(b Untermhaus, Thuringia, 2 Dec. 1891; d Singen, 25 July 1969). German painter and printmaker. In the 1920s he was, with George Grosz, the outstanding artist of the Neue Sachlichkeit movement, his work conveying his disillusionment and disgust at the horrors of war and the depravities of a decadent society with complete psychological truth and devastating emotional effect. The Match Seller (1920, Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart), for example, is a pitiless depiction of indifference to suffering, showing passers-by ignoring a blind and limbless ex-soldier begging in the street, and Dix's fifty etchings entitled The War (1924) have been described by George Heard Hamilton (Painting and Sculpture in Europe: 1880–1940, 1967) as ‘perhaps the most powerful as well as the most unpleasant anti-war statements in modern art’.

Text source: The Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (Oxford University Press)


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