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ARTIST NAME: Otto Dix
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Auction Results and Indebt Information on Otto Dix Art
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Otto Dix Biography:
Otto Dix, the son of Franz Dix (1862-1942)
and Louise Amann (1864-1953) was born in Unternhaus,
Germany, in 1891. After attending elementary school he worked locally until 1910
when he became a student at the Dresden School of Arts and
Crafts. To help fund his education, he accepted commissions and painted
portraits of local people.
On the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 Dix volunteered for the German
Army and was assigned to a field artillery regiment in Dresden. In the autumn of
1915 Dix was sent to the Western Front where he served as a non-commissioned
officer with a machine-gun unit. He was at the Somme during the major allied
offensive during the summer of 1916. Dix was wounded several times during the
war. One one occasion he nearly died when a shrapnel splinter hit him in the
neck.
In 1917 he fought on the Eastern Front and after Russia negotiated a peace with
Germany, Dix returned to France where he took part in the German Spring
Offensive. By the end of the war in 1918 Dix had won the Iron Cross (second
class) and reached the rank of vice-sergeant-major.
After the war Dix developed left-wing views and his paintings and drawings
became increasingly political. Like other German artists such as John Heartfield
and George Grosz, Dix was angry about the way that the wounded and crippled
ex-soldiers were treated in Germany. This was reflected in paintings such as
War Cripples (1920), Butcher's Shop (1920) and War Wounded
(1922).
In 1923 Dix's painting, The Trench was purchased by the Wallraf-Richartz
Museum. When the painting was exhibited in 1924 its depiction of decomposed
corpses in a German trench created such a public outcry that the museum's
director, Hans Secker, was forced to resign.
In 1924 Dix joined with other artists who had fought in the First World War to
put on a travelling exhibition of paintings called No More War! Dix also
produced a book of etchings, The War
(1924) that was later
described by one critic as "perhaps the most powerful as well as well as the
most anti-war statements in modern art".
During this period, Dix made extensive use of photographs that had been taken of
German soldiers who had been badly disfigured by warfare. Many of these
photographs were later used by another German anti-war artist, Ernst
Friedrich, in his book War Against War! (1924).
Dix worked for six years on what is considered to be his two great masterpieces,
Metropolis (1928) and Trench Warfare
(1932). In the left-hand panel of Metropolis,
Dix shows himself as a war cripple entering Berlin and being greeted by a row of
beckoning prostitutes. Trench Warfare
is also a triptych (a
painting on three panels side by side) deals more directly with the First World
War. The left-handed panel shows German soldiers marching off to war, the
central panel is a scene of destroyed houses and mangled bodies, and the
right-hand panel side panel shows soldiers struggling home from the war.
In 1933 Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany. Hitler and his Nazi government
disliked Dix's anti-military paintings and arranged for him to be sacked from
his post as art tutor at the Dresden Academy. Dix's
dismissal letter said that his work "threatened to sap the will of the German
people to defend themselves".
Dix left Dresden and went to live near Lake Constance in the south-west of
Germany. Soon afterwards, two of Dix's paintings, The Trench and War
Cripples, appeared in an Nazi exhibition to discredit modern art. The show
called Reflections of Decadence was held in Dresden Town Hall. Later,
several of Dix's anti-war paintings were destroyed by the Nazi authorities in
Germany.
Dix responded to the Reflections of Decadence exhibition by painting
another powerful anti-war painting, Flanders (1934). Inspired by
inspired by a passage from Le Fe,
a First World War novel written by the French soldier, Henri Barbusse,
the painting shows a scene from the Western Front. In the picture dead bodies
float in water-filled shell-holes while those soldiers still alive
resemble rotting tree stumps.
After the Nazis came to power artists in Germany could only work as an artist,
buy materials or show their work, if they were members of the
Imperial Chamber of Fine Arts. Membership was
controlled by the Nazi government and in 1934 Dix was allowed to become a member
in return for agreeing to paint landscapes instead of political subjects.
Although Dix mainly painted landscapes during this period, he still produced the
occasional allegorical painting which contained coded attacks on the Nazi
government. In 1938 several of these paintings, including Flanders,
appeared in a one-man exhibition in Zurich.
In 1939 Dix was arrested and charged with involvement in a plot on Hitler's
life. However, he was eventually released and the charges were dropped. In the
Second World War Dix was conscripted into the Volkssturm
(German Home Guard). In 1945 Dix was forced to join the
German Army
and at the end of the war was
captured and put into a prisoner-of-war camp.
Released in February 1946, Dix returned to Dresden, a city that had been
virtually destroyed by heavy bombing. Most of Dix's post-war paintings were
religious allegories. However, paintings such as Job (1946), Masks in
Ruins (1946) and Ecce Homo II (1948) dealt with the suffering caused
by the Second World War. Otto Dix died in 1969.
- Courtesy: schoolnet.co.uk
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