Otto Dix

Biography

The painting “The Trench” (1923) was on show in Cologne only briefly: the Wallraf-Richartz Museum hung a curtain in front of it, because it depicted the dismembered and decomposing bodies of soldiers after a battle. In 1925 the then mayor of Cologne, Konrad Adenauer, cancelled the purchase, and the museum’s director had to resign. Today the canvas is gone: after 1940 its trail goes cold, and it may have been lost in the confusion at the end of the war.

The artist was thirty-one at the time.

Wilhelm Heinrich Otto Dix was born on 2 December 1891 in Untermhaus, now part of the city of Gera in Thuringia. His father was a moulder in an iron foundry, and his mother was a seamstress who loved the arts. As a boy Dix sat as a model for his mother’s cousin, the painter Fritz Amann, and after that, as far as we know, he wanted to be an artist. He always regarded himself as a child of the working class. A teacher at school encouraged his drawing, and then he trained with the decorative painter Carl Senff in Gera. A scholarship from the Prince of Reuss enabled him to enter the Dresden School of Applied Arts in 1910, where his teachers included Richard Guhr and Johann Nikolaus Türk. In the Dresden picture gallery he copied and studied the history of painting, while his own work of those years was in a late Impressionist and Expressionist vein, and he tried out Cubist and Futurist forms.

In August 1914 he was called up. He served in the field artillery and then as a machine-gunner on the Western and Eastern fronts, took part in the Battle of the Somme and in the German spring offensive of 1918. He received the Iron Cross, 2nd class, rose to the rank of Vizefeldwebel (a senior non-commissioned officer) and in August 1918 was wounded in the neck. He returned home in December. Years later he spoke of a recurring nightmare in which he crawled through ruined houses. At the front he produced Futurist drawings and gouaches.

After the war Dix enrolled at the Dresden Academy, in 1919 became one of the founders of the Dresden Secession, and received a studio as a master student of Otto Gussmann. In the same year he began to have contact with the Berlin Dadaists; in 1920 he met George Grosz, made Dada works with collage elements and took part in the First International Dada Fair in Berlin. From 1922 he lived in Düsseldorf, where he worked in a studio at the academy and learned printmaking techniques. In 1923 he married Martha Koch, whom he had met two years earlier; she often posed for his portraits. By the middle of the decade his manner had become increasingly realistic: thin glazes of oil paint over a tempera underpainting, as with the old masters. In 1925 he moved to Berlin and took part in the “Neue Sachlichkeit” (New Objectivity) exhibition in Mannheim, which gave the movement its name; in 1926 he had two solo exhibitions, in Berlin and in Munich.

He painted prostitutes, cripples, old people, death. Legless and disfigured veterans, a common sight on Berlin’s streets, became the subject of separate works. Among his best-known works of these years are “Sailor and Girl” (1925), “Portrait of the Journalist Sylvia von Harden” (1926) and the triptych “Metropolis” (1928), which shows the revelry and depravity of the Weimar Republic. In one of his few statements, published in 1927, he declared: “The object is primary and the form is shaped by the object.” From 1927 to 1933 Dix was a professor at the Dresden Academy, and in 1931 he became a member of the Prussian Academy of Arts. He completed the triptych “The War” in 1932.

Nationalist critics had been calling him “degenerate” long before 1933. In April 1933, after the Nazis came to power, he was dismissed from his chair for “a violation of the moral sensibilities” of the nation. In the autumn he moved to the south of Germany, living first in Schloss Randegg and from 1936 in his own house in Hemmenhofen on Lake Constance, where he painted the landscapes of the Hegau and the shore of the Untersee. In 1937 many of his works were confiscated from museums; “The Trench” and “War Cripples” were shown at the “Degenerate Art” exhibition in Munich, and he was forbidden to exhibit. Like all artists, he had to join the Reich Chamber of Fine Arts. In November 1939, two weeks after the attempt on Hitler’s life in a Munich beer hall, the Gestapo briefly arrested him on a charge of involvement in the plot; a few days later he was released for lack of evidence. After that he lived in “inner emigration” and carried out private commissions, for example painting Saint Christopher in the manner of the old masters for the owner of a brewery in Köstritz.

In 1945 he was drafted into the Volkssturm (the last-ditch German home guard) and was taken prisoner by the French. He was held in a camp at Colmar, where many of the six thousand prisoners died; when his identity was established, he was allowed to work there as an artist. He returned to Hemmenhofen in February 1946. After the war he gave up glazing and went back to the freer Expressionist manner of his early period; his late works contain many Christian themes, for example “Ecce Homo” (1948), in which a self-portrait appears behind barbed wire. Neither the Socialist Realism of East Germany nor the abstraction of West Germany was close to him, but he received recognition in both states. He also worked in Dresden, where he kept a studio. In 1949, when Willi Baumeister proposed him for a professorship at the Stuttgart Academy and the senate asked for samples of his work, Dix flatly refused.

In 1959 he received the Grand Cross of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany; in 1966, on his seventy-fifth birthday, he became an honorary citizen of Gera; in 1967 he received the Lichtwark Prize in Hamburg, the Martin Andersen Nexø Art Prize in Dresden and the Hans Thoma Prize; in 1968 the Rembrandt Prize of the Goethe Foundation in Salzburg.

Dix died on 25 July 1969 in Singen am Hohentwiel. He is buried in Hemmenhofen. The house in Hemmenhofen where he lived and worked from 1936 has been open as a museum since 2013.