Otto Dix

Wilhelm Heinrich Otto Dix (2 December 1891 – 25 July 1969) was a German painter and printmaker, noted for his ruthless and harshly realistic depictions of Weimar society and the brutality of war. Along with George Grosz, he is widely considered one of the most important artists of the [Neue Sachlichkeit].

Early life and education
The artist's birthplace opened as a museum in 1991. Otto Dix was born in Untermhaus, Germany, now a part of the city of Gera. The eldest son of Franz and Louise Dix, he an iron foundry worker and she a seamstress who had written poetry in her youth, he was exposed to art from an early age. The hours he spent in the studio of his cousin, Fritz Amann, who was a painter, were decisive in forming young Otto's ambition to be an artist; he received additional encouragement from his primary school teacher.[1] Between 1906 and 1910, he served an apprenticeship with painter Carl Senff, and began painting his first landscapes. In 1910, he entered the Kunstgewerbeschule in Dresden (Academy of Applied Arts), where Richard Guhr was among his teachers.

World War II and the Nazis
When the Nazis came to power in Germany, they regarded Dix as a degenerate artist and had him sacked from his post as an art teacher at the Dresden Academy. He later moved to Lake Constance in the southwest of Germany. Dix's paintings The Trench and War cripples were exhibited in the state-sponsored Munich 1937 exhibition of degenerate art, Entartete Kunst. They were later burned.

Dix, like all other practising artists, was forced to join the Nazi government's Reich Chamber of Fine Arts (Reichskammer der bildenden Kuenste), a subdivision of Goebbels' Cultural Ministry (Reichskulturkammer). Membership was mandatory for all artists in the Reich. Dix had to promise to paint only inoffensive landscapes. He still painted an occasional allegorical painting that criticized Nazi ideals.[6] His paintings that were considered "degenerate" were discovered among the 1500+ paintings hidden away by an art dealer and his son in 2012.

In 1939 he was arrested on a trumped-up charge of being involved in a plot against Hitler (see Georg Elser), but was later released.

During World War II Dix was conscripted into the Volkssturm. He was captured by French troops at the end of the war and released in February 1946.

Following the Nazi purge of "degenerate art", his art work having been included in the 1937 Entartete Kunst exhibit, Otto Dix was labeled an enemy of the government and a menace to German culture, and went into internal exile in "the countryside to paint unpeopled landscapes in a meticulous style that would not provoke the authorities (Karcher 1988, 206)."

Sources:

• [http://www.moma.org/collection/artists/1559]
  
• [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Dix]
  
• [http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Degenerate_art]
• Michael Website Family Tree on MyHeritage.com