  |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Data |
|
Catalogue Text |
|
Biography |
|
Zoom |
|
|
Otto Dix was one of the leading artists of the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), the classicising movement which brought together a diverse group of German artists around 1925 with the aim of breaking away from Expressionism through a new objective figuration. The movement can be seen within the context of the return to order evident in art throughout Europe in the 1920s and was promoted by the very artists who had been pioneers of the avant garde a few years earlier. Dix gradually recovered from the horrors of the war which had so tormented him and, impelled by the pessimistic belief that art was no longer capable of changing society, modified the critical tone and revolutionary beliefs of his Dadaist period to the taste of the new bourgeoisie, whom he had previously so mordantly criticised. During this period the renewed emphasis on the human image brought with it the revival of portraiture, the genre in which Dix produced his most significant work during these years.
This portrait of Hugo Erfurth was painted shortly after Dix arrived in Berlin in 1926. The sitter, whom Dix had already painted the previous year with a photographic lens in his hands, had gained a reputation as a society photographer. Dix paints him here with his huge dog and not with one of the tools of his trade, thus indicating the high status which Erfurth had attained as a photographer. As did Erfurth as a photographer, Dix as a painter left behind an unrivalled gallery of portraits of the bourgeoisie and the intellectual circle of the Romansiches Cafe, at that point the centre of bohemian culture in Berlin. His paintings of the ballerina Anita Berber, the journalist Sylvia von Harden, the abstract art dealer Alfred Flechtheim and the poet Ivar von Lücken, are images which have become fixed forever on our collective memory as the portrait of an era.
Furthermore, as Peter Vergo explained (1992), it is important to note that Dix's return to portraiture was accompanied by the intention to revive the technique of the great German Renaissance painters (Dürer, Cranach and Baldung Grien), described in Max Doerner's book The Materials of Painting published in 1921. For this reason Grosz wittily dubbed Dix "Hans Baldung Dix."
From 1925 Dix almost always painted on panel, at times also using a mixed technique of tempera and oil. His very signature, a serpent entwined with a bow and arrow, is a homage to Cranach who signed his works with a small winged dragon. Vergo relates how Dix followed Doerner's instructions in his book when he painted the present painting: first he made a life size sketch on paper (now in the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett), in which he worked out the two figures with pencil and white chalk; the image was then transferred to the panel, which Dix carefully painted with an emulsion of egg tempera; finally he made the finishing touches with an oil glaze.
In this portrait of 1926, as with his earlier one of the same sitter of 1925 and the preparatory drawings for both, Dix particularly concentrated on the treatment of the face and the hands, achieving a high degree of physical likeness with great emphasis on the details. While the 1925 portrait had shown Erfurth full face, in the present work he is shown three quarters seated in a chair-leaning his hand on its arm-next to his Alsatian dog. The dog is shown as alert with his ears pricked and his huge tongue out, in contrast to its owner, whose is portrayed in a calmer pose whose immobility and introspection give Erfurth a very static appearance. Dix achieves the impression of a frozen image through his concentration on objective fact, intensifying it through his hyper realistic depiction of the details, which, with unusual precision, reveal more of the sitter than his mere appearance.
Paloma Alarcó
|
|
|
