Death Lawyer New Wrongful York

Death Lawyer New Wrongful York

Death Lawyer New Wrongful York

It has been the first major solo exhibition of Otto Dix’s works in the United States: More than 100 paintings, drawings and prints were on display at the Neue Galerie in New York City throughout spring and summer. Now, this extensive immersion into the socio-political abysms that haunted the Weimar Republic will close its doors on Fifth Avenue, and travel to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.

Portaits from the Weimar Times

The German painter Otto Dix (1891-1969) is probably best known for the portraits he crafted in the 1920s, mainly in Berlin during the Weimar Republic. They represent a kaleidoscope of a glamorously unbalanced, degenerated and traumatized society at the verge of stumbling into the darkest chapter of the 20th century, the Nazi terror.

The exhibition, curated by the German art historian Olaf Peters, focuses on the two most decisive decades in his oeuvre and embraces, besides the artistic digestion of World War I, works from Dix’s affiliation with Dadaism and Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity). It concludes with nature paintings from the 1930s. The latter are influenced by Old Masters like Albrecht Dürer and Lucas Cranach, and despite their presumably inoffensive appearance, he uses these landscape motives to hide political statements. In Nazi terminology, most of his paintings were considered “Degenerate Art” - nevertheless, Dix stayed in Germany and managed to sell works until the early 1940s. By the end of the war, he was drafted into service and became prisoner of war in France.

Otto Dix, Eternal Prisoner of War

War may well be the experience that most impacted Otto Dix’s life, and this is especially true for World War I. The first floor of the Neue Galerie assembles 50 gruesome, Goya-esque etchings based on Dix’s experiences in the years between 1914-1918. Dix, who served as a machine gunner and was wounded several times, has visualized the horror of the trenches with sardonic honesty and cynical brutality: wounds, guts, and skulls. Grimaces of pain and fear. Dark and desolate settings. Exhausted soldiers wearing gasmasks that look, once more, like skulls. Death is omnipresent, as is the helpless ugliness of bucolic scenes in brothels and taverns, which only highlight a sensation of rotten hopelessness.

As a matter of fact World War I, that apocalyptic nightfall at the beginning of the 20th century, has brought forth decades of radical and ruthless examination of the human condition in Europe, and Otto Dix is but one representative of a generation of artists and writers that should forever be imprinted by their experiences in the trenches: Georg Trakl comes to mind, and so does Erich Maria Remarque - to name just two, German speaking, contemporaries.

Dissecting the Weimar Republic

Otto Dix came “along like a natural disaster, outrageous, inexplicably, devastating, like the explosion of a volcano. One never knows what to expect from this wild man.” The critic Paul Ferdinand Schmidt uttered these words at the occasion of a Dix retrospective in Berlin, in 1926. Yet there was one thing you definitely could expect from Otto Dix: A coldblooded, dissecting view not only of war, but of society as a whole.


Posted by Admin on January 07, 2012 - 5:32 am Posted in landlord grants rifle aging lawyer rating
  • Death Lawyer New Wrongful York

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