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Otto Dix. The Old Master of Modern Art
“`I am not a gifted pupil of Rembrandt, but rather of Cranach, Dürer and Grünewald´, Otto Dix declared in 1968 on receiving the Rembrandt Prize from the Goethe Foundation in Salzburg. His association with the German Old Masters first arose sixty years earlier, in the autumn of 1909, when the teenage Dix decided to leave his native Gera and move to Dresden to study at the Kunstgewerbeschule (School of Arts and Crafts), a decision that would determine his future as an artist. In this great city of culture, Dix was immediately fascinated by the works in the Gemäldegalerie, one of Germany’s most celebrated art galleries. At the same time, the young artist made his first contacts with avant-garde art through the exhibitions organised by Galerie Arnold and the Kunstsalon Richter, which were at that point showing the work of the group Die Brücke, formed by Dresden’s young Expressionists (in 1910), the Italian Futurists (in 1913), and artists such as Gauguin (in 1910) and Van Gogh (in 1912).
As the School of Arts and Crafts did not teach easel painting, Dix started to paint in a self-taught manner, taking as his models the Early Flemish masters and the German and Florentine Renaissance painters represented in the royal collections.
(...) During this period it became increasingly clear that in a Europe affected by a state of emotional desolation, Expressionism’s subjective vehemence and the romantic spirit of the avant-garde movements were no longer appropriate idioms for many of the artists who, like Dix, had survived the war. As a result of the moral damage inflicted by years spent in hellish trenches, many young German artists saw their vision of the world previously determined by Nietszche’s Zarathustra crumble. A new, realist perspective of the world emerged, arising from a loss of confidence in the values that had previously prevailed in Western art. The result was an anti-romantic reaction and an active aversion to avant-garde formalism.
(...) In the defeated and humiliated Germany, furthermore, the rise of realism responded to the need to establish a link with the country’s great cultural heritage. The revival of techniques and styles used by the German Old Masters was accompanied by a desire to recover lost signs of national identity.
(...) The relationship between Dix and Erfurth introduces us to a key issue in the artistic debate of this period: the comparison between painting and photography. The paragon between photography and painting was an ongoing theoretical topic of the day. Inevitably, Dix did not remain aloof from the controversy, aware of the `competition´ that the work of photographers such as Hugo Erfurth or August Sander presented to his paintings. Indeed, on various occasions he explicitly stated his belief in the superiority of painting over photography in capturing the inner nature of the sitter. Dix was always prepared to defend his ground with regard to the more modern method of representation that was gradually prevailing, and in 1955 he commented: `Photography can only record a moment, and that only superficially, but it cannot delineate specific, individual form, something that depends on the imaginative power and intuition of the painter.´
As Matthias Eberle speculated in a recent essay, it is possible that Dix’s decided return to the techniques of the German Old Masters concealed an attempt to compete more successfully with the new and growing medium. The painter may have demonstrated his superiority through a detailed representation of the most insignificant details and through the use of the tactile qualities of objects, thus achieving a way of exposing the sitter beyond external appearances. With his technical mastery and morbid exactitude, Dix went far beyond the ability of any lens, however precise. On this aspect, Paul Westheim, editor of the influential magazine Das Kunstblatt, wrote: `When Dix paints people it is as if he were sending out arrest orders. If I may be allowed to use terminology borrowed from the art of photography, his portraits are like enlargements or close-ups, which reveal almost everything. They have something of the brutality of police ‘Wanted’ posters that announce information of vital public importance.´
Erfurth belonged to the generation of photographers that upheld photography as equal to painting. Not only did he systematically deploy different pictorial techniques (such as oleograph) that gave photographic prints the texture of canvas, and also work with subjects and genres characteristic of painting, but in addition, in his attempt to evoke the inner nature of his sitters, he also exploited the possibilities of successive shots with the aim of capturing his models in different poses.
