Otto Dix was haunted by his experiences of the 1st World War which resulted in
his harsh and brutal paintings of war and the Weimer society of the 1920’s. He later
painted nudes and savagely satirical portraits of celebrities from Germany's intellectual circles.
A leading light of the Neue Sachlichkeit movement, he was later persecuted by the Nazi’s,
but he survived. Let’s explore this remarkable artist’s life.
Wilhelm Heinrich Otto Dix was born on the 2nd of December 1891 in Untermhaus near Gera in Thuringia
in Germany. He was the eldest son of Ernst Franz Dix who was a mould maker in an iron foundry,
and his seamstress wife Pauline Louise. They were working-class parents, but his mother
Louise enjoyed poetry and had a cousin Fritz Amann who was a painter. At the age of ten,
Otto Dix modelled for Fritz Amann and was so impressed by his experience in his studio,
that he decided to become a painter himself. Fritz Amann would later become Dix’s mentor.
Between 1899 to 1905 he attended an elementary school in Untermhaus. He was inspired by his art
teacher Ernst Schunke, who guided his study and later helped him get financial assistance for
further study at art school. From 1905 until 1909 he trained locally under the artist Carl
Senff and began painting his first landscapes of Dresden and Thuringia in oil and pastel.
In 1909 Dix enrolled at the Dresden School of Arts and Crafts and attended classes there until 1914.
Luckily, after the first term his fees were covered by a stipend. He made extra money by
selling small portraits and genre paintings, as well as colouring black and white photographs. The
Academy being a more craft-oriented institution did not teach academic painting. As a result, Dix
taught himself how to paint through an intensive study of the Old Dutch, Italian, and German
Renaissance Masters. He analysed their methods and learnt, through lots of practice, how to build up
layers of paint to create depth and luminescence. He also admired the German Expressionists,
the Post-Impressionists and especially the work of Vincent van Gogh, whose work he saw in the Van
Gogh exhibition in Dresden in 1913. At the start of the War in 1914 he
voluntarily enlisted for military service and trained as a machine gunner in Dresden.
From 1915 he served as a machine gunner and platoon leader on the frontlines in Flanders,
Poland, Russia and in 1916 was at the Battle of the Somme, during the major allied offensive.
Dix was wounded several times, on one occasion he nearly died when a shrapnel splinter hit him
in the neck. "War” he said, “is so bestial: the hunger, the lice, the mud, those insane noises.”
During 1916 he had his first exhibition of war drawings at the Galerie Arnold in Dresden.
At the end of the war in 1918, he returned to Gera. Dix was profoundly affected by what he had
experienced on the frontlines, and later described a recurring nightmare in which he crawled
endlessly through a tunnel of destroyed houses. His traumatic experiences influenced many of his
later works, which became increasingly political and along with fellow German artist and friend
George Grosz, he adopted left wing views and referred to himself as a "revolutionary pacifist".
In 1920 Otto Dix and Georges Grosz took part in the first DADA fair at the gallery Burchard in
Berlin and later in the German Expressionists’ exhibition in Darmstadt. But Dix was angry,
especially about the way wounded and disabled ex-soldiers were treated in Germany. This
anger can be seen in these paintings; The War Cripples, The Prager Street and the Match Vendor.
Dix’s art became increasingly more morbid and realistic. Dix’s work veered toward social satire,
developing a grotesque and exaggerated aesthetic that along with Georges Grosz,
Max Beckmann and others formed the basis of the Neue Sachlichkeit, the New Objectivity movement
that sought to represent the harsh social and political realities of the Weimar Republic.
It was during this period he devoted himself to furthering his study of old master painting
techniques by initially drawing in egg tempera, followed by thin glazes of
cold and warm tones in oil paint. In 1923 he married Martha Koch,
Dr. Hans Koch’s ex-wife and later that year their daughter Nellie was born.
Also, in 1923 the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne bought Otto Dix’s painting,
The Trench. A critic described it as "perhaps the most powerful anti-war statement in modern art".
In 1925 Dix settled in Berlin where his work, like that of artist George
Grosz—his fellow veteran—became increasingly critical of contemporary German society.
In 1926 he painted his iconic portrait of the journalist Sylvia von Harden. The painting came
to characterise the period as much as the woman herself and was even referenced in the 1972 film
Cabaret which was also set in the Weimar-era of 1920’s Berlin. Dix claimed she was a perfect image
for a society that cared more about a woman's psychological state than her outward appearance.
In 1927 he moved to 32 Bayreuther Strasse in Dresden and was later appointed professor of
art at the Dresden Art Academy. On the 11th of March that year his son Ursus was born.
Otto Dix’s paintings were shown in the 16th Biennial in Venice and at
the international exhibition of modern art in the Brooklyn Museum in New York in 1928.
Shortly afterwards he began work on his great masterpiece, Metropolis. To understand this
painting context is vital. Hyperinflation had taken hold, the economy of the Weimar Republic
had been decimated due to reparation payments as a result of 1st World War. Consequently, the middle
class was almost completely wiped out, leaving just the extremely wealthy and the extremely
poor. There was widespread unemployment, hunger, and malnutrition. Metropolis, shows the depravity
of the situation the Weimar Republic faced in the 1920’s. In the centre panel Dix portrays the
upper classes, they are partying, having a great time, whilst just outside, people are starving,
resorting to desperate measures to fulfil their basic human needs. There desperation is clearly
seen in the two side panels of the triptych. In 1929 Dix exhibited in Paris and Detroit and
began work on the War triptych whose centre panel is a reworking of the Trench painting of 1923.
