After expressionist, futurist and Dadaist beginnings in Otto Dix’s artistic work, a noticeable formal calmness emerged around 1921. The artist developed his own unique critical realism, combining old master techniques with biting social criticism, and became one of the most important protagonists of New Objectivity. Immediately after the National Socialists came to power, he was the first German artist to be dismissed from his professorship at the academy in Dresden. He fled with his family to Hemmenhofen on Lake Constance and withdrew into internal emigration in the rural surroundings. Having lost his most important source of inspiration, the milieu of the big city, he now mainly produced landscape paintings, executed in the elaborate glazing technique of old German panel painting. In these compositions, created in his studio, Dix reflected on current political events with the help of menacing forces of nature.
The collection presentation focuses on Dix’s landscape paintings from between 1933 and 1945. The exhibition is complemented by New Objectivity paintings by Otto Dix, Karl Hubbuch, Georg Schrimpf, Max Peiffer-Watenphul and Gustav Wunderwald.
