Fame by Installments

The catalogue of the "degenerate art'' show put on by Nazi Propagandist Joseph Goebbels in 1937 has, with predictable irony, become a handy checklist of great modern German artists--Lehmbruck, Barlach, Kirchner, Grosz, Nolde, Ernst. But one artist, Otto Dix, who was considered so crass that no fewer than 16 of his works were hung in the show, is only now getting recognition commensurate with that backhanded accolade. Berlin and Darmstadt have seen comprehensive Dix exhibitions in the past couple of years, and his current show in Stuttgart is drawing praise from critics all over Germany.

Disasters of War. Dix's new renown is his second installment of fame. He had a burst of popularity in the early '20s. and the Stuttgart exhibition, with 115 graphics made between 1911 and 1928, shows why. Most of them are scenes of World War I, sketched with a fury on plain brown wrapping paper. Their strident picturing of cavernous shell craters, socket-eyed cadavers, skull-like gas masks. bloody vines of barbed wire and battered nerves has much the same pitiless sting as Goya's gruesome series of etchings. The Disasters of the War. Man's shreds of nobility as well as his flesh rot away into humus. A flower casually grows through the clenched hand of a corpse, petals sprout from his chest.

Dix had been a machine gunner in the war, and his drawings did to war-weary Germans what Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front did in words. By 1923, he had sold an enormous triptych, Trench, to the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne for 10,000 gold marks, or nearly $3,000. Carrying on as lance bearer of the Neue Sachlichkeit (the New Objectivity), Dix went on to influence Max Beckmann and Georg Grosz with his sharp-edged, magical realism that applied the techniques of the old masters to the social misery of the anarchic Weimar Republic. With Hitler's rise, Dix was ousted from his professorship in art at the Academy of Art in Dresden, forbidden to paint, finally pressed into the potbellied Volks-sturm, a sort of last-ditch militia. He was captured by the French while snoozing in the sun one spring afternoon.

The French treated P.W. Dix thoughtfully, supplying him with paints to do altarpieces for their barracks chapel. Freed in 1946, Dix retreated into the Biblical subject matter that has preoccupied him for the past decade. "With a Madonna, everybody understands what you're saying." he thought. Critics dismissed these works as oldfashioned, although there is little piety to his garishly colored, grotesque Biblical scenes. Their raw outlines, squeezed from tubes, and their hacked surfaces betray the same tortured view of man as his early drawings.

Beauty in Ugliness. Today Dix lives on the idyllic, alpine shore of Lake Constance in a house whose walls shelter the bulk of his works. "I considered them so important that I didn't want to sell them," he explains. At 72. wispy, wiry Dix no longer paints. "I feel I don't have to say that much any more. There comes a time when one has to look back." His summation: "Nietzsche told me that there's beauty in ugliness. That is what has intrigued me all my life."

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