Otto Dix

It’s the faces that haunt us, the faces that seduce us, yielding a frisson that few other works can induce so well. The destroyed faces of otherwise ambulatory subjects lurk in this exhibition like a death’s head hawkmoth—harbingers of a truth perhaps too radical to be told. But Otto Dix was a rare genius at verismilitude when it came to his dermatologicals (I don’t mean anti-infectives but rather ruined flesh artefacts) and anatomicals. Whether working with gregarious facial wounds or tertiary syphilis on legs, he was entirely unafraid. He put ink, paint and graphite to deeply routed flesh.

In this first comprehensive exhibition in North America of the work of Dix, the grotesquerie begins in a room of etchings from the series called “Der Krieg (The War)” that have no real precedent in the history of art, with the possible exception of Goya’s “Disasters of War” (and which presumably figured as Dix’s model for emulation). They are exceptionally rendered and jaw-droppingly direct in their appraisal of all the horrors of this world: Gas Victims (Templeux-La-Fosse, August 1916), Buried Alive (January 1916, Champagne), Shot to Pieces. The print entitled Soldier and Nun (The Rape) was originally suppressed by Dix’s own publisher, who obviously feared that its release at that time would have resulted in Dix’s lynching on a lamp post by irate mobs.

If his is a demonic genre of portraiture, it is one that serves a very human, inverse purpose: exorcism. Never one to flinch in the face of humanity in extremis or pull his painterly punches, Dix brought the wounded faces of soldiers into the foreground of his art—and conjured up close and personal what the American playwright Paddy Chayefsky once called the “whole wounded madhouse of our time.” With those beautiful watercolours of soldiers with inassimilable facial wounds and the “War” etchings, Dix was no mute witness to what transpired when he was on a tour of duty as a machine-gunner in WWI.

Interesting to note that the soldiers who suffered such grotesque facial wounds from incendiaries were often subsequently closeted in military hospitals to avoid the awkward fallout that would impact their return to civilian life. They made me think of a wound the size of a baseball in my own father’s right leg, crisscrossed with linear black bomb fragments like tourmaline inclusions in rock crystal, that he suffered in Normandy in 1944 and that a pant’s leg draped but never quite hid. What seems spectral here is really radiant—and with a Socratic honesty that makes us understand that a painter like Lucian Freud is Dix’s blood brother. His work is lit with a wan and unwholesome light resonant of the morgue.

Contemporary philosopher Alphonso Lingis has argued that humanity is an “ecstatic” species. (In Greek, ek-static means literally to be outside, even beyond, oneself. In other words, to transcend both who—and what—one is.) If excess and ecstasy really do draw a deft radius across humanity in its essence, then Otto Dix is the test case. Dix delivers his punch and makes us stand outside ourselves, as we reluctantly look into his transgressive surfaces, sinking like a knife in butter. It is important to note that Dix only painted those who intrinsically interested him. (It’s instructive to meditate on the salient difference between his society portraits and those of Kees van Dongen, subject of a survey at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and covered in these pages by this writer last year.)

Dix’s Portrait of the Dancer Anita Berber, 1925, and Reclining Woman on Leopard Skin, 1927, unsettle us again and are felt in so many areas—heart, head, groin. One thinks again of Lucian Freud, an equally gifted clinician who some hold is also equally misogynist. Is Dix a misogynist? I think not. Aesthetically, (a)morally, he gives us the prequel to Francis Bacon’s famous nerve endings—and nervous intensity. But still, what a falling off there is in the latter rooms of this exhibit, which strive to replace the oomph of the earlier work with a taxidermist’s rather tired orthodoxy. However remarkable the portrait of Hugo Simons (a lawyer who successfully represented Dix in a court case and later emigrated to Montreal) that is now famously part of the MMFA collection, one of scant Dix paintings that have survived, it does not deliver anything like the hair-raising jolt of Two Children, 1922, depicting a boy and a girl standing in the street, which pulls us up by the scruff of the neck and kicks us in the gut in a way that only an image by Diane Arbus would decades later in her Child with Toy Hand Grenade in Central Park, 1962. One of his students at the Dresden Academy of Art once pointed out that Dix never chose the young, photogenic, healthy models. Instead, he chose models from the ranks of those marginalized and crushed by life.

Sex, too, is an incandescent integer in Dix’s work, as this exhibition makes clear. His series focusing on post-war sex murders is simply harrowing. In the watercolour Scene II (Murder), Dix depicts a prostitute with her throat slit, a work in which the red blood from the wound and the luminosity of her white skin are incommensurable. How graphically unavoidable when compared with Alberto Giacometti’s later sculpture Woman with Her Throat Cut, 1932, seen to represent the simultaneity of sexual ecstasy and the death event.

Called a “degenerate artist” by the Nazis and dismissed from his post as a teacher at the Dresden Academy, just as the philosopher Husserl in Freiburg, was alongside a legion of other luminaries, Dix remained in Germany throughout his career. He died in July 1969, and his legacy, at least in terms of the early work, is pristine. This exhibit of 220 works was curated by German art historian Olaf Peters. It made its debut this past spring at New York’s Neue Galerie. Praise for mmfa Director Nathalie Bondil, who said of this show: “We want to touch people.” In this exhibition, a joint project of the MMFA and the Neue Galerie, her desire and intention have been radically and laudably fulfilled. ❚

“Rouge Cabaret: The Terrifying and Beautiful World of Otto Dix” was exhibited at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts from September 24, 2010, to January 2, 2011.

James D Campbell is a writer and curator in Montreal who contributes regularly to Border Crossings.