts Monographien 287, Hamburg, 1980. —. «Nietzsche - Konkretionsformen in der bildenden Kunst 1890-1933,» Nietzsche - Studien, Internationales Jahrbuch für die Nietzsche Forschung, Vol. 10/11, 1981-1982, p. 308 ff. —., «Otto Dix und der Krieg, » Pazifismus zwischen den Weltkriegen, 1918-1933. (Co-ed. Hartu, D. and Scummpr, R.M.) Heidelberg, 1985.

Vogt, Paul. Geschichte der Malerei im 20. Jahrhundert. Cologne, 1972. WIRTH, Günther. Kunst im deutschen Südwesten von 1945 bis zur Gegenwart. Stuttgart, 1982. WOLFRADT, Willi. Otto Dix. Leipzig, 1924.

EXHIBITIONS

1961

Neue Sachlichkeit, Haus am Waldsee, Berlin.

Otto Dix — Das Graphische Gesamtwerk 1913-1960. Graphic works. Essay by Will Grohmann. Galerie Meta Nierendorf, Berlin.

94

1962

Otto Dix. Paintings, drawings, and watercolors. Hessisches Landesmuseum, Darmstadt.

1964 1966

Otto Dix. A Retrospective. Galleria del Levante, Milan. Otto Dix zum 75, Geburtstag. Paintings, drawings, and prints.

Essays by Eugen Keuerleber and Otto Conzelmann. Galerie der Stadt, Stuttgart. 1966-1967 Otto Dix. Paintings, drawings, and prints. Essays by Hans Platte and Fritz Löffler. Kunstverein, Hamburg; Kunstverein, Frankfurt. 1970 Otto Dix. Drawings, prints, and paintings from the collection of Fritz Niescher. Essays by Peter Ludwig, Hans Feldbusch, and Fritz Löffler. Sürmondt-Museum der Stadt, Aachen. Avantgarde gestern, Das junge Rheinland und seine Freunde 1919-1929. Städtische Kunsthalle, Düsseldorf. 1971 Otto Dix. Augustinermuseum, Freiburg. 1971-1972 Otto Dix. Watercolors, drawings, and prints from

1978-1979

1979

1972

Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris. Il realismo in Germania. Rotonda di via Besana, Milan. Otto Dix zum Gedäctnis. Exhibition at the Galerie der Stadt Stuttgart, 1 October-28 November 1972. Text by Hans Wentzel, published in Kunstchronik, 25, Folio 1, Munich, 19722

1973

Otto Dix. Pastels and drawings. Hans-Thoma-Gesellschaft, Reutlingen.

1974

Realismus und Sachlichkeit. Aspects of German Art 1919-1933. Nationalgalerie, Berlin. Réalismes en Allemagne 1919-1933. Essays by Francoise Guichon and Bernard Ceysson. Musée d’Art et d’Industrie, Saint-Etienne; Musée d’Art et d’Histoire, Chambéry.

1975

Otto Dix. Oil paintings, watercolors, prints. Wessenberghaus, Kunstverein, Constance.

Otto Dix. The National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. 1976

Otto Dix. Drawings, pastels, and lithographs. Essays by Alfred Hagenlocher and Otto Conzelmann. Städtische Galerie, Albstadt. Die zwanziger Jahre im Porträt, Porträts in Deutschland

1980

1977

Neue Sachlichkeit und 20. Jahrhunderts, Vienna.

Realismus.

Museum

1977-1978 Aspekt Grosstadt. Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Kunstverein, Hanover; Kunstverein, Frankfurt.

Natio-

Realism

in the

Otto Dix. Drawings, pastels, watercolors, prints, and

lithographs from the collection of the Städtische Galerie Albstadt. Essays by Frangoise Guichon, Alfred Hagenlocher, Otto Conzelmann, and Jean Cassou. Musees d’Art et d’Histoire, Chambery; Städtische Galerie, Albstadt. Otto Dix - The War. Drawings and prints from the collection of the Städtische Galerie Albstadt. Essays by Alfred Otto Dix. Drawings 1911-1942. Essay by Jens Christian Otto Dix. Galleria del Naviglio, Milan.

1980-1981 Kunst im Aufbruch - Dresden 1918-1939. Staatliche Kunsthalle, Berlin; Centre National d’Art et de Culture Georges Pompidou, Paris. 1981 Otto Dix 1891-1969. Essays by Kunrich Gehrer, Hans

Kinkel, and Bruno Effinger. Künstlerhaus Palais Thurn und Taxis, Bregenz.

Otto Dix und der Krieg. Drawings and prints, 1913-1924. Essays by Veit Loers and Dietrich Schubert. Städtische Galerie, Regensburg. 1981-1982 Otto Dix. Paintings, drawings, and prints. Essay by Gerhard Winkler. Kunstgalerie, Gera. Otto

Dix

-

Menschenbilder.

