A retrospective exhibition of works by German artist Otto Dix (1891-1969) started on September 20th 1998 in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, Southern France. It is the first time that such event regarding this major painter has been taking place in France. Some 150 works (paintings, watercolours and drawings) as well as 70 engravings are on show at the Maeght Foundation until October 18th.
Dix discovered horror during the First World War and depicted its atrocities in the 1920's before facing censorship once the Nazis took power in Germany in 1933. Labelled as a "decadent" artist he saw over 250 of his paintings destroyed on Nazi orders. Dix was a witness of a troubled period during which he reached fame with his depiction of prostitutes, mutilated soldiers and those people who had been marked by the war. His derisive works were somewhat disturbing in that sense that he obviously delivered some kind of political message in them. This former Dada artist did not hesitate to be nightmarish in a way since he was going through the realities of his time during a period which saw Germany drained in the aftermath of war with millions of people living in poverty under the reign of some anarchy which paved the way for Nazism. Dix can be compared with German Renaissance masters whom he admired intensely, notably Durer, Cranach and Grunewald in whose works he would find some reference to his anguish regarding human physical decrepitude which he depicted in his painting "Old Lovers" of 1923 now in the Berlin National Gallery or a still life with the veil of a widow of 1925. Dix was also a remarkable draugthsman putting forward a masterly talent for caricature as in his series of engravings on War published in 1924. In a world quite apocalyptic the object was a central piece as he once stated in 1927 while wishing to establish a kind of new relationship between man and the world. Being a visionary artist and certainly the last exponent of German Expressionism Dix, like Goya, tried to exorcize human fears with an eye which ignored taboos. The artist exhaled less violence in his works after World War Two and spent the last 25 years of his life experimenting some kind of new approach to contemporary painting. Adrian Darmon
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