This is the bad uncle Dix

I will either be famous or infamous - Otto Dix

 

 Gert Heinrich Wollheim, This is the bad uncle Dix, 1923

Otto Dix (1891-1969) was born in Untermhaus, Germany, now a part of the city of Gera. From his father, a mould maker in an iron foundry, he inherited his steel blue eyes; from his mother, a seamstress, he received a love of music and poetry. Otto first displayed his artistic talent - especially in drawing - during elementary school. At the age of ten, he modeled for the painter Fritz Amann and decided to become a painter himself. His school art teacher, Ernst Schunke, guided his study and helped him get financial assistance. The award required that he learn a craft while he continued to study art with Schunke, so he became an apprentice decorator for four years.

Otto Dix, Street Fight, 1927 (destroyed)

In 1909, Dix began his study at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts. There was a huge creative output in the city, with a well established and internationally renowned art and music scene that hosted large exhibitions and events. Dix did not struggle financially during art school: after the first semester he was exempt from paying fees and received a stipend.  He also made extra money selling small portraits and genre paintings. The Academy did not offer academic painting, but a more craft-oriented education. As a result, Dix was essentially a self-taught painter.

August Sander, The Painter Otto Dix and his Wife Martha, 1925

Through his intensive study of the Old Dutch, Italian and German masters, Dix taught himself how to paint with their methods - building up layers of paint to create depth and luminescence. However he was also impressed by the Expressionists and the Post-Impressionists, and in particular by a Van Gogh exhibition that he saw in 1913. Primarily painting portraits and landscapes, Dix experimented with pen and ink and made his first prints in 1913.

Otto Dix, The Match Seller, 1920

When the First World War erupted in 1914, Dix enthusiastically volunteered for the German Army. He was assigned to a field artillery regiment in Dresden. In the fall of 1915 he was assigned as a non-commissioned officer of a machine-gun unit in the Western front and took part of the Battle of the Somme. He was seriously wounded several times. In 1917, his unit was transferred to the Eastern front until the end of hostilities with Russia. Back to the western front in 1918, he fought in the German Spring offensive. He earned the Iron Cross (second class) and reached the rank of vice-sergeant-major.

 Otto Dix, Stormtroopers during a Gas Attack, 1924

Dix was profoundly affected by the sights of the war, and would later describe a recurring nightmare in which he crawled through destroyed houses. He represented his traumatic experiences in many subsequent works, including his famous portfolio of fifty etchings called Der Krieg (The War), published in 1924 by Karl Nierendorf. You can see the whole series on the website of the Minneapolis Institute of Art.

Otto Dix, Group Portrait: Günther Franke, Paul Ferdinand Schmidt, and Karl Nierendorf
1923

In the aftermath of the war, Dresden was a shadow if its former self. No longer a seat of government, it suffered a huge drop in income and severe rationing. However, the artistic scene adapted and came back full force. With the value of money and political ideas in constant flux, Dix was driven to experiment. He had already taken on some elements of Futurism and Cubism during the war years; now he began integrating Dada and Expressionist elements into his work. Dix also created surreal portraits and woodcuts, even delving into collage and mixed media. In 1919, he founded the Dresden Secession Group together with Conrad Felixmüller and Lasar Segall. Other members included Peter August Böckstiegel, Otto Griebel, Oskar Kokoschka, Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler and Gert Wollheim.

Otto Dix, Self-portrait with Nude Model, 1923

On his arrival in Dresden in 1919, Otto Dix made contact with numerous figures in the city’s cultural circles. Hugo Erfurth was one such figure. Fifteen years old than Dix, Erfurth was by that time an established photographer and his studio welcomed the leading personalities of the German Weimar Republic. In 1921 Dix participated in exhibitions in Berlin and Dresden before moving to Düsseldorf in 1922. This relocation was an important shift as he studied with new teachers, Heinrich Nauen and Wilhelm Herbeholz. He became a part of Johanna Ey's art salon circle where he met and befriended the painter Jankel Adler.  Dix also joined the artist's association "Das Junge Rheinland" (The Young Rhineland).

Arthur Kaufmann, The Contemporaries, 1925. The Painting shows members of the artist's association Das Junge Rheinland. Lower row left to right: Gert Wollheim, Johanna Ey, Karl Schwesig, Adalbert Trillhaase. Upper Row left to right:Herbert Eulenberg, Theo Champion, Jankel Adler, Hilde Schewior, Ernst te Peerdt, Arthur Kaufmann, Walter Ophey, Otto Dix, Lisbeth Kaufmann, Hans Heinrich Nicolini.

