Otto Dix

Otto Dix (Untermhaus, near Gera, 1891 - Singen, 1969) was a German painter and printmaker associated with Expressionism and, above all, with the New Objectivity, a movement that depicted the society of the Weimar Republic without idealising it. Together with George Grosz and Max Beckmann, he is widely regarded as one of the most important artists of that movement. He is best known for his paintings of war and for his unsparing view of the violence and decay of the postwar years.

The son of an iron foundry worker, he trained first with the decorative painter Carl Senff and then at the Dresden school of applied arts, where Richard Guhr was among his teachers. His early works were landscapes and portraits in a stylised realism that later moved towards Expressionism. He experimented with Cubism, Futurism and Dada, and incorporated collage into his work.

When the First World War broke out, Dix volunteered for the German Army and served as a non-commissioned officer in a machine-gun unit on the Western Front, taking part in the Battle of the Somme. He also fought on the Eastern Front and in the German spring offensive of 1918. He was wounded and received the Iron Cross, second class. The experience left a lasting mark: he described a recurring nightmare in which he crawled through destroyed houses, and he returned to it in many works, including the portfolio of fifty etchings Der Krieg (The War), published in 1924.

After the war he co-founded the Dresdner Secession Gruppe 1919 in Dresden, then moved to Düsseldorf and Berlin, where his painting became ever more realistic and critical. His work of this period depicts prostitution, violence, old age and death, as well as the maimed veterans who were a common sight on Berlin's streets. Among his best-known paintings are Metropolis (1927-28), a triptych on the decadence of the Weimar Republic, and the portrait of the journalist Sylvia von Harden (1926). In 1927 he obtained a professorship at the Dresden Academy of Art, from which he was dismissed after the Nazis came to power.

Under the Nazi regime Dix withdrew to the Lake Constance area, his works were included in the Degenerate Art exhibition, and in 1939 he was arrested on a suspicion of involvement in a plot against Hitler, though he was released shortly afterwards. After the Second World War, in which he was conscripted in 1945 and taken prisoner by French troops, he did not fit into the Socialist Realism of East Germany or the abstract art of West Germany. Nevertheless, he received recognition in both Germanys and numerous prizes in the 1960s. He died in Singen in 1969 after a second stroke.

His legacy lies in his stark documentation of the wounds of war and of interwar German society, and in a body of work of great technical range, from drawing and watercolour to printmaking and oil painting in the manner of the old masters.