Otto Dix painted Weimar Germany so bluntly that museums hid his work
A machine-gunner at the Somme, Otto Dix spent the rest of his life haunted by a dream of crawling through ruined houses. He turned that war into merciless art, and his bleak portraits of Weimar Berlin so offended nationalists that the Nazis branded him degenerate and threw him out of his professorship.
Dix was born on 2 December 1891 in Untermhaus, now part of Gera, the son of a foundry worker and a seamstress who had written poetry. Afternoons in the studio of a painter cousin fixed his ambition early. After an apprenticeship with a local painter he went to the Dresden school of applied arts in 1910, turning out landscapes and portraits that drifted from stylised realism towards expressionism.
He volunteered in 1914, commanded a machine-gun unit on the Western Front, fought at the Somme, served in Russia and Flanders, won the Iron Cross and was wounded in the neck in 1918. He came home that Christmas. The experience fed a portfolio of fifty etchings, Der Krieg, published in 1924, and later a large war triptych. One trench painting from 1923 caused such an uproar that a Cologne museum hung a curtain in front of it, and mayor Konrad Adenauer later cancelled the purchase.
In Dresden and Berlin he flirted with Dada collage alongside his friend George Grosz, then developed a cool, exact style, laying thin oil glazes over tempera as old masters had. With Grosz and Max Beckmann he became a leading figure of the New Objectivity. His subjects were veterans missing limbs on Berlin streets, prostitutes, old age and the frantic nightlife of Metropolis, a triptych from 1928. Sailor and Girl later appeared on the cover of a Philip Roth novel.
The Nazis dismissed him from the Dresden Academy in April 1933 for offending the nation's morals, and two of his war paintings hung in the 1937 degenerate art show. Allowed to paint only harmless landscapes, he retreated to Lake Constance, was briefly arrested in 1939, and ended the war as a French prisoner. Honoured afterwards in both East and West Germany, he died in 1969.
Source: Otto Dix
