In December 1891 Otto Dix was born into the Generation
of 1914. He was one of millions of late 19th Century babies who ushered in the
20th on the battlefields of the First World War. Dix was the eldest son of
Franz and Louise. His father toiled in a iron foundry and his mother was a
seamstress.
Dix was exposed to art at an early age. He spent time
in the studio of his older cousin, the landscape painter Fritz Amann. Children
play - and Dix was no different - but gradually his art improved. Encouraged by
elders, Dix took an apprenticeship with the landscape painter Carl Senff. In
the early part of the 20th Century, he began to paint landscapes of his
own.
By 1910 his apprenticeship was complete and Dix left
home for Dresden. He had been accepted into the Saxon School of Arts and
Crafts. Here he encountered influences that would greatly shape his work. Like
many Expressionists, Dix was moved by the Naturalist and Symbolist tendencies
of the printmaker Max Klinger. He was first exposed the artist in Dresden.
Nietzsche was popular then and Dix devoured his work. He would later claim his
most important sources of inspiration were the Bible, Goethe, and Nietzsche.
The Great War
Modern memory holds that the First World War was
greeted with joy in the capitols of Europe. Perhaps, but a strange elation did
drive many young men to the colors. Dix was twenty-two in the summer the arch
duke died. When war was declared in August of 1914, he immediately volunteered.
Most thought the war would be over by Christmas and worried they'd never get to
the front. The stalemate lasted four long years.
Dix was originally assigned to an artillery unit in
Dresden. In 1915, he was transferred as a NCO to a machine gun unit. Entrenched
automatic rifles helped create the stalemate in Europe. Machine gunners sprayed
bullets at advancing troops and they were very hard to take out. Dix helped
defend the line against the great British advance on the Somme. Siegfried
Sassoon, C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkein were on the other side.
Dix was wounded several times along the Western Front.
In August 1918, he served in Flanders where he took a nearly fatal wound to the
neck. A medic was able to stop the bleeding and he was moved back to an aid
station. The war ended with Dix in a hospital bed. He was discharged in
September 1918.
During the war, Dix kept a diary and a sketchbook with
which he chronicled his experience. They would provide material for a major
work of fifty prints called simply, The War. Dix was profoundly affected by the
war. He described a recurring nightmare in which he crawled through bombed out
houses. His experience with war and its aftermath became a dominant theme in
the art he produced after 1914.
Aftermath
Dix returned to Dresden after his military discharge.
He resumed art studies as best he could but the war soon crept into his work.
Dix was continually haunted by the brutality of war. His training in landscapes
paid dividends as he tried to capture the desolate fields of Flanders, carved
with military trenches and strewn with bodies. Dix emphasizes the
disproportionate burden that was placed on soldiers. His infantry men are
mutiliated, wounded, suffering or mad while his sailors are carousing with
whores.
In 1921, Otto Dix traveled to Dusseldorf where he met
Doctor and Frau Hans Koch. He was enthralled by both. The doctor, a urinology
specialist, sat for a portraint in which Dix surrounded him with menacing
medical equipment. He then took the doctor's wife to his bed. When Dix returned
to Dresden, Martha Koch followed him. She left her husband and two children
behind. The Doctor was unperturbed because he had already begun an affair with
Maria Lindner, his wife's older sister. Dix and Koch became brothers-in-law and
remained friends until the Doctor's death in 1952.
Dix met Karl Nierendorf the same year he met his wife.
Nierendorf was an influential art dealer in Berlin. In 1924, he published Dix's
crowning achievement, a fifty piece portfolio of etchings entitled Der Krieg
(The War). The series confronted mass inhibition on trauma that constrained
memory of the Great War. It stood anathema to the myth of the war as a glorious
cause. There was no "stab in the back." There was mud, mutilation,
death and futility.
Degenerate
In 1926, Dix became a professor in the Kunstakademie
in Dresden. He maintained that position until the Nazis rose to power in 1933.
Modern art ran anathema to Adolf Hitler's conservative sensibilities. Dix drew
special ire as a prominent voice in the anti-war movement. He was stripped of
his professorship and his paintings were displayed in the Degenerate Art Museum
in Munich. They were later destroyed.
In Nazi Germany, the countryside offered some respite
from state oppression. After he was stripped of his professorship the Dix
family moved to the shores of Lake Constance where he painted mostly
inoffensive landscapes. He refused to emigrate since his paintings could not
make the trip abroad. Surely, they would have been destroyed.
In the latter stages of the Second World War Dix was
conscripted into the Volkssturm. This was a national militia comprised of young
boys and old men. He was captured by French troops as the Reich collapsed. He
spent the duration in a French P.O.W. camp.
Dix continued to work until his death in 1969.
Jeffrey
Fulmer
For the Online
Otto Dix Project
February 2009
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