In 1923 Dix married Martha Koch, and over the next decade had three children, all of whom were captured on canvas throughout their childhoods. Throughout the 1920s Dix was included in many of the most significant exhibitions of new art in Germany. Most importantly he was included in Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), the exhibition at the Kunsthalle Mannheim in 1925 that gave its name to the movement Dix would forever be associated with. Neue Sachlichkeit evolved out of Expressionism, but took on qualities of the classical, linear realism that was becoming prevalent in Italy at that time. 

 Otto Dix, Portrait of Poet Ivar von Lücken, 1926

In 1927 Dix became a professor at the Dresden Academy and was appointed a member of the Prussian Academy of Arts in1931. The same year he showed work in exhibitions all over Germany and at MoMA in New York. This renown was relatively short-lived, however, as the Nazis began to target him, regarding his art as "degenerate". As such, he was forbidden to exhibit in Germany, but he traveled to Switzerland several times during the mid 1930s and participated in several exhibitions there.

Otto Dix, Dedicated to Sadists, 1922

When the Nazis came to power in 1933, they immediately dismissed Dix from his post at the Dresden Academy. In response to his dismissal Dix created The Seven Cardinal Sins (below). The figure of Sloth, depicted in the center, is a skeleton whose outstretched arms and scythe form a sort of swastika. Dix felt that this sloth or lack of concern and unwillingness to take early action by the German people had allowed Hitler's rise to power. The most poignant aspect of this picture is the representation of Envy, riding on the back of Avarice: he wears a Hitler mask. However, it wasn't until after the war that Dix painted in the telltale mustache. 

 Otto Dix, The Seven Cardinal Sins, 1933

Dix, like all other practicing artists who had not left Germany, was forced to join the Nazi government's Reich Chamber of Fine Arts (Reichskammer der bildenden Kuenste), a subdivision of Goebbels' Cultural Ministry (Reichskulturkammer). Membership was mandatory for all artists in the Reich. But Dix still managed to secretly paint an occasional allegorical painting that criticized Nazi ideals. Dix's paintings The Trench and War Cripples were exhibited in the state-sponsored Munich 1937 exhibition of degenerate art, Entartete Kunst. They were later burned.

Otto Dix, Melancholie, 1930

A couple of months after his dismissal Dix went into "inner emigration" moving to a small village at Lake Constance near the Swiss border, where he lived on private commissions. In 1939 he was arrested on a trumped-up charge of being involved in Georg Elsner's attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler but was later released. Drafted into the Volkssturm during the last weeks of the war, Dix was captured by the French army and held prisoner until 1946. Not wasting time, he painted a triptych for the prison camp chapel.

Otto Dix, Portrait of a Prisoner, 1945

After returning to Germany, Dix picked up where the war had interrupted his career. He resumed showing works and began making lithographs documenting his war experiences and its effects in his work. Much of Dix's later work focuses on post-war suffering, religious allegories and Biblical scenes. Throughout the 1950s and 60s, he traveled a great deal and exhibited his work constantly. He was appointed to membership of many arts academies in Florence, Berlin and Dresden. In 1967, after traveling to Greece, he suffered a stroke, which paralyzed his left hand; he died in 1969. You can see a timeline of Otto Dix's work on my Flickr page.

This is Jankel Adler

 Otto Dix, This is Jankel Adler, 1926

A couple of days ago I stumbled upon this rarely seen 1926 portrait of Jankel Adler. Compared with Dix' often brutal characterizations, this respectful portrait appears thoroughly restrained, even the title is unusual: This is Jankel Adler. Also remarkable is the sgraffito-like background with the ornate pattern of the wallpaper. Both of these reflect Adler’s own style of painting. 

August Sander, The Painter Jankel Adler, 1929

Moreover, the portrait echoes Picasso’s classical figurative style of the early twenties. In this way Dix deliberately invoked one of the artists who had especially inspired Adler. Otto Dix would later write of his portraits: The ‘exterior’ is the expression of the ‘interior’, that is to say that exterior and interior are one and the same. Three years later, in 1929, August Sander photographed Jankel Adler in a similar, pensative and sceptical mood.

Georg Trakl - Grandsons Unborn

Georg Trakl, The Ravens, 1913

Over the black crevice
at noon the ravens rush with rusty cries.
Their shadows touch the deer’s back
and at times they loom in gnarled rest.

