Otto Dix left us an oeuvre characrerized by his unsparing view of humanity that continues to captivate and disturb the viewer t this day. Nothing escaped his relentless, almost forensic gaze on reality: neither suffering nor helplessness, greed, and the horrors of our human existence. It was the experience of the existential traumas that Dix had to live through in his early twenties in the First World War – piles of corpses, death all around him, and the acrid smell of fear and decay – that laid the foundations for his lifelong fascination with the subject of life and death. In retrospect, the artist described the war as a kind of gruesome awakening: “War is something so beastly: hunger, lice, mud, noises that drive you insane.[..] looking at the earlier pictures, I had the impression that there was one side of reality that had not yet been depicted: ugliness. “War was a hideous thing, but also something monumental. [..] You must have seen people in such a state of unleashed violence to understand human nature.” (Quoted from Otto Dix 1891-1969, Museum Villa Stuck, Munich 1986, p. 280.) Henceforth, Dix dedicated his work to ‘primeval themes of humanity.’ In his disturbing pictures of figures captured in an exaggerated critical realism, Dix confronts us with helpless human beings with a physicality marked by life. Otto Dix's portraits go far beyond all traditions of salon painting. They are not masterfully staged images of the high society. Instead, Dix makes ordinary people the protagonists of his revolutionary art with great power and courage. And so it is the financial hardships, the burden of work, the fear of illness and death, as well as the dark sides of human nature that Dix denounces with unsparing directness.
Die Hure (The Whore), Der Selbstmörder (The Suicider), Die Alte Schauspielerin (The Old Actress), Die Straßendirne (The Streetwalker) and Die Magd (The Maid) are the titles of these magnificent works from the 1920s in which Dix captured the defining features of the actors of contemporary society with a confident stroke in fascinating spontaneity and with unsparing accuracy. The facial features and stature of the “Magd” are coarse and rough, resulting from a lifetime of hard physical labor. Her cheeks and nose are bright red; her massive breasts droop down on her belly. Nevertheless, Dix's “Magd” is not ugly; she appears solid and brave, and her eyes are focused and directed into the distance with an intense, self-confident gaze. In this work, which Dix executed with playful ease and luminous, saturated colors, we encounter a femininity that has broken free from the male gaze and that, due to its surprising modernity, continues to captivate us today. [JS]