Biography

Born in Gera-Unternhaus, Germany, in 1891, the son of a railroad worker, Dix studied at art schools in Dresden and Düsseldorf. He explored Expressionism and founded the Neüe Sanchlinchkeit movement with George Grosz. He lived in Germany during the two Great Wars and died in Singen in 1969.

The Influence

Dix is renown for his majestic depiction of the first Great War. His realistic portraition of war casualties and of Berlin’s social decadence were captured in fifty of his etchings and in numerous paintings.

“The call to arms of the First World War brought about an abrupt change in his style and his life. When he emerged from the horrors of the war, Dix seemed to have been shocked by the physical and moral wounds that had been opened in the body of the German society. Thus he developed a means of expressing in which he took a drastic and biting realism to the point of absurdity.” [1]

A painting that was able to reveal Otto’s feelings about the war is Triptych of the War, in which he paints the devastating remains of a bombardment: human cadavers are everywhere; flesh and blood are all torn and distributed throughout; a masked figure stands in the foreground contemplating the devastating human waste; and, above him is a dead soldier whose severe burns have left him half flesh, half skeleton.

This artist was profoundly frightened by the events of the war. So much devastation caused him to continue to express “his disgust with the social injustice” even well after the war. He did so “in bitterly satirical works, in which strained contours and sour colors create a feeling of bluntly repellent realism.”[2]