Otto
Dix, the son of Franz Dix (1862-1942) and Louise Amann (1864-1953)
was born in Unternhaus, Germany, in 1891.
After attending elementary school he worked locally until 1910 when
he became a student at the Dresden School of
Arts and Crafts. To help fund his education, he accepted commissions
and painted portraits of local people.
On the outbreak of the First World War in 1914
Dix volunteered for the German Army and
was assigned to a field artillery regiment in Dresden. In the autumn
of 1915 Dix was sent to the Western Front
where he served as a non-commissioned officer with a machine-gun
unit. He was at the Somme during the major
allied offensive
during the summer of 1916. Dix was wounded several times during the
war. One one occasion he nearly died when a shrapnel splinter hit
him in the neck.
In 1917 he fought on the Eastern Front
and after Russia negotiated a peace with Germany, Dix returned to
France where he took part in the German Spring
Offensive. By the end of the war in 1918 Dix had won the Iron
Cross (second class) and reached the rank of vice-sergeant-major.
After the war Dix developed left-wing views and his paintings and
drawings became increasingly political. Like other German artists
such as John Heartfield and George
Grosz, Dix was angry about the way that the wounded and crippled
ex-soldiers were treated in Germany. This was reflected in paintings
such as War Cripples (1920), Butcher's
Shop (1920) and War
Wounded (1922).
In 1923 Dix's painting, The Trench
was purchased by the Wallraf-Richartz Museum. When the painting was
exhibited in 1924 its depiction of decomposed corpses in a German
trench created such a public outcry that the museum's director, Hans
Secker, was forced to resign.
In 1924 Dix joined with other artists who had fought in the First
World War to put on a travelling exhibition of paintings called
No More War! Dix also produced
a book of etchings, The
War (1924)
that was later described by one critic as "perhaps the most powerful
as well as well as the most anti-war statements in modern art".
During this period, Dix made extensive use of photographs that had
been taken of German soldiers who had been badly disfigured by warfare.
Many of these photographs were later used by another German anti-war
artist, Ernst Friedrich, in his
book War Against War! (1924).
Dix worked for six years on what is considered to be his two great
masterpieces, Metropolis (1928)
and Trench Warfare
(1932). In the left-hand
panel of Metropolis, Dix shows
himself as a war cripple entering Berlin and being greeted by a row
of beckoning prostitutes. Trench Warfare
is
also a triptych (a painting on three panels side by side) deals more
directly with the First World War. The left-handed
panel shows German soldiers marching off to war, the central panel
is a scene of destroyed houses and mangled bodies, and the right-hand
panel side panel shows soldiers struggling home from the war.
In 1933 Adolf Hitler came to power in
Germany. Hitler and his Nazi government disliked Dix's anti-military
paintings and arranged for him to be sacked from his post as art tutor
at the Dresden Academy. Dix's dismissal
letter said that his work "threatened to sap the will of the
German people to defend themselves".
Dix left Dresden and went to live near Lake Constance in the south-west
of Germany. Soon afterwards, two of Dix's paintings, The
Trench and War Cripples,
appeared in an Nazi exhibition to discredit modern art. The show called
Reflections of Decadence was held
in Dresden Town Hall. Later, several of Dix's anti-war paintings were
destroyed by the Nazi authorities in Germany.
Dix responded to the Reflections of Decadence
exhibition by painting another powerful anti-war painting, Flanders
(1934). Inspired by inspired
by a passage from Le
Fe, a First
World War novel written by the French soldier, Henri
Barbusse,
the painting shows a scene from the Western
Front. In the picture dead bodies float in water-filled shell-holes
while those soldiers still alive resemble
rotting tree stumps.
After the Nazis came to power artists in Germany could only work as
an artist, buy materials or show their work, if they were members
of the Imperial Chamber of Fine Arts.
Membership was controlled by the Nazi government and in 1934 Dix was
allowed to become a member in return for agreeing to paint landscapes
instead of political subjects.
Although Dix mainly painted landscapes during this period, he still
produced the occasional allegorical painting which contained coded
attacks on the Nazi government. In 1938 several of these paintings,
including Flanders, appeared in
a one-man exhibition in Zurich.
In 1939 Dix was arrested and charged with involvement in a plot on
Hitler's life. However, he was eventually released and the charges
were dropped. In the Second World War Dix was
conscripted into the Volkssturm (German
Home Guard). In 1945 Dix was forced to join the German
Army and
at the end of the war was captured and put into a prisoner-of-war
camp.
Released in February 1946, Dix returned to Dresden, a city that had
been virtually destroyed by heavy bombing. Most of Dix's post-war
paintings were religious allegories. However, paintings such as Job
(1946), Masks in Ruins (1946)
and Ecce Homo II (1948) dealt
with the suffering caused by the Second World War.
Otto Dix died in 1969.
| Otto
Dix, Trench Warfare (1932) |
(1)
In 1963 Otto Dix explained why he had joined the German Army on the
outbreak of the First World War in 1914.
I
had to experience how someone beside me suddenly falls over and is
dead and the bullet has hit him squarely. I had to experience that
quite directly. I wanted it. I'm therefore not a pacifist at all -
or am I? - perhaps I was an inquisitive person. I had to see all that
for myself. I'm such a realist, you know, that I have to see everything
with my own eyes in order to confirm that it's like that. I have to
experience all the ghastly, bottomless depths for life for myself;
it's for that reason that I went to war, and for that reason I volunteered.
(2)
Otto Dix, interviewed by Maria Wetzel (1963)
As
a young man you don't notice at all that you were, after all, badly
affected. For years afterwards, at least ten years, I kept getting
these dreams, in which I had to crawl through ruined houses, along
passages I could hardly get through.
Not that painting would have been a release. The reason for doing
it is the desire to create. I've got to do it! I've seen that, I can
still remember it, I've got to paint it.
(3)
Otto Dix, Neues Deutschland (December, 1964)
The
painting (Trench Warfare) began life ten years after the First World
War. During this time I had made a lot of studies, so that I could
give artistic expression to my war experiences. In 1928 I felt ready
to tackle the big subject. At this time there were a lot of books
in the Weimar Republic once again peddling the notions of the hero
and heroism, which had long been rendered absurd in the trenches of
the First World War. People were already beginning to forget, what
horrible suffering the war had brought them. I did not want to cause
fear and panic, but to let people know how dreadful war is and so
to stimulate people's powers of resistance.
(4)
Julius Meier-Graefe reviewed Otto Dix's painting, The Trench,
in July, 1924.
The
trench is not only badly, but disgracefully painted, with a penetrating
delight in detail, not I hasten to add, in sensuous detail but in
matter-of-fact detail. Brains, blood and entrails can be painted in
a way which make's one's mouth water. This Dix - forgive the crude
expression - makes you want to throw up.
(5)
Otto Dix's painting, Flanders, was inspired by a passage from
Le Fe, a First World War novel written
by the French soldier, Henri Barbusse.
In
the same place, where we had thrown ourselves down in the night, we
wait for daybreak. Half dosing, half sleeping, continually opening
and closing our eyes, paralyzed, shattered and freezing, we stare
in disbelief at the return of the light. Painfully and swaying like
an invalid, I raise myself up and look around. The oppressive weight
of my wet greatcoat pulls me down. Next to me lie three completely
disfigured shapes.
| Otto
Dix, Flanders (1934) |
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