O how they derange the brown stillness,
in the one acre itself entranced,
like a woman married to grave premonitions,
and at times you can hear them bicker

about a corpse they sniffed-out somewhere,
and sharply they bend their flight towards north
and dwindle away like a funeral
march in the air, shivering with bliss.

 Otto Dix, Sunrise, 1913

One year after Georg Trakl's poem and Otto Dix' painting, visions of the impeding disaster, both men were called to the military. World War I had begun. In July 1914, shortly before being drafted by the Austro-Hungarian Army, Georg Trakl received a large monetary gift from the then unknown philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein who was distributing his enourmous inheritance to artists. Unfortunately, Trakl never was able to use the money. His emotional instability became worse under the strains of war and he was hospitalized numerous times as a result of depression and suicide attempts. After several bloody defeats at the hands of the Russians, Trakl was left to single handedly care for 90 wounded men in a barn near Grodek where he wrote the following poem:

 Albin Egger-Lienz, Den Namenlosen (Those Who Have Lost Their Names), 1914

Georg Trakl, Grodek, 1914

At evening the autumn woodlands ring
With deadly weapons. Over the golden plains
And lakes of blue, the sun
More darkly rolls. The night surrounds
 
Warriors dying and the wild lament
Of their fragmented mouths.
Yet silently there gather in the willow combe
Red clouds inhabited by an angry god,
 
Shed blood, and the chill of the moon.
All roads lead to black decay.
Under golden branching of the night and stars
A sister's shadow sways through the still grove
 
To greet the heroes' spirits, the bloodied heads.
And softly in the reeds Autumn's dark flutes resound.
O prouder mourning! - You brazen altars,
The spirit's hot flame is fed now by a tremendous pain:
The grandsons, unborn.

Trakl could not adequately relieve the pain of his patients on his own, and he witnessed the splattered brains of one soldier who shot himself. Trakl then went outside, and after seeing some of the local Ruthenians hanging from trees, suffered a mental breakdown and threatened to shoot himself. In October, Trakl was hospitalized in Cracow, Poland, and received a visit from a friend who encouraged Trakl to send for his benefactor Wittgenstein. Unfortunately, Trakl injected himself with a fatal dose of cocaine, a probable suicide attempt, on November 3, 1914, three days before Wittgenstein arrived (three years later, Trakl's sister Grete shot herself at a party after failing to overcome her drug addiction).

Telegram of Georg Trakl to his publisher Kurt Wolff: "I should be very delighted if you would send me a copy of my new book Sebastian in Dream. Being ill and hospitalized here in Garnisonsspital Krakau - Georg Trakl."

Kurt Wolff published Sebastian in Dream in 1915, which would garner Trakl a small, but loyal following in Germany and Austria.  Wittgenstein's opinion of Trakl's poems was this: "I do not understand them; but their tone pleases me. It is the tone of true genius."

You can find the above telegram (and countless other treasures) in the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library of Yale University.

Hugo Erfurth

 Otto Dix, The Photographer Hugo Erfurth, 1925

Hugo Erfurth (1874-1948) was the portrait photographer par excellence of the intellectual and artistic avant-garde of the Weimar Republic in the 1920s. Many artists, including Oskar Kokoschka, Otto Dix, Max Beckmann, Marc Chagall and Paul Klee had their portraits taken in his atelier. He developed an elegiac style of portraiture. Erfurth’s work is characterized by a simple natural use of light, great psychological insight into the character of each of his subjects, and a masterful use of the technique of oil-pigment printing.

Hugo Erfurth,  Otto Dix with his painting class at the Dresden Academy, 1929

Erfurth studied art at the Academy of Arts in Dresden, Germany, from 1892 to 1896. Where he was trained in the aesthetics of Pictorialism and shaped by the compositional style of Art Nouveau. He worked as a portrait photographer in Dresden from 1896 until about 1925. From 1924 to 1948 he was chairman of the jury of the prestigious Gesellschaft Deutscher Lichtbildner (GDL). He worked in Cologne, Germany, from 1934 to 1943 and in Gaienhofen (Bodensee) from 1943 until his death in 1948. 

 Hugo Erfurth, Otto Dix and [actor] Heinrich George in front of his portrait, 1933

Otto Dix, Portrait of the Actor Heinrich George, 1932

 

Hugo Erfurth, Marc and Bella Chagall, 1923

 

 Hugo Erfurth, Oskar Kokoschka, 1920

 

Hugo Erfurth, Max Beckmann, 1928

 

 Otto Dix, Hugo Erfurth with Dog, 1926

Otto Dix - Street Fight

Otto Dix, Street Fight, 1927

This painting was destroyed in 1945. There is an interesting collection of "Lost Art" here. You can see more paintings by Otto Dix here on my Flickr page.

