Product Description
This generously illustrated monograph on
Otto Dix presents the work of the controversial
German artist renowned for his unflinching
portrayal of life during war time and the
aftermath of violence. The celebrated German artist Otto Dix, a volunteer for the
German Army during World War I, went on to create some of
the most powerful anti-war images of the modern age. His
work also includes unsettling depictions of civilian life in the
Weimar Republic following World War I. This book examines
every aspect of Dix s career, from his expressionist work to his
gradual embrace of classically influenced realism. Though
many of Dix s works were destroyed under the Third Reich, a
number of his rarely seen landscapes from that era a genre
forced on him by the Nazi government as well as later works of
religious allegory are included here. The result is a timeline of
artistic development as we witness a master grapple with
creative passions and political oppression. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

The painter of modern life (and death)
This book is the catalogue for the Dix exhibition currently held at the Neue Galerie in NYC, which will later travel to Montreal, Canada and which is the first one dedicated to this major artist in North America. Without being a comprehensive Dix retrospective (a fact which is readily acknowledged by the authors)since it concentrates on a 20-year timespan (1919-1939), it is a high-quality publication with top-class illustrations and a very interesting text that tends to divide Dix's works into four areas, the images of war (Dix is frequently compared to the great Goya in this respect), the portraits, the representation of sexuality and Dix's production during the Third Reich, a production all the more moving as Dix was one of the few German artists of the Weimar avant-garde who had chosen to remain in Germany after 1933, even though he obviously was an opponent of the Nazi regime. The low-key landscapes which he painted during that period are metaphoric criticisms of totalitarianism, and this is very well shown in the book.

There are several groundbreaking essays in this book and anyone interested in the New Objectivity movement of the 1920's in Germany should read the last one, which dwells on Dix's 1928 masterpiece "Metropolis" (now in Stuttgart)and analyses the artist's ability to represent the ugly "not as a symptom of a hopeless pessimism, but rather as an indication of the will to power of the artist (who) heroically said yes to brutal life in an art of the sweetest cruelty" (those last two words coming from a text by Nietzsche, whose philosophy was one of the main sources of inspiration for Otto Dix). Another essay studies the theme of sexual murder, a theme that is recurrent in Dix's art (especially in two missing masterpieces that disappeared during WWII), in German and Austrian art and literature in general (Grosz, Beckmann, Musil...).

Highly recommended.

excellent monograph on Otto Dix
Otto Dix (1891-1969) was a leading artist of the German Expressionist movement. He saw service in the German army during the entire course of World War One. His horrific experiences in the trenches of the Western and Eastern fronts had an immense influence on his psyche and his art. By the 1930's he was labelled as a degenerate artist by the Nazi regime and his ascerbic, grotesque style that was so harshly critical of the corruption of Weimar society dimmed dramatically. It was only in his later years that he was to receive a measure of the recognition that he deserved.

This book is a catalogue of an exhibition being presently held at the Neue Gallerie New York. It is the first retrospective of Dix's work to be held in North America and this volume is presently the only monograph in the English language available on this artist. While the exhibitionfeatures paintings, drawings and etchings created between 1919 and 1938, most emanate from the twenties, his greatest period. There are 170 art works illustrated in excellent color; included are 50 gruelling etchings from the renowned 1924 War cycle. Additionally there are portraits and scenes from life in Weimar Germany.

Dix's art makes uncomfortable viewing but there is a penetrating and powerful voice in his artistic vision. There is only a small overlap of paintings featured in the Metropolitan Museum's Glitter and Doom exhibition. Apart from the illustrations there are a variety of informative essays about Dix's life and world. This is an excellent publication that I recommend highly to those interested in 20th century art. ... Read more

Product Description

Product Description
Few painters are as strongly linked to the historical events and political catastrophes of twentieth-century Germany as Otto Dix (1891-1969). Born to a working-class family at the turn of the twentieth century, he hurled himself into the art world of the prewar era, and fought and drew on the front during World War I; after 1918, he gave that war perhaps the most honest face bestowed on it by an artist. During the Weimar Republic, Dix emerged as an enfant terrible, a dandy and an urban sophisticate, but he was also a respected professor and pedagogue, until he was driven from his position by the Nazis a few months after they came to power. Ostracized and threatened under the Nazi regime, Dix retreated to Lake Constance, where he began painting in the broader brushstokes that characterize his final phase. Published in Hatje Cantz's new Art to Read series, Philipp Gutbrod's expertly written biography examines an eventful life and a multifaceted oeuvre. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

It's terrible that Otto Dix remains a silent genius.
This book is damn wonderful.I remember checking it out from a local library and not returning it for nearly four months.Otto Dix is an inspiration to many artists, but still is very unheard of.He's dead youknow, shouldn't he be getting more attention?

