Otto Dix

Galerie Nierendorf, Berlin

Private Collection, Switzerland (acquired from the above in the 1960's)

Thence by descent to the present owner

Otto Dix trained as a decorative painter for a decade before joining the German army and serving throughout the war. In 1919, his eyes opened were by life on the front line, he began to imagine himself in the lower depths amongst the diseased and maimed. He dealt with topics in poor taste: mutilated veterans, for example, forced to beg on the streets. In the newspapers he read of sex crimes and of serial killings.

He recalled people driven mad to the point of suicide by memories of life and death in the trenches, and by subsequent hardships. Military life had also familiarized him with the dangers of syphilis, a major threat to war efforts on all sides. Dix, a handsome upstanding man, represented himself as an unmoved witness in the alternative cultures to which he and his contemporaries had been so brutally exposed.

Heinar Schilling of the Dresdner Verlag published Neun Holzschnitte (Nine Woodcuts) in 1922. They date from 1919 when Dix was at his most dynamic, described at the time by Hugo Zehder as being like ‘’a Sioux chieftain. Always on the warpath.’’ Elektrische, which opens the series and depicts a tram no. 42 that sparks and crackles even though labelled A-moll, along with an advert for Ilse. The quaint painting of 1919 shows tram 47 travelling east, marked E, having arrived at stop no. 11 (fig. 1). In the woodcut, by contrast, passengers shout against the din. Dix liked reading matter, but he also liked sensory overload, as expressed in the sparking, clanking streetcar. The next woodcut he named Lärm der Strasse, the noise of the street, inscribed with a line from a romantic song, set to music by Liszt, “O lieb’, so lang du lieben kannst” (“O love as long as love you can”). Street scenes were mostly genteel until electric trams and traffic brought a new order of sounds to city streets. Futurists may have looked forward to exhilarating urban experiences but Dix, demobilised in Dresden in 1919 and after, came across inversions featuring sprawled and crippled beggars on the city’s pavements, avoided and mostly ignored by passers-by.