Dix, Otto

(1891-1969)

   artist; best known for his harsh portraits of postwar German society. Born in Untermhaus, near Gera, he studied art privately in 1905-1909 while working in Gera as a decorator's apprentice. His artistic train-ing began in 1909 at Dresden's Technische Hochschule; he remained in the Saxon capital for five years. But it was his wartime ordeal as commander of a machine-gun unit that led to the stark black-and-white drawings of the 1920s. After the war he returned to Dresden to study at the prestigious Kunstakademie.

   Although Dix was a founding member of Dresden's predominantly Expres-sionist Sezessiongruppe 1919, his work increasingly reflected the mentality es-poused by German Dada.* Intent on rendering the dreadful reality of both the war and postwar German society, he rejected Expressionism* and endeavored, as he later explained, "to achieve a representation of our age, for I believe that a picture must above all express a content, a theme." In concert with George Grosz,* his art linked humor with irony and satire. The themes of poverty, suffering, and prostitution were central to his attack on the morality of postwar bourgeois society. During 1922-1925 he studied at the Düsseldorf Kunstaka-demie, became a member of the group Das junge Rheinland, and worked pri-marily in watercolors. Having joined and exhibited with the Berliner Sezession in 1924, Dix relocated to Berlin* in 1925 and worked as a freelance artist. Reducing the irony and eroticism evident in much of his early Weimar work, his Berlin period (1925-1927) was marked by his pitilessly realistic portraiture. With some regret he left Berlin in 1927 to begin a successful teaching career at Dresden's Kunstakademie. Appointment to the Prussian Academy of Arts fol-lowed in 1931. His art, especially after 1929, was increasingly obsessed with war, death, and dying, perhaps best depicted in his graphic cycle Krieg (War), painted during 1929-1932.

   When the Nazis seized power, most of Dix's work was labeled pornographic or grotesquely unheroic. Dismissed from his post and forced to resign his mem-bership in the Prussian Academy, he was forbidden to exhibit in 1934. About 260 of his works were impounded; 26 were included in the 1937 traveling exhibition Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art). In 1939 he was briefly arrested under suspicion of being part of a Munich conspiracy to assassinate Hitler.* Inducted into the army in 1945, he spent several months as a French prisoner of war.

   REFERENCES:Barron, "Degenerate Art";Löffler, Otto Dix.