It is my wish to come very close, strikingly close, to the times in which we live, without submitting to artistic dogma...I need the connection to the world of senses, the courage to portray ugliness, life as it comes. Otto Dix

Staging the world as a play

In the 1920s, Otto Dix was the artist of Neue Sachlichkeit, the New Objectivity, par excellence. Painting in a very realistic, almost photographic style, he chose as subjects the poverty, violence, death, and war that he experienced as a soldier in World War I. After this terrible experience, he painted the famous triptych The War.

Dix staged the world as a play, a grotesque farce. But the form he chose to do so was based on the classical canon of beauty. Dix lived his life and served art, for he adhered to the age-old rule that the American painter Ad Reinhardt put in a nutshell: "Life is life, and art is art."

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