Otto Dix

A German artist, graphic artist, an author of emotionally intense, expressionistic and shocking paintings.

He was born into the family of worker Franz Dix and sewer Polina. His mother instilled in his son a love for music and poetry.

One of the founders of Dada movement was the most influential creator who formed the image of the Weimar Republic of the 1920s; his works are key in the movement “Neue Sachlichkeit” (“New objectivity” or “New Materiality”). He is one of the founders and participants in the union “Dresden Secession” (1919). In the canvases of Otto Dix, pacifist, social, and in later works biblical motives are vivid. The artist was a participant in two world wars.

Key ideas:

– The words of Otto Dix, “Art is an exercise, I draw dreams and views of my time. Art is an attempt to create peace in oneself. I have as much chaos in me as it is in our time”, may serve as a key to understanding the key ideas of Dada artist and Expressionist. Only a few creators were as tightly connected with tragic events and political catastrophes of Europe as Otto Dix.

– The young artist and veteran of the First World War was persecuted by his experience of the participation in the horrible tragedy. Otto Dix depicted “the war with an honest face” as its eyewitness. The other theme of the works of Dix was a satire He is considered one of the sharpest caricature painters in the modern painting.

– While many artists refused from the portrait genre in favour of abstraction, Dix made it resurrect, creating the portraits of famous activists and celebrities from the intellectual circles of Germany. His narrative paintings are remembered by the accusation of corrupt and immoral life of the modern city. At the height of his art career, he painted in the genre of nu, depicted prostitutes.
– Typical for portraits by Dix of the beginning of the 1920s is a portrait of Fritz Glazer. The artist often invited his famous friends as his models – art-dealers, writers, doctors, lawyers who were interested in art. For example, Glazer had an impressing collection – Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Emil Nolde and others. Caricaturist Dix highlighted the expressive features of the lawyer’s face, in this case, an expressive Semitic nose. These and other portraits, especially those of journalist Silvia von Harden, impress with the contradiction between good, often friendly relationships between models and their unattractive images in paintings.

– The works of the artist become more gloomy and allegoric at the beginning of the 1930s, when he became an indicative target for Nazis. The regime called him a degenerative artist; many of his works were burnt. Dix had to leave the grotesque style that he used to sharply criticize corruption and other negative phenomena in the Weimar community. Slowly departing from social themes, Dix turned to landscape and story paintings on Christian themes. Only in the years following after the Second World War, the master received as much recognition as he deserved.