After Two Wars

Otto Dix is a German painter. He likes to growl, "I'm not so tender." And in pre-Hitler Germany he showed what he meant: cynical portraits of German prostitutes and socialites, gruesome oils and etchings of World War I. The Nazis didn't like the Dix kind of thing at all; they considered his powerful paintings deliberately calculated to spread despondency and alarm. They labeled him an "artistic degenerate," kicked him out of his art professorship at the University of Dresden, and destroyed all the Dix pictures they could lay hands on. Dix retreated to a German village on the shores of Lake Constance and kept on painting.

Last week in Munich, Painter Dix's stubbornness was rewarded by a big retrospective show in honor of his 60th birthday. While the Nazis and World War II had not stopped his painting, they had radically changed its style. Under "permanent observation" by the Nazis, Dix dropped his brutal social criticism and took to noncommittal expressionist landscapes filled with bright colors and bold patterns. He found life on Lake Constance "idyllic, probably too idyllic."

The idyl was interrupted for a while in 1944. At 53, ex-Soldier Dix was drafted into the Volkssturm for the last-ditch defense of the Reich. But his World War II service was brief and painless. "I was with my squad of ten other men near a little town on the Rhine. We were posted in a field. It was a warm spring afternoon. We all lay down in the grass and went to sleep The next thing we knew, there were some French African troops standing over us with machine guns in their hands. We just did what they told us."

At the French P.W. camp, Dix was told to paint an altarpiece for the camp chapel. The camp commander liked the painting so well that he appropriated it for his private collection, and told the prisoner to paint another for the chapel. Dix became seriously interested in religious art. After he was released, he refused a Russian offer of his old professorship at Dresden and returned to Lake Constance.

In last week's show, critics found his new religious paintings the most impressive. And Dix agrees. Now he confesses: "Even as a young artist I had a longing to paint religious motives, not because I am a religious man but because the motives are so universal. With a Madonna, everybody understands what you're saying "

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