Otto

The art of Otto Dix is not to be taken lightly; in the exhibition just coming to an end at the Musée des Beaux Arts in Montreal, which we visited on New Year's Eve, it wasn't.

This artist refused to add "pretentious," explanatory notes to his creations. "Those who have eyes to see, look!" he said. "You'll grasp at a glance that my paintings contain the most accurate information, such as you'll not find in our time." That is to say, his pictures conveyed ideas that were not conveyable in words. And when we see them we are too horror-struck for words ourselves, because his subjects are the victims of war and what war brings in its wake, "all the ghastly, bottomless depths of life."

So why did he dwell on such things? The answers are obvious. The first reason was that as a young man Dix was inquisitive. He went to war, the First World War, because he wanted to see it for himself, to "confirm" that it was as he imagined. No doubt it was far worse than he had imagined, and afterwards he came out with his second reason for drawing and painting those Goya-like nightmares: "All art is exorcism."

Not only did he draw exactly what he saw in the trenches, some of it in full colour, he also did a grinning, vampiric self-portrait in those days, so he was under no illusion about the predatory nature of his art. The titles give some idea of the hideous subject matter: Human Intestines. Soldier and Nun. Wounded Veteran. A typical shocker depicted a prostitute with a wounded man with half his face shot away.

The war fizzled out in the end, but the surviving victims remained at large, and Dix didn't stop putting them into his images: the widows, the half-starving working class children, the limbless veterans playing games of skat (for example). This is what the Nazi generation objected to. They called his art "degenerate," entartete Kunst, and in the 1930s they banned it for being an insult to German "war heroes". Dix had dared to caricature the disabled and portray them as freaks, like the oddities people would laugh at in circuses; he did a series of circus sketches in the 1920s too, reminiscent of Toulouse-Lautrec. The black and white films of the day, such as the famous Der blaue Engel (we have the video at home but I don't often feel strong enough to watch it) based on the Heinrich Mann novella Professor Unrat (I have that on the shelf, too!), were produced in the same fashion. Unhealthy, yes, very, but true to life. Hamburg (the St Pauli docks in particular) and Berlin in the 20's and 30's were not healthy places. The exhibition also drew parallels with Wedekind's Lulu and Brecht's Threepenny Opera, the misery of prostitutes and their customers being a trendy theme in those days. Dix was by then a man about town, acting the part of a Berlin dandy, sporting the nickname of Jimmy, when underneath he wasn't like that at all; in reality he was an "unshakable proletarian" with a tender heart, as the occasional, astonishingly gentle portrayals of his wife and children clearly show.

A clever and revealing painting was a Still Life with Widow's Veil from 1925: a mask hangs on the wall, the face of Dix' sister, apparently, and on the left is a black veil hanging on a skeleton human spine, with a vase of black lilies in the foreground sitting on a piece of cloth full of suggestive folds and shadows. From the exhibitions of 1925 and 1926 were several large portraits, one a sad, beautifully executed one of an emaciated poet (Iwar von Lücken) in a frayed suit, with a perfect rose in a beer bottle standing on a chair beside him. This man later starved to death in Paris. Dix paid lip service to Dada but was considered too much of a "brutal realist" to be truly representative of that movement. He classed himself as a leader of the Neue Sachlichkeit movement. The Nazis had him dismissed from his post at the Dresden academy, whereafter he was no longer allowed to exhibit, although several of his works—doomed to be destroyed—appeared in the infamous 1937 exhibition of Degenerate Art.

He went into self-imposed exile on the Swiss border by Lake Constance, no doubt in order to protect his wife and three children, and the last galleries were full of surprises: lavish landscapes painted in a neo-Renaissance or neo-Romantic style, such as The Enchanted Forest (1942). But it is his horrific ones that stick in the mind.