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Lot Essay
Älteres Liebespaar is one of the finest of an extensive series of deliberately grotesque, 'Verist' watercolours that Otto Dix made in the early 1920s at the height of Germany's 'Inflation Years' when hyper-inflation, in the wake of the First World War, had crippled the country and brought polite society to its knees. Dix, like many artists, during this difficult period when the materials needed for oil painting were both difficult and expensive to source, had turned to the medium of watercolour and soon came to be recognised as one of the leading masters of the medium.
The many watercolours that Dix produced between 1922 and 1923 today form one of the artist's most important bodies of work. It is these, for example, that most strongly characterise the development of his painting out of the exaggerated Dadaist satire of the immediate post-war period and into the shockingly perceptive Verist style of portraiture that was to distinguish his best-known work of the 1920s. With its disturbingly accurate portrayal of a grotesque pair of aging lovers canoodling on a couch in the midst of a lovingly detailed Biedermeier interior, Älteres Liebespaar is a well-known and particularly accomplished case in point.
The term 'Verism' that was given to the work of artists such as George Grosz, Max Beckmann and Otto Dix in the early 1920s applies to the intentionally ugly form of realism that formed a major part of the emerging Neue Sachlichkeit tendency in Germany in the aftermath of the world war. Often tinted with a strong sense of moralising and/or social criticism, Verism also served as a powerful realist counter to the colourful, exaggerated and inward-looking excess of earlier Expressionism.
For Dix, a veteran of the war who had served as a machine-gunner on both its Eastern and Western fronts, realism was an affirming of the way things really are. 'You cannot paint indignation', he declared, 'you have to be able to affirm – affirm the expressions of humanity that are there and always will be' (Otto Dix, quoted in F. Löffler Otto Dix: Life and Work, New York, 1982, pp. 69-70). As a guide in this direction Dix often looked back to the eternal truths articulated by Old Masters painters, in particular German masters such as Hans Baldung Grien and Lucas Cranach. These were two figures whose penchant for depicting the theme of unequal and aging lovers undoubtedly informs such works as Älteres Liebespaar as well Dix's oil painting on this theme: Altes Liebespaar in the Nationalgalerie, Berlin and Ungleiches Liebespaar in the Galerie der Stadt, Stuttgart.
The eternal truth that Dix persistently asserted was the one that he had learned from Nietzsche: that life was little more, in essence, than an endless and recurrent battle between the twin elemental forces of Eros (sex) and Thanatos (death). It is the articulation of this endless and elemental struggle – one which Dix had personally witnessed raw and unleashed during the war and which he then continued to recognise still functioning beneath the veneer of polite society in the years following - that underpins almost all his pictures of the 1920s. This is very much the case also in Älteres Liebespaar, where its pair of unequal lovers and their aging, decrepit and decaying bodies are visibly shown to be still pulsing with erotic desire. By way of social commentary, Dix sets this ugly truth against the contrastingly shallow lie of the surface décor of the aging couple's Biedemeier apartment. 'I wasn't at all interested in depicting ugliness', Dix said of such paintings, 'Everything I've ever seen is beautiful' (Otto Dix, quoted in D. Schmidt, Otto Dix im Selbstbildnis, Berlin, 1981, p. 149).
The many watercolours that Dix produced between 1922 and 1923 today form one of the artist's most important bodies of work. It is these, for example, that most strongly characterise the development of his painting out of the exaggerated Dadaist satire of the immediate post-war period and into the shockingly perceptive Verist style of portraiture that was to distinguish his best-known work of the 1920s. With its disturbingly accurate portrayal of a grotesque pair of aging lovers canoodling on a couch in the midst of a lovingly detailed Biedermeier interior, Älteres Liebespaar is a well-known and particularly accomplished case in point.
The term 'Verism' that was given to the work of artists such as George Grosz, Max Beckmann and Otto Dix in the early 1920s applies to the intentionally ugly form of realism that formed a major part of the emerging Neue Sachlichkeit tendency in Germany in the aftermath of the world war. Often tinted with a strong sense of moralising and/or social criticism, Verism also served as a powerful realist counter to the colourful, exaggerated and inward-looking excess of earlier Expressionism.
For Dix, a veteran of the war who had served as a machine-gunner on both its Eastern and Western fronts, realism was an affirming of the way things really are. 'You cannot paint indignation', he declared, 'you have to be able to affirm – affirm the expressions of humanity that are there and always will be' (Otto Dix, quoted in F. Löffler Otto Dix: Life and Work, New York, 1982, pp. 69-70). As a guide in this direction Dix often looked back to the eternal truths articulated by Old Masters painters, in particular German masters such as Hans Baldung Grien and Lucas Cranach. These were two figures whose penchant for depicting the theme of unequal and aging lovers undoubtedly informs such works as Älteres Liebespaar as well Dix's oil painting on this theme: Altes Liebespaar in the Nationalgalerie, Berlin and Ungleiches Liebespaar in the Galerie der Stadt, Stuttgart.
The eternal truth that Dix persistently asserted was the one that he had learned from Nietzsche: that life was little more, in essence, than an endless and recurrent battle between the twin elemental forces of Eros (sex) and Thanatos (death). It is the articulation of this endless and elemental struggle – one which Dix had personally witnessed raw and unleashed during the war and which he then continued to recognise still functioning beneath the veneer of polite society in the years following - that underpins almost all his pictures of the 1920s. This is very much the case also in Älteres Liebespaar, where its pair of unequal lovers and their aging, decrepit and decaying bodies are visibly shown to be still pulsing with erotic desire. By way of social commentary, Dix sets this ugly truth against the contrastingly shallow lie of the surface décor of the aging couple's Biedemeier apartment. 'I wasn't at all interested in depicting ugliness', Dix said of such paintings, 'Everything I've ever seen is beautiful' (Otto Dix, quoted in D. Schmidt, Otto Dix im Selbstbildnis, Berlin, 1981, p. 149).