Otto Dix
Went to the trenches as a machine gunner and drew what he saw for the rest of his life.
Otto Dix was born near Gera in 1891, volunteered in 1914, served as a machine gunner on the Western and Eastern fronts through the whole war, and came back to paint it with a precision that has never been surpassed or forgiven. Der Krieg, the portfolio of fifty etchings published in 1924, is the central work. Alongside it he made the great Neue Sachlichkeit portraits of Weimar Berlin and Dresden — the journalist Sylvia von Harden, dancers, war cripples, prostitutes — in a deliberately archaic Old Master technique. The Nazis dismissed him from his professorship, showed him in Degenerate Art and burned pictures. He died in 1969.
Provenance between 1933 and 1945 is the first question with any Dix, both because works were confiscated and because many were destroyed. The etchings, particularly Der Krieg, are the most frequently traded part of the output; state, edition, paper and the sharpness of an impression are what separate them, and the plates were printed in defined editions that are well documented. Watercolours and drawings are numerous and include a significant number of misattributions. Paintings on panel in his mixed-media technique are scarce and heavily studied.
If you own a work by Otto Dix
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
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