Otto Dix valuation
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.
What a work by Otto Dix is worth
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Bio
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.
At a glance
- Born
- 2 December 1891, Untermhaus
- Died
- 25 July 1969, Singen
- Movements
- Expressionism, New Objectivity
Der Krieg, Karsch and the museums
Der Krieg was commissioned and published by Dix's Berlin dealer Karl Nierendorf in 1924 as five portfolios of ten prints each, in an edition of seventy. Nierendorf also published pamphlets reproducing some of the images to publicise the series among newspapers, trade unions and pacifist groups, so printed reproductions of the plates exist alongside the etchings.
Florian Karsch's catalogue, Otto Dix: Das graphische Werk, published in 1970, numbers the fifty Der Krieg plates K.70 to K.119, and Karsch numbers are how Dix prints are identified. The Kunstmuseum Stuttgart holds one of the most important Dix collections and runs the house at Hemmenhofen on Lake Constance where he lived from the 1930s until his death, reopened as the Museum Haus Dix in 2013.
Senff, The Trench and Metropolis
Dix served an apprenticeship with the Gera painter Carl Senff from 1906 to 1910 before entering the Kunstgewerbeschule in Dresden, then a school of applied arts. After the war he was a founder of the Dresden Secession in 1919 and showed collages at the Dada Fair in Berlin in 1920. The Trench, painted in 1923, showed the decomposed bodies of soldiers so plainly that the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne hung it behind a curtain, and in 1925 the mayor, Konrad Adenauer, cancelled its purchase. It was shown in the Degenerate Art exhibition in Munich in 1937, and its whereabouts after 1940 are unknown.
The triptych Metropolis, finished in 1928, is in the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, and The War, the triptych he painted between 1929 and 1932, is in Dresden. He also drew portraits and self-portraits in silverpoint on prepared paper. Works by him were among those found in 2012 in the hoard kept by Cornelius Gurlitt, son of the dealer Hildebrand Gurlitt, which is one reason the history of a Dix between 1933 and 1945 is examined so closely.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