The War triptych is actually four panels which shows men going into battle,
the aftermath of conflict, and the return from the battlefront. It was completed in 1932.
During the 1930’s Otto Dix was a committed portrait painter, at a time when photographic
portraits had become much more fashionable. Dix commented, ‘Painting portraits is regarded by
modernist artists as a lower artistic occupation; and yet it is one of the most exciting and
difficult tasks for a painter.’ He produced a number of child portraits and many savagely
satirical portraits of German intellectuals and leading lights of German society.
In 1931 Otto Dix became a full member of the Prussian Academy of the Arts in Berlin and
took part in the German Painting and Sculpture Show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
The following year he exhibited the War triptych at the Prussian Academy and produced a mural for
the Museum of Hygiene in Dresden. This was later chiselled off the wall by the Nazis in 1934.
When Hitler and the Nazis came to power in 1933, Dix was dismissed from his professorship at the
Dresden Art Academy. Apparently, through his painting, he had committed a ‘violation of
the moral sensibilities and subversion of the militant spirit of the German people’.
His students were also reprimanded. Later that year a number of his paintings were
ridiculed in the Nazi Art exhibition, ‘Reflections of Decay’ held in Dresden.
In 1934 the Nazis banned the Otto Dix from exhibiting his work, but he did take part in
the German Painting exhibition in Zurich in 1935. In 1936 he moved to Hemmenhofen on the
shore of Lake Constance very close to the Swiss border and lived there for the rest of his life.
In 1937 Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi Propaganda Minister ordered the President of the Reich
Chamber of Visual Arts, Professor Ziegler to confiscate 260 of Otto Dix’s paintings. In
July 1937 8 of Dix’s paintings were exhibited at the infamous Degenerate Art Exhibition in Munich.
At the time Otto Dix, like all German artists, were forced to join the Nazi
government's Reich Chamber of Fine Arts. Membership dictated that Otto Dix had to
promise to paint only inoffensive landscapes or portraits, although he didn’t always comply.
In 1939 Otto Dix was arrested by the Gestapo and locked up for two weeks in Dresden for alleged
complicity in the Munich attack on Hitler’s life. When he was released, he took refuge on the Höri
peninsula, on the shores of Lake Constance, just a stone’s throw from the Swiss Border. On the
20th of March 1939 Hitler ordered the Berlin Fire Department to burn almost 5000 art works
including paintings by Otto Dix. Thousands of other works by major artists were also confiscated
and sent to Zurich and Lucerne in Switzerland to be auctioned off to fill the Nazi coffers.
Rather bravely in 1942 Otto Dix turned down a contract to paint the portrait of Joachim
Von Ribbentrop, the foreign minister of the German Reich. Towards the end of the war in
1945 Dix was forced to enlist in the German People’s Militia “Volkssturm” and was sent
to the banks of the Rhine in March 1945. The following month he was captured and
taken prisoner by French forces and placed in a prison camp in Colmar, north eastern France.
Luckily, the commandant recognized who he was and allowed him to paint in the camp workshops
where he completed a triptych for the prison camp Chapel. He was released in early 1946.
After his release he returned to live in Hemmenhofen and his indomitable spirit began
to return. His painting took a new direction as he began to produce works on religious themes
such as ‘Job’ and ‘Christ on the Cross’. In 1948 he participated in an exhibition
at the Museum of Modern art in New York and in numerous exhibitions in East and West Germany.
Otto Dix was very unusual in his ability to negotiate between the regimes of West and East
Germany. Travel between the two does not seem to have been much of a problem for him when for
others it was banned. In 1955 he became a member of the German Academy of the Arts in West Berlin
and the following year a member of the German Academy of the Arts in East Berlin. He received
major awards in both the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic.
In 1959 he travelled to southern Italy and later created the mural ‘War and Peace’ for the town
hall of Singen in Baden-Württemberg. It is the only surviving Otto Dix mural.
Later in 1966 he paid his last visit to Dresden and received numerous honours in both East and
West Germany to commemorate his 75th birthday. In 1967 Otto Dix travelled to Greece but later in
November of that year he suffered his first stroke which resulted in his left hand being paralysed.
Otto Dix became an honorary member of the Karlsruhe Art Academy in 1968
and also received the Rembrandt prize from the Salzburg Goethe Foundation.
Later the same year his triptych painting War was purchased by the state art collection in Dresden.
Dix donated a number of drawings and a collection of copperplate engravings
to the Dresden Art Gallery in 1969 and on the 19th of July of the same year,
suffered his second stroke. 6 days later he died of a heart attack at the age of 78 in
the hospital in Singen. He was buried on the 28th of July in the cemetery at Hemmenhofen.
Otto Dix constructed his paintings as though staging the world as a play. His sharp-eyed
representation, his early obsession with injured veterans and his use of parody,
suggest a resignation and acceptance of life’s trials and tribulations. But he is
perhaps best known for his portraits that not only came to symbolise the hedonistic Weimar
Republic of the 1920’s, but also influenced many portrait artists throughout the 20th century.
Thank you for watching. I hope you have enjoyed the video. If you would like to
see more of my videos, then why not subscribe? It’s free. And by clicking the little black bell
will tell you when my next video is released. If you want to support the making of my videos,
then please check out my Patreon Channel where you can find lots of interesting rewards in
return for your patronage. Thanks again. I’ll see you in the next video. Goodbye.