Otto Dix Archive: “The horror in his pictures was disturbing”

100 years ago, Otto Dix’s painting “The Trenches” was shown here at Pariser Platz for the first time in Berlin, you said in your opening speech at the new Dix archive. Did such a detailed inside view of the horrors of war overwhelm viewers at the time?

Because of their own war experiences, it was traumatic for many of Otto Dix’s contemporaries to look into this mirror in 1924. But people also fought for political positions. When Dix confessed: “I wanted to show the destroyed earth, the corpses, the wounds,” then this naturally disrupted the self-image of front-line fighter associations like the “Stahlhelm,” which ignored the horrors of war with heroic pathos. This topic also raised the question: What can and what can art do? The art critic Julius Meier-Graefe, who played a key role in establishing Impressionism in Wilhelmine Germany, recommended that “the monster” be taken down again because it was not only “bad” but also “infamously painted, with a penetrating joy in detail.” Max Liebermann, on the other hand, defended the “trenches,” seeing it as the “personification of war without pathos and Bengali fireworks.”

Opinions continued to differ on this image of the war – it was shown in 1937 as an example of “painted military sabotage” in the Nazi exhibition “Degenerate Art”, where numerous Dix works were represented – but it has been considered lost since 1940. There are only black and white photographs of it left, including one by the well-known photographer Hugo Erfurth, which Dix commissioned for documentation purposes and which is in his estate at the academy.

In 1933, Otto Dix was one of the first members to be excluded from the Prussian Academy of Arts, which was brought into line by the Nazi regime. He was not elected to it in 1931 by the predominantly conservative members, but was appointed by ministerial decision, which also says a lot about the Weimar Republic. But ten years after the end of the Second World War, which Dix had survived in seclusion on Lake Constance, he was accepted into the art academies of East and West Germany. That wasn’t exactly the norm in the 1950s.

No, it was an attempt to make amends for someone whose pictures had so mercilessly shown the horror of war and who had been forced to leave without much resistance from members. In this respect, a commitment in East and West alike to the humanism of Dix and his academy history. But he remained an outsider in both German states, also because his late work was increasingly influenced by Christianity. In the West, abstract art dominated the scene, with which Dix, who had experimented with so many styles but always remained connected to realism, had nothing to do with. In the East, cultural policy was bothered by the many details of the horror in Dix’s pictures. This was considered “late bourgeois” and decadent. For Dix, membership in both academies was the opportunity to maintain his artistic independence. His connection to Dresden played an important role at the Ost-Akademie. He still had his studio there, where the “Seven Deadly Sins” had survived. The studio had surprisingly survived the bombing; the printing press for his graphics was also in Dresden, and his lover Käthe König lived there.

She had been a nude model at the art academy and at the same time a court servant. It is said that when the Gestapo arrested Dix after the Munich assassination attempt on Hitler in 1939, she made incriminating material against him disappear from court, so that he had to be released again. But we don’t know this in detail, and this correspondence is blocked until 2040. Which brings us to the question of the archive. A large part of Dix’s written estate is in the Germanisches Museum in Nuremberg – and the Swiss archive section now in the AdK. How did this come about and what is this material made of?

There are 145 archive boxes, 16 linear meters – that’s a surprising amount for someone who was actually rather uncommunicative when it came to personal things. We have been processing this material, which was given to us by the Otto Dix Foundation in Switzerland, for over a year and have now made it accessible to researchers and interested visitors. The archive materials can be researched online in our archive database and viewed in our reading room. On the one hand, there are “life documents”, around 300 letters, notebooks, ID cards, memorabilia and other biographical documents. Also Dix’s painting case, with a drawing on the inside. It shows a Madonna with a halo from 1942, the patron goddess of his painting utensils. One of the rare self-explanations of his art, something he otherwise strictly avoided, can also be found underneath, the text “About my painting style”. This is a lecture he gave at a painting school.

On the other hand, there is the “work documentation” – 4,000 index cards with photos of his pictures. Dix wanted to see his entire work documented – he had lost a significant part of his work during the Nazi era and the war, including his bust of Nietzsche, which is lost, and the large mural “Orpheus and the Animals” for a man from Chemnitz Industrialist that burned in a bomb attack. Not to mention the works removed from museums as part of the Nazi campaign against “degenerate art,” many of which have remained missing. That’s why it was so important to him that photos of everything he created were archived, along with the associated data such as dimensions or buyer’s names, which is of great value for research today.

Why are these rather sober data so important for understanding art?

Of course, you can also see the images directly and understand them intuitively. But by precisely contextualizing them in the time situation in which they were created and first received, one gains a different approach. That seems important to me.

With the Otto Dix Archive, the Academy of Arts now protects Herz together with the archives of George Grosz, John Heartfield and Wielanddiscovered a considerable treasure in the area of ​​Dada art. What was the most amazing find you made in the Dix estate?

A sample book for tattoo artists, a bizarre find that made us wonder why Dix was interested in anchors and pierced hearts of all things. Then we found out what he had used the templates for. It was a source of inspiration for the picture “Suleika, the Tattooed Miracle” from 1920. When you search, unexpected connections suddenly emerge that help you better understand what you have in front of your eyes.

It sounds as if archival work, as you can read in Umberto Eco in “The Name of the Rose,” is still a kind of dangerous expedition.

Maybe not dangerous, but it is an expedition into the unknown, a detective work in which old documents tell you stories. You put together a puzzle from many details. For example, there is a double portrait of Otto Dix and his wife Martha, a painting that is lost. You didn’t even know how big it was. We have now found a photo in the archive in which the painting can be seen next to a door frame. This allowed us to reconstruct the dimensions. Certainly a detail, but it makes up meticulous research.

Interview

The Academy of Arts in Berlin now has an Otto Dix archive, which opened last week. It contains, among other things, biographical photos and documents of the painter (1891–1969), who was a member of the academy, and was donated to it by the Otto Dix Foundation. Werner Heegewaldtborn in 1962, has been archive director of the Academy of Arts, historian and scientific archivist since 2016.

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