August Sander The Painter Otto Dix and his Wife Martha, 1925

Berlin Dada Fair 1920

John Heartfield, Cover of the exhibition catalogue of First International Dada Fair (Erste Internationale Dada-Messe), John Heartfield and Wieland Herzfelde editors, Otto Burchard and Malik-Verlag, July 1920. The fair took place at at Dr. Otto Burchard’s Berlin art gallery.

From left to right: Hausmann, Höch, Dr. Burchard, Baader, Herzfelde, Margarete Herzfelde, Schmallhausen, Grosz (with hat and cane), Heartfield. Heartfield's and Schlichter’s pig soldier can be seen hanging from the ceiling. Here is a 2004 reconstruction of lost 1920 original:

John Heartfield and Rudolf Schlichter's Prussian Archangel assemblage, depicts a pig-headed military officer that the artists suspended from the ceiling. The giant puppet is wrapped with a poster that reads "I come from Heaven, from Heaven on high" - the refrain from a well-known German Christmas carol. The sign dangling below further mocks the military: "In order to understand this work of art completely, one should drill daily for twelve hours with a heavily packed knapsack in full marching order in the Tempelhof Field [a military training ground in Berlin]." When the Prussian Archangel was exhibited in 1920 during the First International Dada Fair, authorities charged the artists with defaming the German army. In the end, Schlichter and Heartfield were acquitted. 

On the left wall we see Otto Dix's 1920 painting Kriegskrüppel (War-Cripples):

This painting was donated to the Stadtmuseum Dresden, and confiscated by Nazis in 1937 as degenerate. It was exhibited at the Entartete Kunst exhibition of degenerate art held in Munich in 1937, and later destroyed by the Nazis.

Gert Wollheim

Wollheim was born in Dresden and studied at the College of Fine Arts in Weimar from 1911 to 1913. From 1914–1917 he was in military service in World War I.

 Gert Wollheim, The Wounded Man, 1919

Wollheim himself was shot in the stomach and nearly died from the serious wound - and it is certain this experience was the inspiration for this disturbing work. After the war he lived in Berlin until 1919, when Wollheim, Otto Pankok (whom he had met at the academy in Weimar), Ulfert Lüken, Hermann Hundt and others created an artists' colony in Remels, (East Frisia).

At the end of 1919 Wollheim and Pankok went to Düsseldorf and became founding members of the Young Rhineland Group, which also included Max Ernst, Otto Dix, and Ulrich Leman. 

 Gert Heinrich Wollheim, This is the bad uncle Dix, 1923

 
He also became part of the aggressively political Aktivistenbund 1919 (Activist League 1919), a group of artists and intellectuals dedicated to pacifism and working class politics. Wollheim was one of the artists associated with the art dealer Johanna Ey. In 1925 he moved to Berlin, and his work began a new phase of coolly objective representation.

Gert Wollheim, Farewell from  Düsseldorf, 1924

Immediately after Hitler's seizure of power in 1933 his works were declared degenerate art and many were destroyed. He fled to France and became active in the Resistance. In 1937 he was one of the joint founders of the artist federation “L´union de l'artistes libres” in Paris, and he became the companion of the dancer Tatjana Barbakoff who was murdered 1944 in Auschwitz.

Wilhelm Schmurr, The Dancer Tatjana Barbakoff, c. 1925

In Munich, three of his pictures were displayed in the defamatory Nazi exhibition Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) in 1937. From Paris he fled to Saarbrücken and later to Switzerland. In 1939 he was arrested and held in a labor camp until his escape in 1942, after which he hid in the Pyrénées.

Gert Wollheim, Untitled, 1926

At war's end in 1945 he returned to France, and in 1947 moved to New York and became an American citizen. He died in New York in 1974.

Otto Dix - Brothers-in-Law

Otto Dix, Dr. Hans Koch, 1921

Dix's paintings Salon I (below) and Salon II (lost) were acquired by Dix's good friend, sometime patron and one time sitter, Dr. Hans Koch (1881-1952). When the artist left Düsseldorf to return to Dresden in 1921, one of the items traveling with him was Koch's wife, Martha (1895–1985). Dix and Martha later married, while Dix and Koch, remained good friends. When the latter married his ex-wife's older sister, Maria, the two men indeed became brothers-in-law. How terribly, terribly civil.  

