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

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 World War I|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 (1916)|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.

Dix was profoundly affected by the sights of the
war. He would later tell about his recurring
nightmare where he was crawling through destroyed
houses. He produced a series of drawings and
prints that reflected that traumatic period.

In the Weimar Republic Dix studied at the Dresden
Art Academy, became a founder of the Dresden
Secession, and was a contributor to the Neue
Sachlichkeit exhibition in Berlin in 1925. His
paintings became his expression of the bleaker
side of life, especially war. He used realistic
pictures of disfigured soldiers as his model. His
1923 painting The Trench, which depicted
dismembered and decomposed bodies of soldiers in a
trench after a battle caused such a furor that the
Wallraf-Richartz Museum hid the painting behind a
curtain. In 1925 the then-mayor of Cologne, Konrad
Adenauer, cancelled the purchase of the painting
and forced the director of the museum to resign.

Like the work of his friend and fellow veteran
George Grosz, Dix's material was extremely
critical of contemporary German society and often
dwelled on the act of Lustmord, or sexual murder.
Dix's postwar depictions of soldiers and veterans
very clearly illustrates their invisibility within
contemporary German society, a concept also
developed in Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on
the Western Front.

When the Nazis came to power in Germany, they
regarded Dix as a degenerate artist and had him
sacked from his post as an art teacher at the
Dresden Academy. He later moved to Lake Constance.
Dix's paintings The Trench and War cripples were
exhibited in the Nazi exhibition of degenerate
art, Entartete Kunst. They were later burned. 

Dix was forced to join the Nazi-controlled
Imperial chamber of Fine Arts in order to be able
to work as an artist at all and had to promise to
paint only landscapes. He still painted an
occasional allegorical painting that criticized
Nazi ideals. In 1939 he was arrested on a
trumped-up charge of being involved in a plot
against Hitler but was later released.

During World War II Dix was conscripted into the
Volkssturm. He was captured by French troops at
the end of the war and released in February 1946. 

Dix eventually returned to Dresden. After the war
most of his paintings were religious
allegory|allegories or depictions of post-war
suffering.

Otto Dix died in Singen, Germany, in 1969.