Life is life, and art is art.
""It is my wish to come very close, strikingly
close, to the times in which we live, without submitting to
artistic dogma...I need the connection to the world of senses, the
courage to portray ugliness, life as it comes."" - Otto Dix
In the 1920s, Otto Dix was the artist of
Neue Sachlichkeit, the New Objectivity, par excellence. Painting in
a very realistic, almost photographic style, he chose as subjects
the poverty, violence, death, and war that he experienced as a
soldier in World War I. After this terrible experience, he painted
the famous triptych "The War."
Dix staged the world as a play, a grotesque
farce. But the form he chose to do so was based on the classical
canon of beauty. Dix lived his life and served art, for he adhered
to the age-old rule that the American painter Ad Reinhardt put in a
nutshell: "Life is life, and art is art."