Otto Dix

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"Parents of the Artist," oil on canvas by Otto Dix, 1921; in the Öffentliche … (credit: Courtesy of the Offentliche Kunstsammlung and the Emanuel Hoffman-Stiftung, Basel, Switz.; photograph, Hans Hinz)

(born Dec. 2, 1891, Untermhaus, Thuringia, Ger. — died July 25, 1969, Singen, Baden-Württemberg, W.Ger.) German painter and printmaker. He studied at the academies of Düsseldorf and Dresden and experimented with Impressionism and Dada before arriving at Expressionism with a nightmarish personal vision of contemporary social reality, depicting the horrors of war and the depravities of a decadent society with great emotional effect. He was appointed professor at the Dresden Academy in 1926 and elected to the Prussian Academy in 1931. His antimilitary works aroused the wrath of the Nazi regime and he was dismissed from his academic posts in 1933. His later work was marked by religious mysticism. See also Neue Sachlichkeit.

For more information on Otto Dix, visit Britannica.com.

(b Untermhaus, nr Gera, 2 Dec 1891; d Singen, 25 July 1969). German painter, printmaker and watercolourist. His initial training (1905-14) in Gera and Dresden was as a painter of wall decorations, but he taught himself the techniques of easel painting from 1909 and began concentrating on portraits and landscapes in a veristic style derived from northern Renaissance prototypes. After seeing exhibitions of paintings by Vincent van Gogh (Dresden, 1912) and by the Futurists (1913), he quickly fused these influences into a randomly coloured Expressionism. Volunteering as a machine-gunner during World War I, he served in the German army (1914-18), making innumerable sketches of war scenes, using alternately a realistic and a Cubo-Futurist style. The experience of war, moreover, became a dominant motif of his work until the 1930s. He later commented: 'War is something so animal-like: hunger, lice, slime, these crazy sounds ... War was something horrible, but nonetheless something powerful ... Under no circumstances could I miss it! It is necessary to see people in this unchained condition in order to know something about man' (Kinkel, 1961; repr. in 1985 exh. cat., p. 280).

See the Abbreviations for further details.

German painter and graphic artist Otto Dix (1891-1969) became best known for his work in the 1920s as the leading exponent of Die Neue Sachlichkeit (The New Objectivity). His works of social criticism were called "degenerate" by the Nazis.

Otto Dix was born December 2, 1891, in Untermhaus (Thuringia) of working class parents with arts and crafts inclinations. While attending the Volksschule from 1899 to 1905 he showed talent enough to be apprenticed to a decorative painter in nearby Gera. Dix encountered modern art in his travels and in Dresden, where he studied at the School of Decorative Art from 1909 to 1914. Influence by the early German artists Dürer and Cranach was soon succeeded by that of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists. By 1912 Dix had made contact with the Expressionists, experience of which provided the footing for his mature art.

It was while serving in the army from 1915 to 1918 that Dix first exhibited his famous war drawings (1916), so prophetic, both in style and in content, of his later work. Dix returned to Dresden in 1919 and worked at the Dresden Academy until 1922, during which time he became loosely associated with the Berlin Dadaists, who exhibited his work in the "scandalous" 1920 International Dada Fair. During these same years he was also a member of the politically oriented Novembergruppe and Gruppe 1919 of the Dresden Sezession. Between 1922 and 1925, years spent at the Düsseldorf Academy, Dix published his famous etching cycle, Der Krieg. The work was executed in a veristic style, already apparent in his work from 1920.

Even by this time Dix had become well known for his bitter socio-political criticism. The uncompromising nature of his vision and his almost forced attention to detail were part of a general reaction against abstraction following World War I. His work, along with that of others, was labeled Die Neue Sachlichkeit by Gustav Friedrich Hartlaub, director of the Mannheim Kunsthalle, on the occasion of an exhibition there. Art historian Paul Ferdinand Schmidt had coined the same name for the same tendencies at precisely the same time. His reputation grown, Dix was given his first retrospective exhibition at the Galerie Nierendorf in 1926 and served as professor at the Dresden Academy of Art from 1927 to 1933.

