Otto Dix (December 2, 1891 - July 25, 1969) was a German expressionist and anti-war painter and a veteran of the First World War. His most famous paintings were a (1928) triptych Metropolis and Trench Warfare (1932).

Otto Dix was born in Untermhaus, Germany, now a part of the city of Gera. In 1910, he entered the Dresden School of Arts and Crafts and supported himself as a portrait painter.

When the First World War erupted, Dix enthusiastically volunteered for the German Army. He was taken to a field artillery regiment in Dresden. In the fall of 1915 he was assigned as a non-commissioned officer of a machine-gun unit in the Western front and took part of the Battle of the Somme. He was seriously wounded several times. In 1917, his unit was transferred to the Eastern front until the end of hostilities with Russia. Back in the western front, he fought in the German Spring offensive. He earned the Iron Cross and reached the rank of vice-sergeant-major.

More on [ Otto Dix ]

AmArt Latest Issue

Volume 21, number 2: Emerging Themes, Emerging Voices
Mills Mon, 30 Jul 2007 16:33:05 -0500

Volume 21, number 2: Considering the Copy
Moss Mon, 30 Jul 2007 16:33:05 -0500

Volume 21, number 2: Beyond English
LaFountain Mon, 30 Jul 2007 16:33:05 -0500

Volume 21, number 2: Collapsing Boundaries
Bailly Mon, 30 Jul 2007 16:33:05 -0500

Volume 21, number 2: Objects, Contexts, and the Space Between
Jordan Mon, 30 Jul 2007 16:33:05 -0500

Volume 21, number 2: Copley's Cargo
Roberts Mon, 30 Jul 2007 16:33:05 -0500
In 1765, John Singleton Copley sent his painting Henry Pelham (Boy with a Squirrel) from Boston to London in hopes of receiving feedback from the arbiters of academic aesthetics. Several months later, he received the welcome news that Sir Joshua Reynolds had called the painting "wonderfull." In virtually every scholarly narrative of early American art, Boy with a Squirrel derives its canonical significance from this famous transatlantic relay. But the most basic reality of that relay–the massive fact of the Atlantic Ocean standing between Copley and his interlocutors–has barely been registered in the scholarship.This essay interprets Boy with a Squirrel in terms of the difficulty and delicacy of its transatlantic transmission. I argue that Copley, as he attempted to create a painting that would have the necessary transitive qualities, drew from an array of familiar discourses of Atlantic exchange and transport. The painting's profile format evoked strategies of numismatic exchange. The precise representation of the flying squirrel tapped into well-established transatlantic natural history circuits. The spatial transformations of the composition echoed not only empiricist theories of sensory conveyance (especially the writings of George Berkeley), but also mirrored the workaday dynamics of the shipping and reassembly of transatlantic commodities. Copley, like many other colonial artists, worked in a global community governed by distance, difference, and delay. By attending to the vehicular context of Boy with a Squirrel, we can begin to understand his strategies for articulating–and navigating–that new global space.

Subscribe to Art_History RSS feed