With its active mirrors and varied hatchings Der Lustmörder (K. 14) is an even more artful take on Dix’s 1920 painting ‘’The Sex Killer’’ (Der Lustmörder). Completed in 1920, the oil painting was disposed of or lost during the art purges of the 1930s, making the present print an important record of this atypical self-portrait. Otherwise, only one photograph of the painting survives, showing Dix in a garish suit in a turbulent scene signed DIXAV on an atomizer (image below). In 1919 Dix, newly returned to Dresden from the army, painted genial pictures, even appearing as Christ in ‘’Yearning’’ ( Sehnsucht), now in the Dresden Gallery. Dix, seeking publicity and emboldened by his war experiences and by the popularity of Dada, opted for notoriety. Erich Wulffen, a prominent criminologist, had published in 1910 on sexual criminals (Der Sexual Verbrecher), and his savagely illustrated book was available to police forces and to the general public. Dix owned a copy. George Grosz, too, had included sex crimes in his surveys. Sex crimes, important elements in the news culture of the period, were widely reported. Dix, though, hedged his bets, presenting his charnel house as a hand-made puppet show with detachable body-parts. And in a more sophisticated and more naturalistic painting of 1922, also lost, he asks us to read and respond physically to an inverted head and to make out and check on the jumbled contents of a mirror.