Although respected and shown widely during this period, he was declared "degenerate" by the Nazis in 1933 and was forbidden to teach. The following year he was also forbidden to exhibit. These were tense years, largely because Dix elected to stay in Germany. He moved frequently until settling in Hemmenhofen in 1936. The following year eight of his works were included in the Degenerate Art Exhibition in Munich, and in 1938 260 of Dix's works were confiscated and either destroyed or sold. In 1939 Dix was arrested by the Gestapo in Dresden; in 1945 he served in the Volkssturm, during which time he was taken prisoner by the Allies at Colmar.

From 1946, following his return to Hemmenhofen, Dix exhibited widely, and starting in 1948 he concentrated much of his energy on lithography. His style softened somewhat and his content became more mystical and religious in its orientation. During his late years Dix enjoyed a number of prestigious teaching posts. Suffering poor health the last few years of his life, Dix died of a stroke, at the age of 77, on July 25, 1969.

Further Reading

Although much of the Dix literature is written in German, English language studies have appeared. Linda F. McGreevy, The Lifeand Works of Otto Dix (1981) discusses the artist's entire career, while Brigid S. Barton, Otto Dix and Die Neue Sachlichkeit (1981) concentrates on the years from 1918 to 1925. Fritz Löffler, Otto Dix, Leben und Werk (1978) and Florian Karsch, Otto Dix, Das graphische Werk, 1913-1960 (1971) both remain standard works on the artist. Dix's own writing was largely confined to catalog introductions of exhibited work and introductions to his published portfolios.

Additional Sources

Otto Dix, life and work, New York: Holmes & Meier, 1982.

For the Russian band, see Otto Dix (band).

Otto Dix
Otto Dix (at right)
Birth name	Wilhelm Heinrich Otto Dix
Born	December 2, 1891(1891-12-02) Untermhaus, Germany
Died	July 25, 1969 (aged 77)
Nationality	German
Field	Painting, Printmaking

Wilhelm Heinrich Otto Dix (German pronunciation: [ˈvɪlhɛlm ˈhaɪnʀiç ˈɔto ˈdɪks]) (2 December 1891 – 25 July 1969) was a German painter and printmaker. Noted for his ruthless and harshly realistic depictions of Weimar society and of the brutality of war, he, along with George Grosz, is widely considered one of the most important artists of the Neue Sachlichkeit.

Contents 1 Early life and education 2 World War I service 3 Post-war artwork 4 World War II and the Nazis 5 Later life and death 6 Notes 7 References 8 External links

Early life and education

Otto Dix House in Gera. The artist's birthplace opened as a museum in 1991

Otto Dix was born in Untermhaus, Germany, now a part of the city of Gera. The eldest son of Franz and Louise Dix, an iron foundry worker and a seamstress who had written poetry in her youth, he was exposed to art from an early age. The hours he spent in the studio of his cousin, Fritz Amann, who was a painter, were decisive in forming young Otto's ambition to be an artist; he received additional encouragement from his primary school teacher.^[1] Between 1906 and 1910, he served an apprenticeship with painter Carl Senff, and began painting his first landscapes. In 1910, he entered the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts.

World War I service

Stormtroops Advancing Under Gas, etching and aquatint by Otto Dix, 1924

When the First World War erupted, Dix enthusiastically volunteered for the German Army. He was assigned to a field artillery regiment in Dresden. In the fall of 1915 he was assigned as a non-commissioned officer of a machine-gun unit in the Western front and took part of the Battle of the Somme. He was seriously wounded several times. In 1917, his unit was transferred to the Eastern front until the end of hostilities with Russia. Back in the western front, he fought in the German Spring offensive. He earned the Iron Cross (second class) and reached the rank of vice-sergeant-major.

Dix was profoundly affected by the sights of the war, and would later describe a recurring nightmare in which he crawled through destroyed houses. He represented his traumatic experiences in many subsequent works, including a portfolio of fifty etchings called Der Krieg, published in 1924.

