Exhibition of printmaker Otto Dix’s works at ‘Social Criticism and War’

The exhibition opened with an introduction to Dix and the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) movement in German art, by cultural theorist, curator and art critic, Nancy Adajania on 9 August 2018.

Known as one of the greatest realist painters of the twentieth century, Dix is known for his involvement in the Neue Sachlichkeit movement that swept German art between the two world wars and ended with the rise of Hitler and the beginning of the Second World War. Dix was one of the first professors removed from his posting at the Kunstakademie in Dresden by the Nazis in their attempt to sanitize German culture before the Second War. The exhibition features prints that speak about the realities of the First World War and the subsequent disillusionment in the German society.

In her presentation on Otto Dix’s nerve-wracking paintings and prints made in the aftermath of World War I, Nancy Adajania parsed the meaning of realism as proposed by the Neue Sachlichkeit movement, whose beginning coincided with the birth of the Weimar republic.

Dix’s work bears testimony to the radical uncertainty unleashed by war and the grotesque savaging of the status quo – puny soldiers armed with prostheses reduced to begging, ravaged prostitutes stricken by syphilis – and everywhere grinding poverty and the humiliation brought about by the Treaty of Versailles and runaway inflation.

The presentation was composed in Schnitte, or cuts, to mirror the fragmentation and disorientation caused by war with images culled from art history, politics, cinema and photography.

There were three Schnitte – reflections on such images as Kathe Kollwitz’s ‘Mother with Dead Child’ (1903), Dix’s ‘Die Irrsinnige von St. Marie-a-Py (1924) and the photographs of murdered Syrian children.

The exhibition will continue till 30 September 2018. For more information, and high resolution images, please write to phalguni.desai@goethe.de or call us at 022-22027542 (ext 103).

Available at

Gallery MMB,

Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan, Mumbai

Monday – Saturday 11 am to 7 pm (except public holidays)