Otto Dix Paintings
Otto Dix is a difficult artist to like. Adjectives like harsh, cruel, bloody, and disturbing frequently sex
accompany
descriptions of his work. His depictions of the social and moral decay of Weimar
Germany is
ruthless.
His portrait-sitters had to be thick-skinned, for the results would likely be unflinching.
His war
works
are matched in ferocity only by Goya's "Disasters of War" series.
At the start of the Third Reich, in
1933, he even painted an image of Hitler, minus the mustache at
first,
into his version of the "Seven Deadly Sins"—the Führer is Envy,
riding on the back of Avarice. Dix
rarely
took prisoners.
But admiration is a different thing altogether
and hard as it is to view some of his images,
especially
those portraying sexual murders—Dix ranks among the greatest of 20th-century
German
artists.
Dix has never developed a big following on
this side of the Atlantic. His paintings were exhibited in
Pittsburgh
as early as 1927 and again in 1931 at the Museum of Modern Art. Nazi rule which
deemed
his
art degenerate, World War II and postwar abstractionism relegated Dix to the
background, and unlike
George Grosz—the Berlin painter with whom he is often linked, Dix
did not immigrate
to the U.S. Only in 2006, when the Metropolitan Museum of Art presented the
critically acclaimed
"Glitter and Doom: German Portraits From the 1920s, did Dix begin to
emerge here again. Of about 100 works on display, 53 were by Dix. Now,
with "Otto Dix" at the Niue Galleries, his first solo show in
North America, people here have an even better chance to see what Dix is all
about. The exhibition presents
Dix's many facets, but draws most of its hundred-plus works from the years
between 1919 and1939,
which the museum's director, Renee Price, calls "the decisive two decades
of Dix's career." It begins
with "War," and the horror starts right away, with a watercolor of a
man, from the waist up, half his face
blown away, the blood congealed around an opening into his skull.
The black-and-white etchings that follow,
lining three walls, hit again and again on wars horrific
consequences.
Dix knows whereof he draws. He had volunteered to fight in 1914, and spent most
of the
next four years as a machine gunner at the
front. He sketched the whole time, making hundreds of
into
this set of engravings, which were published in 1924. Gas-masked shock troops
advance on the
viewer;
nearby, soldiers traipse through a sea of the dead. In another work, a bombed
house is awash in
dead
bodies; in another, a bug-eyed soldier is wracked with pain from a hole in his
abdomen. The
cratered
landscapes are a relief—they are desolate, but contain no human suffering.
"War" is relentless.
In
the early '20s, still haunted by his battle experiences, Dix took up the
subject of prostitutes and sexual
murders.
To be
continued…
DR. KARL WALLACE D.D.S.
To
Read more Dr. Wallace go to:
www.karlwallaceblog.blogspot.com