Post-war artwork

At the end of 1918 Dix returned to Gera, but the next year he moved to Dresden, where he studied at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste. He became a founder of the Dresden Secession group in 1919, during a period when his work was passing through an expressionist phase. In 1920 he met George Grosz and, influenced by Dada, began incorporating collage elements into his works, some of which he exhibited in the first Dada Fair in Berlin. He also participated in the German Expressionists exhibition in Darmstadt that year.^[2]

In 1924 he joined the Berlin Secession; by this time he was developing an increasingly realistic style of painting that used thin glazes of oil paint over a tempera underpainting, in the manner of the old masters. His 1923 painting The Trench, which depicted dismembered and decomposed bodies of soldiers after a battle caused such a furor, the Wallraf-Richartz Museum hid the painting behind a curtain. In 1925 the then-mayor of Cologne, Konrad Adenauer, cancelled the purchase of the painting and forced the director of the museum to resign.

Dix was a contributor to the Neue Sachlichkeit exhibition in Mannheim in 1925, which featured works by George Grosz, Max Beckmann, Heinrich Maria Davringhausen, Karl Hubbuch, Rudolf Schlichter, Georg Scholz and many others. Dix's work, like that of Grosz—his friend and fellow veteran—was extremely critical of contemporary German society and often dwelled on the act of Lustmord, or sexual murder. He drew attention to the bleaker side of life, unsparingly depicting prostitution, violence, old age and death.

Portrait of the Journalist Sylvia von Harden, 1926, mixed media on wood, 120 x 88 cm, Paris, Musée National d'Art Moderne

Among his most famous paintings are the triptych Metropolis (1928), a scornful portrayal of depraved actions of Germany's Weimar Republic, where nonstop revelry was a way to deal with the wartime defeat and financial catastrophe^[3], and the startling Portrait of the Journalist Sylvia von Harden (1926). His depictions of legless and disfigured veterans—a common sight on Berlin's streets in the 1920s—unveil the ugly side of war and illustrate their forgotten status within contemporary German society, a concept also developed in Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front.

World War II and the Nazis

When the Nazis came to power in Germany, they regarded Dix as a degenerate artist and had him sacked from his post as an art teacher at the Dresden Academy. He later moved to Lake Constance. Dix's paintings The Trench and War cripples were exhibited in the state-sponsored Munich 1937 exhibition of degenerate art, Entartete Kunst. They were later burned.

Dix, like all other practicing artists, was forced to join the Nazi government's Reich Chamber of Fine Arts (Reichskammer der bildenden Kuenste), a subdivision of Goebbels' Cultural Ministry (Reichskulturkammer). Membership was mandatory for all artists in the Reich. Dix had to promise to paint only inoffensive landscapes. He still painted an occasional allegorical painting that criticized Nazi ideals.^[4]

In 1939 he was arrested on a trumped-up charge of being involved in a plot against Hitler (see Georg Elser) but was later released.

During World War II Dix was conscripted into the Volkssturm. He was captured by French troops at the end of the war and released in February 1946.

Later life and death

Otto Dix postage stamp, Germany, 1991. The stamp reproduces Portrait of the Dancer Anita Berber, a painting of 1925

Dix eventually returned to Dresden. After the war most of his paintings were religious allegories or depictions of post-war suffering. Otto Dix died in Singen, Germany, in 1969.

Notes

1. ^ Karcher 1988, pp. 21–24.
2. ^ Karcher 1988, p. 251.
3. ^ Exhibition of “Cabaret” Era Opens at Met Museum, ARTINFO, November 14, 2006, http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/24291/exhibition-of-cabaret-era-opens-at-met-museum/, retrieved 2008-04-23 
4. ^ Conzelmann, 1959, p. 50

References

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Otto Dix

• Conzelmann, O., Otto Dix (Hannover: Fackelträger-Verlag, 1959)
• Hinz, Berthold (1979). Art in the Third Reich, trans. Robert and Rita Kimber. Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag. ISBN 0-394-41640-6.
• Karcher, Eva (1988). Otto Dix 1891-1969: His Life and Works. Cologne: Benedikt Taschen. OCLC 21265198
• Michalski, Sergiusz (1994). New Objectivity. Cologne: Benedikt Taschen. ISBN 3-8228-9650-0
• Schmied, Wieland (1978). Neue Sachlichkeit and German Realism of the Twenties. London: Arts Council of Great Britain. ISBN 0-7287-0184-7

External links

• Otto Dix at Museum Syndicate
• Otto-Dix-House (birthplace) in Gera
• Otto Dix in Dresden
• Ten Dreams Galleries
• Small gallery of works at mess.net
• http://www.otto-dix.de (German website also in English)

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