Paintings,

watercolors,

gouaches, and drawings. Essays by Eugen Keuerleber, Otto Conzelmann, and Berta Drews-George. Galerie der Stadt, Stuttgart. 1982-1983 Otto Dix - “Der Krieg.” Essay by Wouter Kotte. Hedendaage Kunst, Utrecht.

1983

1984

Otto Dix und die Düsseldorfer Künstlerszene 1920-1925. Essay by Peter Barth. Galerie Remmert und Barth, Düsseldorf. Otto Dix. Essays by Siegfried Lücke, Hans Kinkel, Eva Karcher, and Reinhard Müller-Mehlis. Passau. Otto Dix. Paintings, watercolors, and drawings. Essay by

Freerk Valentien. Galerie Valentien, Stuttgart. Otto Dix. Essay by Lutz Tittel. Städtisches Bodensee-

museum, Friedrechshafen. Otto Dix — Art Contemporain. Essays by Nicole Rainer Beck. XXIX Salon de Montrouge. Otto Dix. Drawings, pastels, watercolors, sketches, and prints

1912-1969 from the Walther Groz Collection at the Stadtische Galerie Albstadt. Essays by Otto Breicha, Alfred Hagenlocher, Eva Karcher, and Otto Conzelmann. Rupertinum, Salzburg. 1985

Otto Dix 1891-1969.

Essays by Eugen Keuerleber and

Eva Karcher. Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels. des

Am Einfang: Das Junge Rheinland. Zur Kunst und Zeitgeschichte einer Region, 1918-1945. Städtische Kunsthalle, Düsseldorf. Otto Dix 1891-1969. Essays by Rainer Beck, Diether Schmidt, Otto Conzelmann, Eva Karcher, Fritz Löffler, and Ursus Dix. Villa Stuck, Munich.

Berlin;

Otto Dix zwischen den Kriegen. Drawings, watercolors, sketches, and prints, Essays by Thomas Kempas, Bernd Weyergraf, Hortense v. Heppe, and Heinz-Dieter Kittsteiner. Haus am Waldsee, Berlin; Kunstverein, Hanover. 1978

German

Jensen. Kunsthalle, Kiel; Schleswig-Holstein Kunstverein.

Otto Dix. The War in drawings and prints. Essays by Alfred Hagenlocher and Fritz Löffler. Städtische Galerie, Albstadt. Otto Dix. Drawings, watercolors, prints, and sketches. Essay by Uwe M. Schneede. Kunstverein, Hamburg. The Dresden Secession, 1919-1923. Essays by Fritz Löffler and Joachim Heusinger von Waldegg. Galleria del Levante, Munich. Otto Dix 1891-1969. Painter and printmaker, material and documents on his life and work, Germanischer nalmuseum, Nuremberg.

and

Hagenlocher, Otto Breicha, and Fritz Löffler. Kulturhaus, Graz.

1918-1933. Rheinisches Landesmuseum, Bonn.

Künstler sehen sich selbst. Self-portraits in prints and drawings from private collections. Städtisches Museum, Braunschweig.

Sachlichkeit

Otto Dix 18911969. Städtische Galerie “Die Fähre,” Salgau. Art and Society in the Weimar Republic. Moderne Museet, Stockholm. Otto Dix. Drawings. Essay by Eugen Keuerleber. Galerie der Stadt, Stuttgart.

1979-1980

The War series. Museum Folkwang, Essen; Kunstverein, Frankfurt; Kunsthalle, Bielefeld. Otto Dix zum 80. Geburtstag. Oil paintings, watercolors,

gouaches, drawings, and prints from The War series. Essays by Eugen Keuerleber, Fritz Löffler, and Otto Conzelmann. Galerie der Stadt, Stuttgart. Essays by Jacques Lassaigne, Eugen Keuerleber, and Otto Conzelmann. Musée d’Art

Neue

Twenties. Hayward Gallery, London.

Paris-Berlin 1900-1933. Essay on the Neue Sachlichkeit by Uwe M. Schneede. Centre National d’Art et de Culture Georges Pompidou, Paris. Cityscape 1910-1939. Urban Themes in American, German, and British Art. Royal Academy of Arts, London.

1986

Neue Sachlichkeit, German Realism. The Solomon Guggenheim Museum, New York.

1986-1987 Otto Dix. Oil paintings and works on paper. Essays by Ursus Dix, Lothar Fischer, and Serge Sabarsky. Villa Croci, Genoa; Castel Mariccio, Bolzano; Accademia delle Belle Arti, Naples; Staatliche Kunsthalle, Berlin; Museen

des XX. Jahrhunderts, Vienna.

3a

ILLUSTRATIONS

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31 87 36 47

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62 60

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65 64 76

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46 80 83

Portrait of the Dancer

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71

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28

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92

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57

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