Otto Dix
The merciless chronicler of war and Weimar.
Otto Dix had been a soldier and showed the horrors of war and the decadence of the 1920s with unsparing sharpness.
Otto Dix was born in 1891 in Untermhaus near Gera in Thuringia. His father was a foundry worker. He trained as a decorative painter and then studied at the School of Arts and Crafts in Dresden. When the First World War broke out, he volunteered and served for several years as a machine-gunner, including on the Somme. His experiences in the trenches marked him for life.
After the war he was for a time involved in Dada, but in the 1920s he became one of the leading figures of the Neue Sachlichkeit, or New Objectivity. He painted with the meticulous technique of the Old Masters, in thin glazes, but his subjects were contemporary and merciless. War invalids, prostitutes, profiteers and nightclub patrons are depicted with a sharpness bordering on caricature.
In 1924, ten years after the outbreak of the war, he published the print cycle The War, fifty etchings of corpses, wounds, gas masks and devastated landscapes. It is regarded as one of the most powerful anti-war works in the history of art. The Portrait of the Journalist Sylvia von Harden of 1926 is in the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The triptych Metropolis of 1927–28 shows Berlin nightlife between jazz bands and begging war invalids and is in the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart. The large triptych The War of 1929–32 hangs in Dresden.
In 1927 he became a professor at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts, but the Nazis dismissed him in 1933 and branded his art degenerate. He moved to the countryside on Lake Constance and painted mainly landscapes. In the final stages of the war he was forced into the Volkssturm and became a French prisoner of war.
After the war he often painted religious subjects in a freer style. He was honoured in both West and East Germany and died in 1969. Dix is regarded as one of the most incisive chroniclers of the Weimar Republic and of what war does to people.