The troubled work of Otto Dix

The Allerheiligen museum in Schaffhouse currently has a retrospective show of the work of German artist Otto Dix (1891-1969), one of the founding fathers of the Neue Sachlichkeit, or New Objectivity, movement. "Otto Dix primarily sought to capture human nature even at its most deviant. Although he was closely caught up in those vituperative times, it was the better to look his fellow humans in the eyes. And sometimes to be part of the action. He fought throughout World War I. He was in the great artillery battles of Northern France and Flanders, and on the Russian front. It was an unspeakable ordeal, which he reflected in his drawings. His wartime sketches and watercolours were as terrible as his portraits of the ensuing Dadaist period were socially and politically ferocious. His prostitutes and sailors on show at Schaffhouse are highly colourful in all senses of the word. Some of Dix's paintings earned him obscenity trials. The Verist path he subsequently followed barely softened his terms of expression. It did make his portraits more human, however.

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