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Otto Dix: 1891-1969

December 2, 2016 By Wendy Campbell

Otto DixBorn on December 2, 1891, in Untermhaus, Germany, Wilhelm Heinrich Otto Dix was a painter, printmaker and watercolourist. He is widely considered one of the most influential artists of the Weimar Republic of the 1920s.

From 1905 to 1914, Dix trained as a decorative wall painter in Gera and Dresden. Starting in 1909, he taught himself easel painting, focusing on portraits and landscapes. Dix’s first paintings were in a veristic style, but after encountering works by Van Gogh and those in the style of Futurism, he incorporated these into an Expressionistic style.

From 1914 to 1918, Dix served in the German army where he made countless sketches of warcenes in both realistic and  Cubo-Futurist manners. The experience of war, became a dominant motif of his work until the 1930s. He later said that “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.”

Following the war, Dix studied at the Dresden Akademie der Bildenden Künste and in 1919, was a founding member of the Dresdner Seccession, a group of radical Expressionist and Dada artists and writers. Dix depicted gruesome scenes of war and revolution, and depictions of legless, drastically disfigured war cripples. In 1920, he exhibited at the First International Dada Fair in Berlin. “Dix employed a mixed-media technique that fused painting and collage using found objects. In his printmaking he echoed the motifs of his paintings, resulting in five portfolios of engravings and one of woodcuts by 1922.”

In 1920, Dix returned to working in a veristic style. He drew nudes at the Akademie and painted portraits of friends and working-class models. His works also included socially critical motifs, scenes of brothels,  and a large triptych entitled The Trench.

Dix received critical and commercial success after his shift to a revised form of realism. He had his first solo exhibition in 1923 at the Galerie I. B. Neumann in Berlin. In 1925, Dix was one of the leading painters of the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), an art movement that arose in Germany as an outgrowth of, and in opposition to expressionism.

While Dix was gaining recognition, his work was also coming under attack. The Trench, which was purchased by the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum in Cologne was perceived “anti-military” and the museum returned the painting. As well, Dix was accused of pornography after exhibiting his Girl Before Mirror, his painting of an aging prostitute. He was acquitted, but right-wing political organizations continued to link him with left-wing plots to undermine German morality.

Dix moved to Düsseldorf in 1922 and married Martha Koch. Themes in his work were less political and he created a series of watercolours that depicted violent and/or morbid erotic subject matter. Dix also became favoured as a portrait painter of Germany’s theatrical and literary groups and their patrons.

Dix moved to Berlin in 1925 to be a part of the city’s art scene and to organize a series of exhibitions in Berlin, Munich and Dresden. He gained a professorship at the Dresden Akademie in 1926. In 1931, he was named as a member of the Preussische Akademie der Künste.

“While continuing to paint portraits and nudes, Dix injected an increasingly pessimistic and allegorical content into his work during the early 1930s. Nudes emerged as witches or personifications of melancholy.”

After the Nazi election in 1933, Dix  was stripped of his teaching position and all honours on the grounds that his paintings included morally offensive works that were “likely to adversely affect the military will of the German people”. He was forbidden to exhibit, and his work was confiscated from German museums to feature in various exhibitions of entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art).

Seeking seclusion, Dix moved first in 1934 to Randegger Castle near Singen, and then in 1936 to Hemmenhofen, a small town on Lake Constance.  “Participating in the ‘inner emigration’ of numerous German artists and intellectuals, supported by a small number of patrons, Dix employed a polemically significant Old Master technique, such as was also often advocated for Nazi art, emulating German Renaissance painters. He also changed his arts most frequent content to the relatively neutral one of landscape, but landscape markedly bereft of human presence and in rejection of contemporary events.”

Dix was drafted into the German territorial army in 1945. He was captured by French troops, served as prisoner of war at Colmar, after which he returned to Hemmenhofen. His work focused on portraits and self-portraits, Christian motifs,  landscapes, and  printmaking. “In politically divided Germany, he was unusual in his ability to negotiate between the West and East German regimes, making annual visits to Dresden, appointed to the academies of both West and East Berlin, and the recipient of major awards in both the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic.”

Dix continued to work in his later years. In the 1950s and 60s he traveled a great deal, constantly exhibiting his work. In 1967, after traveling to Greece, he suffered a stroke which paralyzed his left hand. Otto Dix died in Singen, Germany, on July 25, 1969.

