Otto Dix

From 1905 to 1909 Dix completed an apprenticeship as a decorative painter in Gera and then went to the School of Arts and Crafts in Dresden from 1910 to 1914. In 1914 he experienced the war as a front-line soldier in France and Russia. After the war he was able to continue his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Dresden. In 1919 he was a co-founder of the Dresden Secession and became part of the Berlin Dada movement. In 1922 Dix moved to Düsseldorf and went to the art academy. Here he moved in the circle of the gallery owner Johanna Ey and joined the artists’ association “Das Junge Rheinland”. In 1923, the Wallraff-Richartz-Museum in Cologne bought the now lost painting “Schützengraben” (Trenches), a nightmarish snapshot of the atrocities of war, which caused heated public debate. On the occasion of the “Anti-War Year” in 1924, the large-format oil painting was exhibited at the Academy of Arts in Berlin. The gallery owner Karl Nierendorf published Dix’s graphic portfolio “The War” in 1924. In 1925 Dix moved to Berlin and took part in the travelling exhibition “Neue Sachlichkeit”. Supported by the Nierendorf and Thannhäuser galleries, he celebrated numerous artistic successes. In 1933 Dix lost his professorship at the Academy of Fine Arts in Dresden and over 260 of his works were confiscated. In 1937 his works were shown in the exhibition “Degenerate Art” in Munich. Dix worked only in secret during the war years. After 1945, he increasingly became an outsider as an artist – he could identify neither with Socialist Realism in the GDR nor with the abstract post-war art of the FRG. Nevertheless, he received high recognition in both parts of Germany, was able to organise exhibitions and received numerous honours. His written estate has been in the German Art Archive in the Germanic National Museum in Nuremberg since 1976. The pictorial estate is in the archives of the Otto Dix Foundation in Bevaix (Switzerland).