Otto Dix and Christoph Voll

Sale: Kornfeld & Klipstein, Bern, June 1968, lot 230
Sale: Hauswedell & Nolte, Hamburg, June 1973, lot 365
Purchased at the above sale by the present owner

Cologne, Galerie Ambaum, 1976, no. 18

Ulrike Lorenz, Otto Dix: Das Werkverzeichnis der Zeichnungen und Pastelle, Weimar, 2003, vol. II, no. EDV 13.1.43, illustrated p. 938

Executed on cream wove paper, not laid down, taped to the mount at all four corners and floating in the mount. The left edge is very slightly unevenly cut. There is an artist's pin hole to the upper left corner and the upper right corner is very slightly scuffed. The sheet is slightly time stained and there are two faint diagonal creases across the lower right corner (approx. 4.5cm.) and the upper right corner (approx. 6cm.). There is a light stain towards the centre of the upper edge. This work is in overall good condition.
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NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

In 1919, Otto Dix moved to Dresden to study at the Hochschule für Bildende Kunst (Academy of Fine Arts), and became a founder of the Dresden Secession group. It was here that he met Christoph Voll whom he befriended and who contributed to the present work. Ein schönes Paar was executed in 1921 and is a graphic example of Otto Dix’s ruthless and harshly realistic depictions of Weimar society. It depicts a young couple grotesquely scarred. The woman is wearing a prosthesis on her left arm and, in a harsh contrast to her youthfulness, is showing signs of decay. Similarly, her partner, almost a skeleton, seems to be an embodiment of death. Voll, who added the head to this male figure conceived it as a portrait of Otto Dix. At the time Dix often worked with other artists creating the so-called Kollektivkunstwerke, where several artists would draw one part of a figure not knowing what the other artists had drawn before and, thereby, creating absurd compositions reminiscent of the Surrealist’s cadavre exquis game.

The present work is a wonderful example of Otto Dix using his iconic cynical humour in order to expose the hypocrisy of a society that tried to ignore the realities of post-war Germany. World War I had returned crippled young men and had left families without an income, often forcing women into the streets. The title Ein schönes Paar  (a beautiful couple) as well as the inscriptions unheilbar (incurable) and Arterienverkalkung (arteriosclerosis) seem to jeer on society, giving a seemingly banal diagnosis to the figures severe conditions.

Dix’s œuvre exposes such strains on society and attempts, in its exaggeration, to capture life in Weimar Germany. As Keith Hartley explains: ‘Dada played a key role in this development. Its total denigration of the puffed-up and false, its love of kitsch, low life and the trivial, its emphasis on the caricatural, all made a deep impression on Dix’s art’ (Keith Hartley, Dresden 1919-1922 in Otto Dix, 1891-1969 (exhibition catalogue), Tate Gallery, London, 1992, p. 90).