Metropolis-Otto-Dix-1928
Portrait-of-the-Journalist-Sylvia-von-Harden-Otto-Dix-1926
Wounded-Otto-Dix-1917
The-Skat-Players-Otto-Dix-1920
Three-Prostitutes-On-The-Street-Otto-Dix-1925
The Match Seller-Otto-Dix-1921
Prager-Straße-Otto-Dix-1920
Stormtroops Advancing Under Gas-Otto Dix-1924
Portrait of the Dancer Anita Berber-Otto-Dixx-1925
Parents of the Artist-Otto Dix-1924
Portrait of Dr. Mayer-Hermann-Otto-Dix-1926
Nude Girl on a Fur-Otto-Dix-1932
Flanders-Otto-Dix-19134
Portrait of Dr. Heinrich Stadelmann-Otto-Dix-1922
War-Triptych-Otto-Dix-1929-32

Sources: MoMA, OttoDix.org

Filed Under: ART, Art History, Mixed Media, Painting Tagged With: Futurism, German Art, Neue Sachlichkeit, New Objectivity, Otto Dix

Art-e-Facts: 5 Random Art Facts XVIII

February 22, 2011 By Wendy Campbell

1. Mannerism is a period of European art that emerged from the later years of the Italian High Renaissance around 1520. It lasted until about 1580 in Italy, when a more Baroque style began to replace it.  Northern Mannerism continued into the early 17th century throughout much of Europe. Mannerism encompasses a variety of approaches influenced by, and reacting to, the harmonious ideals and restrained naturalism associated with artists such as Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, and early Michelangelo. The term is also used to refer to some Late Gothic painters working in northern Europe from about 1500 to 1530, especially the Antwerp Mannerists—a group unrelated to the Italian movement. Mannerism also has been applied by analogy to the Silver Age of Latin. (Wikipedia, Artcyclopedia)

2. Sequential Art is the use of a train of images deployed in sequence to graphic storytelling or convey information. The best-known example of sequential art is comics.  The term was coined in 1985 by comics artist Will Eisner in his book Comics and Sequential Art. Scott McCloud, another comics artist, elaborated the explanation further, in his book Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art.  Sequential art predates comics by millennia. Some of the earliest examples are the cave paintings, Egyptian hieroglyphics and paintings and pre-Columbian American picture manuscripts, which were recurrent mediums of artistic expression. (ComicArt.com, Wikipedia)

3. Decalcomania, from the French décalcomanie, is a decorative technique by which engravings and prints may be transferred to pottery or other materials. It was invented in England about 1750 and imported into the United States at least as early as 1865. Its invention has been attributed to Simon François Ravenet, an engraver from France who later moved to England and perfected the process he called “decalquer” (which means to copy by tracing). The first known use of the French term décalcomanie, in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Eleanor’s Victory (1863), was followed by the English decalcomania in an 1865 trade show catalog (The Tenth Exhibition of the Massachusetts Charitable Mechanic Association). It was popularized during the ceramic transfer craze of the mid-1870s. Today the shortened version is “Decal”.  Max Ernst also practiced decalcomania, as did  Remedios Varo.  (Wikipedia)

4. The New Objectivity (in German: ”Neue Sachlichkeit”) was an art movement that arose in Germany in the early 1920s as an outgrowth of, and in opposition to, expressionism.   Gustav Friedrich Hartlaub coined the term in 1923 in a letter he sent to colleagues describing an exhibition he was planning saying “what we are displaying here is distinguished by the — in itself purely external — characteristics of the objectivity with which the artists express themselves. He identified two groups: the Verists, who “tear the objective form of the world of contemporary facts and represent current experience in its tempo and fevered temperature;” and the Magical Realists, who “search more for the object of timeless ability to embody the external laws of existence in the artistic sphere.”  The movement essentially ended in 1933 with the fall of the Weimar Republic and the rise of the Nazis to power. (Wikipedia, Artcyclopedia)

5. The Bradshaw Rock Paintings are a distinctive style of rock art found in the Kimberley region of Western Australia. They are named after the pastoralist Joseph Bradshaw who was the first European to discover them in 1891. The Bradshaws are also known as Gwion Gwion by the local Aboriginal people. Scientists estimate that there may be more than 100,000 sites spread over 50,000 km of the Kimberley. In 1996 one of the paintings was dated by analysing an ancient wasp nest covering it (using thermoluminescence). The nest was found to be over 17,000 years old, indicating that some paintings are at least this old.  (Bradshaw Foundation, Wikipedia)

Filed Under: ART, Art History, Art-e-Facts, Drawing, Illustration Tagged With: Bradshaw Rock Paintings, Decalcomania, Mannerism, Max Ernst, Neue Sachlichkeit, Sequential Art, The New Objectivity

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