Otto Dix

Otto Dix was a German painter and engraver who mixed compassion and Expressionist despair to create works harshly critical of society. He was associated and exhibited with the Neue Sachlichkeit group of painters. Son of a railway worker, Dix was apprenticed to a decorative artist and received training at the Dresden School of Arts and Crafts. He was influenced by the printmaker Max Klinger and the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. He volunteered for the army in World War I and served as a machine gunner on the Western Front. He was wounded several times and witnessed the horrors of war, which he later depicted in his art. He produced a series of 50 etchings called The War in 1924, which showed the brutality and suffering of the soldiers and civilians. He also painted portraits of prostitutes, war veterans, and social outcasts, exposing the corruption and decadence of the Weimar Republic. He used a realistic style with grotesque and distorted features, often incorporating collage elements and references to classical art. He was a professor at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts from 1927 to 1933, but he was dismissed by the Nazis, who considered his art degenerate. They confiscated and destroyed many of his works, and he was briefly arrested in 1939 for an alleged plot to kill Hitler. He moved to Lake Constance in southern Germany, where he painted landscapes and religious scenes in a more subdued manner. He died of a stroke in 1969 at the age of 77. He is regarded as one of the most important German artists of the 20th century and a major figure of the New Objectivity movement. His work influenced later artists such as George Grosz, Francis Bacon, and Gerhard Richter.