We might ask to what extent Dix’s realist style might have influenced Erfurth’s cold and objective portraits, and, conversely, to what degree Dix might have borrowed poses and attitudes from Erfurth’s photographic portraits. Both seem possible. What is clear is that both men shared a comparable interest in the portrait and also that many of the artists, gallery owners, writers and actors of the day whom Erfurth photographed were also portrayed by Dix.”
UBALDO SEDANO
Otto Dix. Classical Modernity
“(...) The idea of a comparative analysis of Dix’s work with that of past painters whose influence he recognised was particularly tempting, in that it offered broad scope for investigating the nature of the creative process at two apparently unrelated moments in history.
(...) The research had two closely-related aims: first, to ascertain the artists’ work `routine´, its theoretical underpinning and the techniques used, in other words (in a phrase currently popular in the fine arts), to get into `the painter’s kitchen´; and second, to bring into play the detailed knowledge thus acquired using ancillary scientific techniques to seek similarities between Dix’s work and that of the Renaissance painters in question.
`For me [...] newness in painting derives from extending subject-matter, from heightening forms of expression whose essence is already present in the Old Masters.´(Otto Dix).
(...) Dix experts agree that his creative approach was influenced by a number of manuals that described, with varying precision, the techniques used by the Old Masters. The publication in the early 1920s of Max Doerner’s famous handbook on materials and techniques, Malmaterial und seine Verwendung im Bilde (published in English under the title The Materials of the Artist and their Use in Painting), which was widely read and admired in artistic circles, may have had a particularly marked influence on painters of Dix’s generation, and prompted them to search in their work for greater material quality. The quality of art materials had been somewhat neglected since the advent of the post-industrial era and avant-garde movements, which rejected technical quality as a constraint on the artist’s creative freedom, in that it forced his work to fit within a set of rules that distracted him from his aims.
(...) Otto Dix sought to reclaim a forgotten, perhaps scorned, aspect of the painter’s technique: craftsmanship, in the sense of a full involvement in all the steps required prior to the creative act, a taste for painstaking preparation, for quality in every single layer applied to the chosen support, for constant attention to the support itself. And at all times, respect for a natural tradition going back generations.
Preparatory layers were applied in such a way as to counter the movement of the wooden support. The drawing was made and transferred with almost ritual precision, followed by layer upon layer of paint until the desired highlights and transparencies were achieved. In the uppermost layers, Dix resurrected another resource no longer employed by avant-garde painters: the glazing technique.
(…) A number of conclusions may be drawn from this comparative analysis. Otto Dix was inspired—in formal terms—by the iconography of the Renaissance painters, adopting or reinterpreting certain elements, such as the carnation in the hand and the entwined-serpent monogram with which he signed some of his work. Dix certainly makes use of the techniques described in documentary sources, but does so in an almost capricious way, creating in a sense a technique of his own in which apparently-incompatible layers are overlaid and juxtaposed (e.g. layers of oil and varnish under layers of tempera emulsion); the result is a meticulous painting whose pictorial effects are strongly reminiscent of certain well-known Old Masters.
Dix’s figures, which sometimes verge on caricatures, carry suggestions of Dürer, hints of some of the works by Leonardo da Vinci, and even clear echoes of Bosch and Brueghel; yet their monumental, hieratic, strength betrays a modern approach far removed from tradition. Ugliness, things unpleasant to behold, and particularly harsh subjects (seen even as immoral by the nascent regime), are treated with such exquisite skill and such delicate technique, that they acquire a subtle beauty.
... `The fact is that the artist, the painter too, identifies with his objects. That is, he forms part of them. So he must love the objects, since one cannot hate oneself. It is a big mistake to think that I paint moved by hatred, moralism or bitterness. In fact, I have loved everything I have painted, even the ugly things. I love ugliness exactly as it is; perhaps I see things in rather more detail, perhaps my eyes are sharper than those of other people. As a result, things appear which on occasion prove to be very, very, very […] pathetic, incisive, at times too clear. But that’s my style. I can’t do it any other way [...] it’s not forced, it’s not deliberate. It’s like that because I’m like that.´ Otto Dix. “