Otto Dix

Dix was born on 2 December 1891 in Untermhaus, near Gera in Thuringia, into a working-class family. His father worked as a foundryman. He trained as a decorative painter in Gera from 1905 to 1908, then entered the Kunstgewerbeschule in Dresden. He enlisted voluntarily in 1914 and served in a field artillery regiment, later moving to the Western Front in northern France, where he participated in the Battle of the Somme in 1916 and was wounded several times. He never fully processed what he saw: the war remained the central subject of his imagination for the rest of his career.

After the war, Dix moved through Expressionist and Dadaist modes before arriving at the hyper-precise, sometimes grotesque realism that became his signature. His work was included in the landmark Neue Sachlichkeit exhibition at the Kunsthalle Mannheim in 1925, the show that gave the movement its name. In the Weimar years, Dix painted war cripples, prostitutes, cabaret performers, and biting portraits of the Berlin intelligentsia - figures rendered with an unsentimental, almost clinical gaze. Works such as 'Die Skatspieler' (1920), 'Sylvia von Harden' (1926), and the 'Metropolis' triptych (1927-28, Kunstmuseum Stuttgart) captured the energy and moral ambiguity of the republic with a sharpness that made them uncomfortable then and makes them indispensable now. In 1927 he was appointed professor at the Dresden Academy, and in 1931 elected to the Prussian Academy of Arts.

The Nazis dismissed him from his professorship in 1933. Over 260 of his works were confiscated; 'Kriegskrüppel' and 'Der Schützengraben' were exhibited at the 1937 Entartete Kunst show in Munich as examples of degenerate art. Rather than go into exile, Dix retreated with his family to Hemmenhofen on the Höri peninsula of Lake Constance, where he spent the next three decades painting landscapes and Christian allegories in a measured, Old Master style far removed from the work that had made him notorious. He himself described it as 'inner emigration.' The 50-print etching portfolio 'Der Krieg' (1924), now held at MoMA, the British Museum, and the Historial de la Grande Guerre in Péronne, endures as one of the most powerful graphic records of modern warfare.

After the Second World War, Dix received growing recognition in both East and West Germany. In 1959 he was awarded the Großes Verdienstkreuz des Verdienstordens der Bundesrepublik Deutschland. He died on 25 July 1969 in Singen am Hohentwiel and is buried at Hemmenhofen. On Auctionist, Dix's work appears through Van Ham, Karl and Faber, Ketterer Kunst, Koller, and Hampel, spanning watercolours, prints, drawings, and paintings. The sole realized price in our data is 7,500 CHF for a 1915 watercolour, 'In the shelter,' though the breadth of mediums and the presence of major German auction houses reflects the sustained depth of collector demand for his work.