Otto Dix *

(Gera 1891–1969 Singen)
Liegender Akt auf Fell, 1932, charcoal, white chalk and pastels on paper, 98 x 144 cm, framed

This work is accompanied by a photo certificate of authenticity released by the Otto Dix Stiftung

Provenance:
Hans Brockstedt, Hamburg (label on the reverse)
Galleria Giulia, Rome
Galleria de Foscherari, Bologna
European Private Collection

Exhibited:
Paris, Les Realismes, Centre Pompidou, 17 December 1980 – 20 April 1981, exh. cat. pp. 136–137, with ill. b/w
Rome, Otto Dix acquerelli disegni incisioni, Galleria Giulia, January – February 1985, exh. cat. no. 24 with ill.
Siena, Il Segno espressionista. Beckmann, Dix, Grosz, Kollowitz, Fondazione Vacchi, 19 July – 20 October 2000

Literature:
U. Lorenz, Otto Dix. Das Werkverzeichnis der Zeichnungen und Pastelle, herausgegeben von der Otto Dix Stiftung Vaduz, VDG Weimar 2003, vol. III, p. 1435, no. 12.1.2, with ill.


“I wasn't at all interested in depicting ugliness. Everything I've ever seen is beautiful.”

Otto Dix, quoted in Diether Schmidt,
Otto Dix im Selbstbildnis, Berlin, 1981, p. 149

Liegender Akt auf Fell, painted in 1932, is an extraordinary example of Otto Dix’s ability to create some of the most intense and electrifying images of the female figure in 20th century art. A sharply realist portrait, indicative of the Neue Sachlichkeit tendency in German art of the 1920s and of the idea of nuda veritas or ‘naked truth’. Liegender Akt auf Fell belongs to a series of provocative and disturbingly realistic pictures of nude women that Otto Dix made during the last years of the Weimar Republic. Painted at a time of great uncertainty, Dix’s images of this nature are aesthetically unconventional, precisely because of his aim to portray the normally undisclosed realities of the world.