Otto Dix (1891-1969) is considered one of the true lions of 20th-C art, a man who established himself as an uncompromising artist that refused to temper how he rendered the realities that he witnessed. Dix's early works often depict the true brutalities of the WWI battlefields and trenches he served in for over three years, as well as the decadent underworld of 1920s Berlin. With the publication of this first of three volumes of an extensive selection of letters, the most comprehensive collection of Otto Dix texts at last comes into print in English. Encompassing well over 1,000 letters, and ranging from friends and family to other artists, collectors, colleagues, critics &amp; biographers, the letters offer a personal portrait of six decades of the 20th C. Dix himself was a controversial figure throughout his life, and while he claimed never to write self-testimonials, the artist had much to say about the widest range of subjects in his private correspondence. Therein, we discover much about a figure who exhibited a gruff, often abrasive persona to many, a man who depicted war with unrepentant brutality yet who could at the same time pen the most romantic, schmaltzy letters to his wife and sketch amusing caricatures to his daughter. Following his experiences throughout WWI, Dix immediately took up with the dadaists in Dresden in 1919 and became an established figure as part of the Sezession. A few years later, after his first portrait commission in Dusseldorf in 1922, Dix met his future wife, Martha, with whom he would go on to raise three children, and who is one of the principle correspondents in this volume of letters. Some of his most significant work was produced in the 1920s, including his powerful Krieg (War) portfolio, for which the Nazis branded him a "degenerate artist" and forced him to resign his professorship in 1933. Condemned to internal exile, Dix thereafter resided in Hemmenhofen, in the extreme southwest part of Germany. Twelve years later, he would suffer further indignities from the Nazis when ordered to join the Volkssturm in 1945. Dix ended up in a prisoner-of-war camp, again a survivor of a second harrowing cataclysm. After his release, from 1946 onwards, the painter lived between East and West Germany, never truly at home in either ideologically, yet he remained prolific, continuing to produce art until the end of his life, having lived through two World Wars as well as the "Cold War." This first volume covers the period 1904-1927 and the heart of it is a selection of Dix's postcards from the WWI front written to his school friend in Dresden, Helene Jakob, a form of artistic reportage of uncanny power. Recipient of the Die schönsten Deutschen Bücher shortlist in 2014, Dix's letters will prove to be of considerable interest to art historians, scholars of Expressionism, and aficionados of Dix, all of whom will encounter the artist as never before.

Letters, Vol. 1

Dix, Otto

Arts & Photography

Contra Mundum Press

La Guerre: L'intégrale des 50 eaux-fortes

History & Criticism

Gallimard]

The objectivist: Staging the world as a play       "It is my wish to come very close, strikingly close, to the times in which we live, without submitting to artistic dogma...I need the connection to the world of senses, the courage to portray ugliness, life as it comes." - Otto Dix  In the 1920s, Otto Dix was the artist of Neue Sachlichkeit, the New Objectivity, par excellence. Painting in a very realistic, almost photographic style, he chose as subjects the poverty, violence, death, and war that he experienced as a soldier in World War I. After this terrible experience, he painted the famous triptych The War.  Dix staged the world as a play, a grotesque farce. But the form he chose to do so was based on the classical canon of beauty. Dix lived his life and served art, for he adhered to the age-old rule that the American painter Ad Reinhardt put in a nutshell: "Life is life, and art is art."

Otto Dix, 1891-1969: Entweder ich werde beruhmt, oder beruchtigt

Karcher, Eva

Taschen

Otto Dix: Die Stiftung Dr. Alfred Gunzenhauser : Bestandskatalog (English and German Edition)

Ingrid Mossinger

Thomas Bauer-Friedrich

Kerber Verlag

A Otto Dix

Distributed Art Pub Inc

Otto Dix 1891-1969: Museum Villa Stuck 23. August bis 27. Oktober 1985 (German Edition)

Reference

Foreign Language Study & Reference

Stuck-Jugendstilverein

Otto Dix: Die Friedrichshafener Sammlung : Bestandskatalog (German Edition)

Catalogs & Directories

Zeppelin-Museum

Otto Dix / Raymond Pettibon: Traue deinen Augen [Trust your Eyes]

Pettibon, Raymond

Kahler, Ingebord

Rudiger, Ulrike

Kerber Christof Verlag

Edited by Hans-Werner Schmidt. Essays by Ingeborg Kahler, Roberto Ohrt and Ulrike Rudiger.

Kerber

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