Otto Dix, The Saloon I, 1921

Otto Dix had another Doctor friend, Dr. Wilhelm Mayer-Hermann, whom he portrayed in 1926. Both, the Doctor and his portray wound up across the Atlantic Ocean in the same city. Six years after its completion Dr. Mayer-Hermann was donated to the Museum of Modern Art in 1932, where it has remained on permanent display. The good Dr. and his family emigrated from Berlin to Manhattan in 1934, and Mayer-Hermann established a wildly successful ear, nose and throat practice. It is said anecdotally that, until his death in 1945, he enjoyed visiting "himself" at MoMA and never failed to be privately amused by the unkind remarks his portrait elicited from other viewers.

Otto Dix, Dr. Mayer-Hermann, 1926

Cycle

by Gottfried Benn (1912)

The lone molar of a whore

who had died unknown

had a gold filling.

As if by silent agreement

the others had all fallen out.

But this one the morgue attendant knocked out

and pawned to go dancing.

For, he said,

only earth should return to earth.

Otto Dix - Flandern

Otto Dix, Flandern, 1934

Dix worked on this large-format (78 x 98") painting from 1934 to 1936. By that point, the National Socialists had already dismissed him from his professorial position at the Dresden Art Academy, and he was living in Randegg bei Singen. The painting shows a field in Flanders where three devastating battles were fought. In contrast to war-time propaganda images, Dix's canvas introduces war in the form of a battlefield where corpses and mud predominate, the one rotting and merging into the other. With this nightmarish tableau, Dix commemorated the victims of one World War in the hopes of preventing another.

Otto Dix - Transplantation

Otto Dix, Transplantation, 1924

We finally halted, after how many hours? Our exhausted flesh, drained of blood, shaken about in other people's arms. I had to comb my fingers over my face as sticky traces stiffened my skin as they dried. I'm going to be a fine sight by the time they get to me, those two slow-moving nurses walking along the foot of the stretchers and bending for a moment over each wounded man. A hand stuck my new Verdun képi on my head, my velvety blue 'flower pot'. How I looked like Pierrot, so pale and blood-smeared in my beautiful new képi! 

There is a nauseating smell, of coal-tar, bleach and the sickly smell of blood. "A lieutenant from the 106ths, doctor."

They touched me and another needle pricked me. I could see the dark tunic of the major between two white nurses. They were talking to me. I answered "Yes, yes...". And the doctor's voice said, "Can't be evacuated. Military hospital."

Maurice Genevoix, Ceux de 14

Sylvia von Harden

August Sander, Sylvia von Harden, Journaliste, 1920s

Nestor Gianaklis by Apollinaire

Je goûte ton haleine plus exquise que la fumée

Tendre et bleue de l'écorce du bouleau

Ou d'une cigarette de Nestor Gianaklis

Ou cette fumée sacrée si bleue

Et qu'on ne nomme pas.

I taste your breath more exquisite than the smoke

Tender and blue of a birch's bark

Or of a Nestor Gianaklis cigarette

Or this sacred smoke so blue

And which you don't name.

 Otto Dix, Portrait of the Journalist Sylvia von Harden, 1926

Sylvia von Harden (March 28, 1894 – June 4, 1963) was a journalist and poet. During her career as a journalist, she wrote for many newspapers in Germany and England.  Born Sylvia Lehr in Hamburg, von Harden (she chose the name as an aristocratic pseudonym) wrote a literary column for the monthly Das junge Deutschland from 1918 to 1920, and wrote for Die Rote Erde from 1919 to 1923. From 1915 to 1923, she lived with the writer Ferdinand Hartkopf, with whom she had a son. During the 1920s she lived in Berlin, and published two volumes of poetry in 1920 and 1927. In 1933, von Harden left Germany for self-exile in England, where she continued to write but with less success. She died in Coxley Green, England in 1963.

Otto Dix - Trenches

Otto Dix, Trenches, 1917

"At that moment, another whistling sound rang out up in the air; we all felt it, our hearts in our mouths, this one's for us. Then a huge, deafening din - the shell had landed right in the midst of us.

Half-dazed, I got to my feet. In the huge shell-hole, machine-gun cartridge belts set off by the explosion glowed with a crude pink light. They lit up the heavy smoke where a mass of twisted blackened bodies lay and the shadows of survivors were running away in every direction. At the same time many appalling screams of pain and appeals for help could be heard.

The dark mass of people turning around the bottom of this glowing, smoking cauldron opened out for a second almost like the vision of a hellish nightmare, the deepest abyss of horror."

Ernst Jünger, Storms of Steel