Otto Dix

No German painter did more to fix the popular image of the Weimar Republic than Otto Dix, and this catalogue is the first serious attempt to put that reputation before a North American audience.

Published by Prestel with the Neue Galerie New York in 2010, the 258-page volume accompanied the exhibition shown at the Neue Galerie from March to August 2010 and at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts from September 2010 to January 2011. Olaf Peters edited the book and opens with an essay on Dix's intransigent realism between the wars; texts by Dietrich Schubert, Karsten Muller and James van Dyke sit alongside period criticism by Ernst Kallai and Willi Wolfradt, so the 1920s reception runs next to current scholarship. The plates track the trajectory from the trench drawings and the Der Krieg print cycle to the cold, technically archaic portraits of the Neue Sachlichkeit years.

Dix (1891-1969) volunteered in 1914, served four years at the front, and spent the following decade converting that experience into some of the most unsparing images in twentieth-century painting. Declared degenerate and dismissed from his Dresden professorship in 1933, he retreated to painting landscapes and allegories on Lake Constance. The Neue Galerie has continued this line of enquiry in later publications including Neue Sachlichkeit / New Objectivity.