Date: 17-03-1992
Owning Institution: Tate
Publication: The Independent 1987 - 1999      
Subject:   20th Century    

It begins so promisingly. Our hero, silhouetted against a brightening dawn sky, stares boldly into his future. He is every German mother's dream, circa 1912, of how her son might turn out: granite-jawed, pure in mind and body, wearing the hiker's gear popularised by the Wandervogel movement. The young Otto Dix, painting himself in the true German style, Durer crossed with Holbein, prepares for his long passage through life. Things, however, do not go quite according to plan. The projected walk turns out to be downhill all the way.

''Otto Dix 1891-1969'', at the Tate Gallery, is not so much an exhibition as an odyssey in pictures. It tells the story of a journey which takes in Flanders during the Great War; Dresden, Berlin and Dusseldorf during the years of the Weimar Republic and the rise of the National Socialist Party; and which winds to a conclusion with Dix in exile on the shores of Lake Constance, branded as a traitor to the national interest by the Nazis, subsiding into an undistinguished old age. The quality of Dix's art, through all this, is uneven: sometimes piercing, sometimes anodyne. But as a story, ''Otto Dix'' has a lot going for it: war, sex (lots of sex) and political intrigue. And it demonstrates that he was capable, if sporadically, of living up to his own ideals. ''Artists shouldn't try to improve and convert,'' Dix said late in life, ''they're far too insignificant for that. They must only bear witness.''

This show also suggests that Dix's reputation as a radical may not have been wholly deserved or even sought by the artist himself. He is revealed as something of a traditionalist (although the uses to which he put tradition were, frequently, pretty startling), as an artist in the old northern-European mould: a painter and print-maker whose concern for precision - ''the most important question has always been whether I have come as close as possible to the thing I see'' - was uneasily allied with a virtually medieval temperament that gives all his art the flavour of allegory.

It was not for nothing that George Grosz gave him the nickname Hans Baldung Dix. For Dix, the per-ceptible world always seems to have been laden with portents, a fact which accounts for the not infrequent portentousness of his art, especially in later life, when he devoted himself to academic treatments of subjects like The Triumph of Death, or to apocalyptic landscapes in the manner of Bruegel or Altdorfer. The young Dix toyed with a variety of styles, painting experiments in the manner of Van Eyck, Van Gogh (Dix's Sunrise, of 1913, is a less than convincing version of the Dutch artist's Wheatfield with Crows) and the Symbolists. With the onset of the First World War, Dix hits on a version of the Futurist style and seems, for the first time, to become his own man. He paints and draws scenes of carnage, landscapes of confusion and affray in which bodies, bayonets and guns become jumbled, broken patterns seen through the lens of a kaleidoscope. His reputation as a pacifist, as one of the great anti-war artists of early modernism, is complicated by this exhibition, which makes it clear that Corporal Dix found war an exciting and even uplifting experience.

The Tate's catalogue reveals that he wrote enthusiastically, in the postcards he sent to his girlfriend in Dresden from the front, of a sense of being at the epicentre of vast, cataclysmic upheaval. In this, as in his imagery, Dix seems more closely allied with the artists of early Romanticism than with those of the early modern period. Like Turner strapping himself to the mast of a ship during a storm, Dix welcomed the experience of war as an opportunity to witness apocalypse at first hand. He absorbed the writings of Nietzsche with a young man's impressionability, and probably had the writer's advice in mind - ''one must have chaos within one, to give birth to a dancing star'' - when he created the whirling, exuberant pictures of the war years.

He took two books to war with him, Nietzsche and the Bible, and this may partly account for the strong sense of a dissonance between Dix's visual language and what he is saying with it - of a fundamentally reli-gious way of seeing brought to bear by an artist entirely lacking in Christian faith. Looking along a trench towards a group of barren trees on the horizon, Dix makes a drawing which, consciously or not, evokes the road to Calvary; or he draws the earth itself, cratered and pitted by shell fire, scarred by trenches and crowned with barbed wire, with the pathos that earlier artists accorded the body of Christ. Yet there are no hints, anywhere in Dix's art, of the possibility of transcendence. The intensity of Dix's better work can be said to proceed from his deployment of artistic devices derived from older traditions - although it is also true that Dix's habit of retrospection is responsible for the vanity and the stale academicism of his later art. In his great print series of the early 1920s, War - which this show suggests may amount to Dix's masterpiece - he treads squarely in the footsteps of Goya, revisiting the territory of the Spanish artist's print sequence The Disasters of War. Yet he also goes back, beyond Goya, to Goya's sources in the fantastical art of the northern European Renaissance. Dix creates, in his eerie, goggle-eyed figures of gas-masked soldiers advancing to battle, or his images of the decayed dead lying in their trenches, startling modern reincarnations of the demons, freaks and lazars of Bosch and Bruegel.

