Otto Dix (1891-1969)

Aliases: Wilhelm Heinrich Otto Dix

Professions: Painter

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Otto Dix Biography

(b Untermhaus, nr Gera, 2 Dec 1891; d Singen, 25 July 1969). German painter, printmaker and watercolourist. His initial training (1905–14) in Gera and Dresden was as a painter of wall decorations, but he taught himself the techniques of easel painting from 1909 and began concentrating on portraits and landscapes in a veristic style derived from northern Renaissance prototypes. After seeing exhibitions of paintings by Vincent van Gogh (Dresden, 1912) and by the Futurists (1913), he quickly fused these influences into a randomly coloured Expressionism. Volunteering as a machine-gunner during World War I, he served in the German army (1914–18), making innumerable sketches of war scenes, using alternately a realistic and a Cubo-Futurist style. The experience of war, moreover, became a dominant motif of his work until the 1930s. He later commented: ‘War is something so animal-like: hunger, lice, slime, these crazy sounds ... War was something horrible, but nonetheless something powerful ... Under no circumstances could I miss it! It is necessary to see people in this unchained condition in order to know something about man’ (Kinkel, 1961; repr. in 1985 exh. cat., p. 280).

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