Otto Dix was a German painter and printmaker, born in Untermhaus (now a part of the city of Gera) on December 2, 1891. Dix avidly enlisted in the Army during World War I, but the post-traumatic stress he suffered (at that time known as "shell shock") would strongly inform his work from that point on. A notable example is
Der Krieg, or "The Battle," a portfolio of fifty etchings. Much of his output depicts the horrors of war and the sorrows of life, particularly the grotesque excesses of the Weimar Republic, as seen through a grim sort of Dadaist prism. Although he began receiving accolades from his countrymen during the last decade of his life, Otto Dix was deemed a "degenerate" by the Nazi regime. His paintings
The Trench (which once led to the forced resignation of a museum director) and
War Cripples are no longer extant, having been burned after the
Entartete Kunst exhibition in Munich in 1937. More of Dix's banned works were
discovered in 2011 in a hidden cache of over 1400 paintings stolen by the Nazis, including some by Chagall, Picasso, Matisse, and Renoir. We found 11 cases of
Ottt* (for words like
Otto,
Ottowa, and
Ottoman) in the OhioLINK database, and 262 in WorldCat.
(Otto Dix self-portrait, 1926, from Wikimedia Commons.)
Carol Reid
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