Yet Dix's art proposes no remedy, no solution, to the ills that it envisages. This is true, too, of the Dadaist collages he created shortly before embarking on the War series, appalling, blackly humorous commentaries on post-war life in the Weimar Republic: Prague Street, or Skat Players (a vitriolic parody of Cezanne's Card Players), whose protagonists are horrendously wounded war veterans who have pieced their bodies together with whatever came to hand. Dix's chosen medium here, collage, is itself the mirror of their broken, hybrid condition: part man, part machine, part scrap-heap remnant.

Dix's art is not notable for its subtlety. ''What we need for the future,'' he had written in his diary at the end of the First World War, ''is a fanatical and impassioned naturalism, a fervent, virile and unerring truthful-ness.'' Dix's only palliative for hopelessness, for the brutal truth, is a form of Nietzschean vitalism - a recognition of the fact that life, somehow, continues, that the will to survive is undaunted. This explains some of the quieter images in the War series, where, for instance, you find a bomb crater ringed with flowers; and it may also explain the peculiar, impersonal quality of the rendering of soldiers' corpses in that series, their presentation, virtually, as compost, mulching back into the land.

It accounts too for the peculiar, intense qualities of many of the lesser known paintings of the 1920s in this show. His Mother and Child of 1921 is a good example - another of his images of Christian piety dis-placed, since Dix's subjects are, really, an urban madonna and child. Backed into a street corner, framed against dark buildings whose surfaces are riddled with bullet holes, neither would seem to have much of a future. The mother is painfully skinny, her child's head swollen to the point of encephalitis. What impresses Dix is the fact that these people have made it this far. That constitutes their heroism, which is really the only kind of heroism in his art - a heroism of persistence, of survival against the odds.

There is a tremendous sense of the fragility of life in many of Dix's paintings of this time, which is communicated primarily through the painting of flesh: skin drawn tight over the bones, veins showing through. His Young Girl in Front of a Curtain is a disconcerting portrait of a naked six- or seven-year-old, whose skin is as thin, as veined and translucent, as that of a gooseberry. Dix is interested by children, but not for the usual artists' reasons: he is quite indifferent to their behaviour, their cuteness or prettiness. He paints children as mysterious, driven creatures, possessed by the simple determination to be.

His art is usually seen as a series of morbid, embittered reflections on terrible times for mankind, but the truth now seems more involved than that. His most famous images, of Twenties Berlin, with its painted whores envisaged as great sacks of overripe Rubensian flesh, actually seem less censorious than the art history textbooks would have you believe when you see them in the context of the rest of Dix's art. They are exaggerated but oddly neutral paintings: images (the best known of them is his triptych, Metropolis) of a desperate, carousing multitude, of people making whatever lives they can for themselves while time and circumstances permit.

Dix uses caricature in an unusual and original manner - not, perhaps, to criticise human animality, but to hymn it, to enhance it through exaggeration. His great fleshy whores are not, in fact, that different from his defiantly frail children, although they are at the opposite end of the life cycle, their existence threatened not by immaturity but by over-maturity. Dix's children are buds struggling to grow; his whores are fat, putrid fruit, on the verge of falling from the tree. The one element of hypocrisy, in all this, is that Dix never paints himself as the base animal he would have everyone else be: he himself, that strangely handsome artist with the superior manner, remains the aloof hero-observer.

The Tate's show cannot revise the standard opinion of Dix's later work, which seems, in the closing galleries, as poor and exhausted as its prior reputation suggested it might do. But it does suggest that his best known work may have been misinterpreted for an awfully long time. Dix has been considered, for dec-ades, as an artist whose main project was satirical; a painter who was incapable of depicting individuals or events without passing scathing judgement upon them. In fact, this show suggests that Dix hardly ever passed judgement on anyone.

Even in his famously scabrous portraiture, Dix was just as unpleasant to his friends as he was to his enemies: all his subjects are remade as sneering, snarling, boss-eyed demons of one kind or another, whether he is painting his close friend the cabaret star Anita Berber as the scarlet whore of Babylon, or his enemy the art dealer Albert Flectheim as a Shylock of the gallery world. The very democracy of Dix's carica-tural approach makes his subjects look, in fact, not reprehensible but interestingly alive: Dix paints people as though they are exotic zoological specimens, and as if his own primary intention, in this unusual project, is simply to find out what makes them tick. What Dix seems to be searching for, in his subjects, is not corruption exactly, but signs of those baser instincts - mercenariness, cupidity, greed - that mark us out, for him, as living things. There are no higher realities, in Dix, only the lower ones. But this does not, cumulatively, come across as a cause for despair. Dix, in the art he deserves to be remembered for, bears witness to life as he sees it; he registers the vital signs, beyond good or evil.