“Selbstporträt” (Self-portrait)

Details

With Spanish customs stamp on the reverse.

Pfäffle A 1923/126.

Provenance:
Collection Will Grohmann (1887-1968), Dresden;
Hauswedell & Nolte, Hamburg 3 June 1976, lot 344, with b/w illus. p. 124;
Private collection, Bavaria.

Description

• Important self-portrait of the artist from his time in Düsseldorf
• Dix shows a factual, critical and rigorous self-examination here, whereby he details the head but only hints at the shoulders and collar
• Dedicated to the art historian Will Grohmann, who, like Dix, was one of the founding members of the Dresden Secession

An end can also be a beginning: After serving in the First World War, Otto Dix studied at the Academy of Art in Dresden and moved into a studio in 1919. In 1921, he painted “Schützengraben” (“Trench”), a work whose immediate intensity would make it an anti-war icon. But his time in Dresden ended in 1922. He had to vacate the studio, which was planned and he knew about it. Instead of looking for new premises, Dix moved to Düsseldorf with Martha Koch, whom he married at the beginning of 1923. The pulse of contemporary art was beating there at the time. His mother Ey, the gallery owner Johanna Ey, accepted him into her circle. At the Düsseldorf Art Academy, he was not only able to move into a masterclass studio, he also studied the production of prints there. He became a member of the Young Rhineland and the Rhine Group. He was able to sell his “Schützengraben” to the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum in Cologne. In short, Otto Dix was on the right track, both in his private life and in his career as an artist.

And yet here is the man who not only had to experience the First World War, but who also had to fight in it. He experienced the horror of this wave of destruction first-hand on two fronts and, if you want to psychologise his works created during and after the war, left the trenches severely traumatised. We meet this man in the “self-portrait” from the summer of 1923 offered here. We do not see a happy, newly married man who has arrived well in a new city, an artist who socialises in the most sought-after circles in the Rhineland. On the contrary, we see a stern, introverted man. His hair slicked back, wearing a high-necked white shirt and red tie, Dix stares past us out of the picture into an indistinct distance. Highly concentrated and dissecting, his gaze bores through the wove. A strict (self-)observer is at work here, who spares himself nothing that he does to his other subjects, namely the most precise colouring. Yet, for all his naturalism, Otto Dix is no naturalist. The colours blur, oil and watercolour form fine layers, building up facial features as well as the emotions behind them. Dix differentiates between the important and the secondary, between the accurately depicted and the sketchy: where the facial features are rendered almost over-accurately, the ear is blurred and the clothing is only hinted at in a few quick strokes.