Otto Dix

Realist painter, born in Gera-Untermhaus, EC Germany. He is best known for his etchings and paintings of World War 1 casualties, portrayed with biting realism, and of Berlin prostitutes in the decadent post-war period. A brilliant and savage portraitist and social commentator, his work was regarded as unwholesome by the Nazis, who included it in the famous exhibition of Degenerate Art. After World War 2 he painted mostly religious subjects.

Otto Dix (December 2, 1891 - July 25, 1969) was a German expressionist and anti-war painter and a veteran of the First World War.

Otto Dix was born in Untermhaus, Germany, now a part of the city of Gera.

When the First World War erupted, Dix enthusiastically volunteered for the German Army.

Dix was profoundly affected by the sights of the war.

During the period of the Weimar Republic Dix studied at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Dresden, became a founder of the Dresden Secession, and was a contributor to the Neue Sachlichkeit exhibition in Berlin in 1925. His 1923 painting The Trench, which depicted dismembered and decomposed bodies of soldiers in a trench after a battle caused such a furor that the Wallraf-Richartz Museum hid the painting behind a curtain.

Like the work of his friend and fellow veteran George Grosz, Dix's material was extremely critical of contemporary German society and often dwelled on the act of Lustmord, or sexual murder. Dix's postwar depictions of soldiers and veterans very clearly illustrates their invisibility within contemporary German society, a concept also developed in Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front.

When the Nazis came to power in Germany, they regarded Dix as a degenerate artist and had him sacked from his post as an art teacher at the Dresden Academy. Dix's paintings The Trench and War cripples were exhibited in the Nazi exhibition of degenerate art, Entartete Kunst.

Dix was forced to join the Nazi-controlled Imperial chamber of Fine Arts in order to be able to work as an artist at all and had to promise to paint only landscapes.

During World War II Dix was conscripted into the Volkssturm.

Dix eventually returned to Dresden. After the war most of his paintings were religious allegories or depictions of post-war suffering.

Otto Dix died in Singen, Germany, in 1969.