Dix, Otto

Dix, Otto (1891–1969). German painter and printmaker, born at Untermhaus in Thuringia. He was apprenticed to a local painter-decorator, 1905–9, then studied at the Dresden School of Arts and Crafts, 1910–14. At this time he was influenced by the Expressionist group Die Brücke, which had been founded in Dresden in 1905, and by an exhibition of van Gogh's work held there in 1913. During the First World War he served in the German army, witnessing the full horror of trench warfare, then took up his studies again at the Academy in Düsseldorf, 1919–22. In the 1920s he was, with George Grosz, the outstanding artist of the Neue Sachlichkeit movement, employing a detailed technique that showed his admiration for the masters of the German Renaissance. His work of this time conveyed disgust at the horrors of war and the depravities of a decadent society with unerring psychological insight and devastating emotional effect. The Match Seller (Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart, 1920), for example, is a pitiless depiction of indifference to suffering, showing passers-by ignoring a blind and limbless ex-soldier begging in the street, and Dix's fifty etchings entitled The War (1924) have been described by George Heard Hamilton as ‘perhaps the most powerful as well as the most unpleasant anti-war statements in modern art'. Another favourite theme was prostitution, and he also painted brilliantly incisive portraits, such as that of the journalist Sylvia von Harden (Pompidou Centre, Paris, 1926), in which ‘he condemned the social and spiritual values of an era, as well as of a way of life, by a merciless analysis of a particular person’ ( Hamilton).

In 1925 Dix moved to Berlin, then in 1927 he was appointed a professor at the Dresden Academy. Although he had no strong political views, his anti-military stance drew the wrath of the Nazis and he was dismissed from his academic post in 1933. The following year he was forbidden to exhibit, and eight of his paintings were shown in the infamous Degenerate Art exhibition in 1937. They included The Trench (1923), a large triptych that had been his most controversial painting on account of its horrific depiction of war; it was destroyed by the Nazis in 1939. By this time Dix was living quietly in the country, at Hemmenhofen near Lake Constance (he moved there in 1936), painting traditional landscapes, but he still aroused suspicion; in 1939 he was arrested on a charge of complicity in a plot on Hitler's life, but he was soon released. He was conscripted into the Volkssturm (Home Guard) in 1945 and was a prisoner of war in France, 1945–6, after which he returned to Hemmenhofen. From 1949 he regularly visited Dresden. His post-war work—which was much more loosely handled and often inspired by religious mysticism—did not compare in originality or strength with his great achievements of the 1920s.

Dix made prints in a variety of techniques—woodcut, etching, drypoint, lithography—and has been described as ‘together with Beckmann … the dominant figure in the field of original printmaking in Germany after the First World War’ ( Frances Carey and Antony Griffiths, The Print in Germany 1880–1933, 1984). After the Second World War he worked mainly in lithography, and as with his late paintings, there was a sharp decline from the standard of his pre-war work.