Title: Self-portrait
Year: 1913
Title: Self-portrait as Mars (Selbstbildnis mit Artillerie-Helm)
Year: 1915
Description: In the second year of war, he depcits himself as the God of War with angles borrowed from cubism. In this scene, death is abundant. Horses rear and flee. Buildings burst open and cities crumble. Yet Dix remains alive. Survival under such circumstances might give anyone a messiah complex.
Publisher: Municipal Gallery, Stuttgart
Title: The Foundry
Year: 1919
Description: The Foundry was hot and the air was foul but it supported the family. Otto's father toiled there for most of his life. Its bricks are dark from soot and its yard is filled with scrap, yet through the Dixian filter, the Foundry is quite attractive.
Publisher: Otto Dix Foundation
Vadux, Germany
Title: The Skat Players
Year: 1920
Description: The war has left them crippled and deformed but their capacity to play skat remains in tact. It is a three-handed card game favored by the Krupps, German manufacturers of the types of weapons that misfigured men such as these.
Publisher: Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart
Title: Prager Straße
Year: 1920
Description: Along Prague Street, deformed men beg for money and attention. A woman in a tight pink dress has no time for them. The Nationalists do. Beside one veteran is a pamphlet entitled, "Jews Out!" The Nazis were not yet a National movement but one of their basic tenets was beginning to disseminate.
Publisher: Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart
Title: Working Class Boy
Year: 1920
Description: Dix often depicted the lives of the downtrodden. Here we have a chance to see the start of the cycle. The working class boy is anything but carefree. He is overburdened and robbed of youth. His gaze is split as though he's trapped between worlds. He leads the life of an adult although he is just a child. He would like to play but there are mouths to feed. The left eye, the serious eye, steers him toward work.
Publisher: Neue Galerie
Title: Portrait of the Lawyer Hugo Simons
Year: 1925
Description: In 1925, Hugo Simons won a lawsuit on Dix's behalf. The artist painted his portrait in a display of gratitude. He generally preferred to accentuate a subject's ungainly characteristics but this depiction was almost flattering. The pair maintained a friendship for the rest of their lives. When the Nuremberg Laws stripped him of citizenship, Simons fled Germany for Canada. He died in Montreal with Dix's portrait hanging on the wall opposite his bed.
Publisher: Montreal Fine Arts Museum
Title: Der Dichter Iwar von Lücken
Year: 1926
Description: Iwar von Lücken was the last in the line of Baltic aristocrats. He was born into privilege and died in poverty under unknown circumstances. His aesthetics were of the avant garde while his family was entrenched in tradition, a difference that cast von Lücken as a black sheep.
Iwar von Lücken was a poet whose work is reduced to a thin single volume. He'd be a literary unknown if not for this portrait. Dix provided post mortem fame that he was unable to obtain with a pen.
To Otto Dix, von Lücken was a sorry figure and that's probably what drew him to the artist. Dix accentuates his poverty -- the poet's complexion is gaunt and his suit was cut before he grew thin. The poet slouches and needs a chair rail for support. Peter de Mendelssohn saw him Berlin soon after he posed for this portrait. The poet with the enobling "von" was seen begging for coins in a cafe.
Publisher: Berlinische Galerie
Title: Portrait of a Prisoner
Year: 1945
Description: When the NSDAP came to power, Dix was forced into self-imposed exile near the Swiss border. The new regime branded him a degenerate and destroyed as much of his art as they could find. Fortunately for posterity, many of his pieces were in private collections.
In the final stages of the war, Dix was conscripted into the Volkssturm, a military homeguard comprised of young boys and old men. He was soon captured by the French and spent the duration in a POW camp. Dix was granted access to materials and he painted a triptych for the prison chapel. Portrait of a Prisoner was completed inside the camp.
The prisoner is a sympathetic figure. Dix forgot his tendency to accentuate his subject's worst features. After the war, his art would take on a strong relgious tone. Here we find a foreshadowing of that tendency as barb wire creates the prisoner's crown of thorns.
Publisher: Private Collection
Early life and education
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. Between 1906 and 1910, he served an apprenticeship with painter Carl Senff, and began painting his first landscapes. In 1910, he entered the Kunstgewerbeschule in Dresden (Academy of Applied Arts), where Richard Guhr was among his teachers.
World War I service
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 autumn of 1915 he was assigned as a non-commissioned officer of a machine-gun unit on the Western front and took part in the Battle of the Somme. In November 1917, his unit was transferred to the Eastern front until the end of hostilities with Russia, and in February 1918 he was stationed in Flanders. Back on the western front, he fought in the German Spring Offensive. He earned the Iron Cross (second class) and reached the rank of vizefeldwebel. In August of that year he was wounded in the neck, and shortly after he took pilot training lessons. He was discharged from service in December 1918.
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.
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 furore that 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.
In one of his few statements, published in 1927, Dix declared, "The object is primary and the form is shaped by the object."
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, 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 in the southwest of Germany. 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. His paintings that were considered "degenerate" were discovered among the 1500+ paintings hidden away by an art dealer and his son in 2012.
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
Dix eventually returned to Dresden and remained there until 1966. After the war most of his paintings were religious allegories or depictions of post-war suffering, including his 1948 Ecce homo with self-likeness behind barbed wire. In this period, Dix gained recognition in both parts of, the then divided, Germany. In 1959 he was awarded the Grand Merit Cross of the Federal Republic of Germany (Großes Verdienstkreuz) and in 1950, he was unsuccessfully nominated for the National Prize of the GDR. He received the Lichtwark Prize in Hamburg and the Martin Andersen Nexo Art Prize in Dresden to mark his 75th birthday in 1967. Dix was made an honorary citizen of Gera. Also in 1967 he received the Hans Thoma Prize and in 1968 the Rembrandt Prize of the Goethe Foundation in Salzburg.
Dix died on 25 July 1969 after a second stroke in Singen am Hohentwiel. He is buried at Hemmenhofen on Lake Constance.
Dix had three children: a daughter Nelly (1923-1955) and two sons, Ursus (1927-2002) and Jan (* 1928).
“I did not paint war pictures in order to prevent war. I would never have been so arrogant. I painted them to exorcise the experience of war.” ~Otto Dix
“People were already beginning to forget, what horrible suffering the war had brought them. I did not want to cause fear and panic, but to let people know how dreadful war is and so to stimulate people’s powers of resistance.” ~Otto Dix
The Trench by Otto Dix (1923)
Title: The War Cripples
Year: 1920
Description: By 1920, Dix was associated with the Berlin Dadaists. In the summer of that year, he exhibited this painting, the War Cripples, there. Unlike many works on display, this one avoided official controversy although it clearly blamed the military for butchering a generation. Others on display were not as fortunate. The military filed charges of insult against several artists at the exhibition.
When Hitler rose to power, Dix was forbidden to exhibit his work but Nazis were under no such restriction. In 1933, this painting was siezed and displayed in the Nazi's Degenerate Art exhibition. It was captioned, "Slander against the German Heroes of the World War."
The reproduction seen here was taken from a period photograph. The War Cripples disappeared after the Degenerate Art exhibition. It's location is currently unknown and it is presumed destroyed.
Publisher: Location unknown
http://www.ottodix.org
Workers renovating the former residence of Otto Dix have uncovered six murals by the artist. The home is being turned into a museum, to be run by the Stuttgart Kuntmuseum http://www.kunstmuseum-stuttgart.de The Carneval-themed pieces, most likely from 1966, were behind a bookcase in the cellar library and are incredibly well-preserved. The museum opened in June 2013.
