Otto Dix

Wilhelm Heinrich Otto Dix was a German artist known for his realistic depictions of the brutal conditions of German society through defining moments of the country’s modern history. Born in 1891 in Untermhaus, a village now part of Gera, Germany, Dix lived through the two world wars and the division of Germany after its defeat. These experiences imprinted a marked influence in his art and fed his interest in exploring the human condition.

Otto Dix grew up spending his spare time in the studio of his artist cousin Fritz Amann, fuelling his ambition to become an artist in his own right. Between 1906 and 1910, Dix apprenticed under painter Carl Senff and began painting his first landscapes. He was later trained at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Dresden — now the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts, with Richard Guhr as one of his instructors.

During World War I, Dix served in the field artillery regiment in Dresden. The horrors of the war haunted the artist, and he would later translate these images onto his canvas and etchings. After the war, Dix founded the Dresden Secession group in 1919. This period marked his first foray into Expressionism. His figurative work became a tool for social satire. With an exaggerated, grotesque style associated with the New Objectivity movement, Dix provided unflinching commentaries on the social and political realities of the Weimar Republic.

In 1920 he met George Grosz and began working with collage elements under the influence of Dada. By the mid-1920s, Dix was experimenting with an increasingly realistic style of painting, using thin glazes of oil paint over a tempera underpainting in the manner of the Old Masters. Otto Dix was a committed portraitist, with subjects ranging from his wife Martha Koch to fellow artists, arts patrons and other members of Germany’s cultural circle.

Dix was labelled as one of Germany’s most ‘degenerate’ artists even before the Nazis’ rise to power in 1933. He, like other practising artists, was forced to join the Nazi government’s Reich Chamber of Fine Arts. During World War II, he was conscripted into the Volkssturm and was captured by French troops at the end of the war. He was released in 1946.

After the war, Dix returned to Dresden and remained there until 1966. His post-war paintings focused on religious allegories and depictions of post-war traumas. In this period he gained recognition in both parts of the then-divided Germany. Otto Dix died in 1969 at the age of 77.