Tableau d otto dix biography

“Photography has presented us with new possibilities and new tasks. It can depict things in magnificent beauty but also in terrible truth, and can also deceive enormously. We must be able to bear seeing the truth, but above all we should hand down the truth to our fellow human beings and to posterity, be it favourable to us or unfavourable.” August Sander

Portraying a Nation: Germany – is an overwhelming experience and a profoundly relevant exhibition in a “post truth” world. It combines two extraordinary shows Artist Rooms: August Sander and Otto Dix: The Evil Eye, each giving context, insight and new perspectives to the other. With over works on display there is a lot to take in, including Dix’s devastating War etchings. Visitors are directed first to the Sander exhibition which is completely absorbing, so allow yourself ample time to spend with Dix’s compelling work in part two. (You may well need a break inbetween!)  Entwined with a historical timeline in handwritten script, August Sander’s black and white photography brings humanity and compassion into focus, in perfect counterpoint with the psychological extremities of Dix’s paintings, drawings and prints. Curated by Dr Susanne Mayer-Büser, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, Francesco Manacorda, Artistic Director and Lauren Barnes, Assistant Curator, Tate Liverpool in collaboration with Artist Rooms (a collection jointly owned by the National Galleries of Scotland and the Tate) and the German Historical Institute, the exhibition is an inspiring collaboration, moving beyond words and essential viewing.

By Edward M. Gómez

In his “New Objectivity” works of the s, the German artist Otto Dix took a piercing view of his fellow beings, as revealed in his first-ever U.S. show.

Nearly a century ago, much of Europe waited with trepidation for war to break out. In August , the conflagration that would become World War I finally erupted, and the German artist Otto Dix was one young volunteer who eagerly headed to the front. An avid reader of the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, the 19th-century philosopher who had championed an ideal “superman” or “overman” who would overcome the limitations of mere humanity as it had evolved thus far, Dix would soon find his illusions shattered. In the words of the German art historian Matthias Eberle, the drawings Dix “jabbed on paper at the front [were] images not of supermen but of sub-men.” The war taught Dix, as he wrote in late , that, “while the sensations of the heart and the systems of the mind may be refuted, there is no refuting the world of objects—and the machine gun is just such a ‘thing.’”

This “sobering realization of the power of things,” as Eberle put it, lay at the very heart of a new style of art that arose in defeated Germany after the war. It became known as “Neue Sachlichkeit” (meaning “New Objectivity”). Characterized by precise technique and harsh satire, the style seemed to offer a postwar antidote to the wild, deformed imagery and primitive, joyous energy of Expressionism, an earlier style that numerous German and Austrian artists had embraced. Neue Sachlichkeit took its name from the title of a exhibition at the Kunsthalle in Mannheim, Germany, that featured works by such artists as Otto Dix, George Grosz and Max Beckmann, some of whom had previously worked in an Expressionist vein.
That show’s organizer was interested, he wrote at the time, in artists who had “reaffirmed their loyalty” to “positive, concrete reality.” At least for a while,