

Biography of Otto Dix

2nd December: Otto Dix is born in Gera as son of a working-class family.

He makes an apprenticeship as decorative painter.

A scholarship granted by the prince of Reuß allows Dix to study at the School of Applied Arts in Dresden. His influences come from impressionism and the emerging expressionism.

From 1912
Dix conducts studies of German painting tradition in the Renaissance and experiments with Cubist, Futuristic and later also Dadaistic shapes.

Dix voluntarily enlists in the military service during World War I and joins the field artillery and serves as machine gunner in France and Russia; as Unteroffizier (German rank between normal enlisted personnel and officers) he enlists for military flight-training towards the end of the war. The horror from the war becomes a basic element of his art works.

After returning to Dresden, he founds the artist group "Gruppe 1919" of the Dresdner-Secession together with Conrad Felixmüller (1897-1977).

Dix paints Dadaistic, socio-critical collages.

He moves to Düsseldorf.

Dix marries Martha Koch.

Dix lives and works in Berlin again where his critical and analytical painting reaches its prime.

He teaches as a professor at the Art Academy in Dresden.

Due to the suspension of teaching staff by the nationalists, Dix is forced to leave Dresden and moves to Schloß Rendegg near Singen.

Dix moves to Hemmenhofen on Lake Constance and paints old-master landscape art, in which he combines Reality in a late-Gothic style and Symbolism that criticises the time around WWI.

The German Nazis defame his works as "deformed art", thus, 260 of them are confiscated and taken from German museums and then sold or burnt.

The artist gets temporarily arrested due to an assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler, which Dix is presumably connected to.

Dix is drafted to the national militia Volkssturm and gets arrested in Alsace.

He gets awarded with the Bundesverdienstkreuz (Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany) and receives tributes from West and East Germany.

25th July: Otto Dix dies in Singen.

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