Wilhelm heinrich otto dix biography

German painter and printmaker (1891–1969)

For the Russian band, see Otto Dix (band).

Wilhelm Heinrich Otto Dix (German:[ˈvɪlhɛlmˈhaɪnʁɪçˈʔɔtoːˈdɪks]; 2 December 1891 – 25 July 1969) was a German painter and printmaker, noted for his ruthless and harshly realistic depictions of German society during the Weimar Republic and the brutality of war. Along with George Grosz and Max Beckmann, he is widely considered one of the most important artists of the Neue Sachlichkeit.

Biography

Early life and education

Otto Dix was born in Untermhaus, Germany, now a part of the city of Gera, Thuringia. The eldest son of Franz Dix, an iron foundry worker, and Louise, a seamstress who had written poetry in her youth, he was exposed to art from an early age. The hours he spent in the studio of his cousin, Fritz Amann, who was a painter, were decisive in forming young Otto's ambition to be an artist; he received additional encouragement from his primary school teacher. Between 1906 and 1910, he served an apprenticeship with painter Carl Senff, and began painting his first landscapes. In 1910, he entered the Kunstgewerbeschule in Dresden, now the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts, where Richard Guhr was among his teachers. At that time the school was not a school for the fine arts but rather an academy that concentrated on applied arts and crafts.

The majority of Dix's early wo

Summary of Otto Dix

Otto Dix has been perhaps more influential than any other German painter in shaping the popular image of the Weimar Republic of the 1920s. His works are key parts of the Neue Sachlichkeit ("New Objectivity") movement, which also attracted George Grosz and Max Beckmann in the mid 1920s. A veteran haunted by his experiences of WWI, his first great subjects were crippled soldiers, but during the height of his career he also painted nudes, prostitutes, and often savagely satirical portraits of celebrities from Germany's intellectual circles. His work became even darker and more allegorical in the early 1930s, and he became a target of the Nazis. In response, he gradually moved away from social themes, turning to landscape and Christian subjects, and, after serving in the army during WWII, enjoyed some considerable acclaim in his later years.

Accomplishments

• Otto Dix is one of modern painting's most savage satirists. After many artists had abandoned portraiture for abstraction in the 1910s, Dix returned to the genre and injected sharp caricatures into his depictions of some of the leading lights of German society. His other narrative subjects are remembered for their indictment of corrupt and immoral life in the modern city.
• Otto Dix was initially drawn to Expressionism and Dada, but like many of his generation in Germany in the 1920s, he was inspired by trends in Italy and France to embrace a cold, linear style of drawing and more realistic imagery. Later, his approach became more fantastic and symbolic, and he began to depict nudes as witches or personifications of melancholy.
• Dix always balanced his inclination toward realism with an equal tendency toward the fantastic and the allegorical. For example, his images of prostitutes and injured war veterans serve as emblems of a society damaged both physically and morally.
• Although Dix's work is often noted for its sharp-eyed depiction of the human figure, his early fixation with crippled ve

Wilhelm Heinrich Otto Dix (1891–1969) was a German painter and printmaker, noted for his ruthless and harshly realistic depictions of Weimar society and the brutality of war. Along with George Grosz, he is widely considered one of the most important artists of the Neue Sachlichkeit.

Life and work

Otto Dix was born on 2 December 1891, in a working-class family in Untermhaus, a village near Gera, Thuringia. He was the oldest child of Franz Dix, who worked as a molder in a foundry, and his wife Louise, née Amann. From 1905 to 1908 he received training as a decorative painter in Gera. In the fall of 1909 Dix moved to Dresden, where he enrolled in the School of Applied Arts in January 1910. At school Dix concentrated on decorative work, learning to draw ornamental designs and flowers characteristic of the art nouveau aesthetic that dominated at the time. Since Dix received no formal training in easel painting at the practically oriented arts and crafts school, he studied the old masters in the Dresden state collections.

In 1911, at the age of twenty, Dix encountered the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche, which would influence his art significantly. Nietzsche urged no less than the collapse of the bourgeois moral code, promoting instead a Dionysian affirmation of life and an exaltation of both joy and pain. Nietzsche advocated the cultivation of intense bodily experiences in order to achieve a nontranscendent self-realization, the most powerful of which, according to the philosopher, were music, singing, dancing, sex, birth, hatred, fighting, and war. Dix's enthusiasm for Nietzsche's ideas inspired his only known sculpture, a life-size plaster bust of the thinker. Acquired by Paul Ferdinand Sch