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Picture book by German painter Otto Dix on display for the first time
A picture book featuring 14 watercolours, painted by Otto Dix in 1925 for his five-year-old stepdaughter Hana Koch, is on display for the first time at a German gallery through December 22nd.
A picture book featuring 14 watercolours, painted by Otto Dix in 1925 for his five-year-old stepdaughter Hana Koch, is on display for the first time at a German gallery through December 22nd.
While five picture books produced by Dix — for his three children, stepson and granddaughter, respectively — are publicly known, the Dusseldorf-based Galerie Remmert und Barth is currently displaying the never-before-seen Picture Book for Hana (Bilderbuch für Hana) that the artist created for his step-daughter, Hana (the offspring of Dix’s wife Martha from her first marriage to a Dusseldorf doctor, Hans Koch). She had, until now, kept the book private in her home in Bavaria.
“Twenty years ago, Hana showed us one page, so we knew it was there,” Herbert Remmert of the Dusseldorf Galerie Remmert und Barth told The Art Newspaper.
After Hana’s death, her daughter Olga gave the gallery permission to display the book, along with several other confidentially kept watercolors and drawings by Dix — notably a portrait of Hana, a drawing of Dix’s mother and a watercolour of an elderly woman.
The illustrations feature mythical and biblical figures, almost phantasmagoric, painted in vivid hues with giddy strokes. Recognizable tropes include St. George fighting a dragon, St. Christopher, Jonah and the whale, and David and Goliath. The book also addresses the Seven Deadly Sins, which Dix would later paint as an allegory of Germany under the Nazi regime in 1933.
Dix (1891-1969) was a painter and printmaker known for his unsparing depictions of Weimar society and the bleakness of war and its aftermath. He was associated with the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) movement of the 1920s: a group of artists including George Grosz, Max Beckmann, Rudolf Schlichter and others, whose sober view on the world staunchly rejected notions of romantic idealism.
One famous Dix painting, Metropolis (1928), is a louche triptych of the Weimar Republic peppered with disillusioned prostitutes, crippled wartime veterans and brightly outfitted dancers. In his Portrait of the Journalist Sylvia von Harden (1926), a smoking, plaid-clad figure with a monocle and a clenched jaw ignores conventions of gendered behaviour.
In addition to Dix, the Galerie Remmert und Barth also represents Polish-Jewish painter and printmaker Jankel Adler, German Expressionist painter Walter Gramatté, German Dada artist Hannah Höch, German painter, printmaker, and sculptor Otto Pankok, and painter Adalbert Trillhaase — whom Dix painted in 1923, titled Die Familie des Malers Adalbert Trillhaase.
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