A wonderful display of Otto Dix's work
I was resently tempted to keep this book after borrowing it, but it truelyis something to be shared.If you love the work of Freud and Schad this isa must have.Otto Dix's work is displayed beautifully in this over 400page book.The onlydrawback being the need for more color reproductions. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Amazing!!!!
Not only was this the most comprehensive book I have found on Otto, but it had the most amazing breadth of works.This will be a great resource for my work, and I was blown away by the quality of pictures.Thanks for getting it to me so quickly! ... Read more

Product Description
Otto Dix (1891–1969) is renowned for his masterful portraits, characterized by their grotesque quality and candidness. Match explores the art of portraiture influenced by Dix’s directness. It brings together over 60 works by the artist, including self-portraits and portraits of his family, artists and notable members of German society. Comparing Dix’s painting with such old masters as Cranach, the authors consider how his technique has in turn influenced such modern and contemporary artists as Francis Bacon, Gerhard Richter and Wolfgang Tillmans. Superb reproductions of works from all stages of Dix’s 50-year career are complemented by texts focusing on self-portraiture, family, Dix’s contemporaries and modern-day portrait painting, among other themes. ... Read more

Product Description
This volume is a catalog accompanying the first comprehensive exhibition on Otto Dix (1891-1969) in Austria in the last 20 years. Most famously known for his depictions of war, Dix nevertheless covered a wide range of topics in his oeuvre, the stylistic and iconographic development of which is covered in this book. German text. ... Read more

Product Description
This volume examines the work of Otto Dix. "Metropolis" is the title of the triptych by Dix, which features alongside more than 150 major works in a retrospective that depicts the troubled period between the wars. ... Read more

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This book addresses modernism's ties to Romanticism, to post-Darwinian debates about evolution and religion, to evolving categories of modernist spirituality and to their collective relationship to aesthetics and thus modern art. The master narrative of the rise of modern art and literary modernism has long settled into the scholarly landscape. It has indeed come to appear as set, unproblematic, and rarely questioned. In this extensively interdisciplinary and transnational study Dr. Richard Lofthouse has set out to conduct a deep probe into that now well-traveled terrain. Whereas most previous scholars have looked to the power of French art and culture as the driving engine behind various modes of modernism, Lofthouse counter-instinctively looks to Germany and Great Britain. In the face of previous studies on the mechanical fascinations of modernists such as the Vorticists, Lofthouse rediscovers the power of European fin-de-siecle vitalism and its trajectory far into the twentieth century. Through Lofthouse's studies of Otto Dix, Stanley Spencer, Max Beckmann and Jacob Epstein a new counter-narrative of the development of modern art and modernism emerges.There is still the modernist rejection of many things Victorian, but these artists embrace a vitalist, organic scientific tradition with roots in the thought of Goethe and Lamarckians rather than Darwin and Haeckel. This study reminds us that the world of science and philosophy in 1900 reflected anything but a triumph of positivist science and secularism. The minds and artists of the day confronted a much more indeterminate world of ideas in which mechanism was not triumphant and the spiritual had not been banished. Each of Lofthouse's protagonists rejected anything resembling traditional religious orthodoxy, but they continued to seek some kind of spiritual meaning in the world and in their own existences. This volume leads scholars to reconceptualize their approach to early twentieth-century culture. Lofthouse emphasizes the manner in which four separate artists of prominence stood determined to forge a new path that ignored the impact of French art, embraced the thought of Nietzsche or overlapping ideas derived from the post-Darwinian landscape that emerged in England by 1900, and produced lasting works of art for which this book provides new clues to understanding.Lofthouse leads his readers to understand that they must henceforth contemplate a variety of modernisms, that they must rethink their comfortable, familiar categories of interpretation, and look for new byways on what they incorrectly took to be an adequate mapped landscape of the modern. ... Read more