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Otto Dix was a German artist
who served in World War I until the bitter end.
He came back looking with
absolute
hatred and
sarcasm at the world around him,
and he could not loosen that vengeance on landscape or still life,
but he turned to depict human beings. This is a relatively early painting, only 1921, a commission
by a Dresden businessman called Max Roesberg. Otto Dix
portrayed him in a provincial kind of office.
It’s green and
black and
brown, the colors of money.
On the right is this rip-off calendar
of a machine company, because he himself was
a businessman for machine parts. He
holds a prospectus, and it’s in pink because
that was the cheap paper used during the inflation. The clock says
it’s 1:32, it means this man can only pose in his lunch hour.
And the only whiff of cosmopolitan air is that telephone.
It’s the latest model and it sits there very prominently.
Beyond is a letter addressed to Otto Dix, so the whole thing is a
wonderful sense of caricature. Dix
always aged his models at least twenty to thirty years.
That brown, round clock echoes the
dark complexion of this poor sitter, who was all of thirty-five.
He is slight, he has very narrow shoulders, and he stands there very
wooden, like a well-behaved schoolboy at his desk. Roesberg himself was apparently
a gentle, kindly man who liked puns,
and he collected the work of young Dresden artists. Later,
Dix did not accept commissions because he wanted
to capture what he saw as the essence of a person,
no matter how negative. He
had such a clinical, nearly satirist viewpoint.
Everything is outlined
and in sharp focus. It is an interesting picture.
It’s a document of the time, of the people
who lived during the Weimar Republic, that very fraught
period. Roesberg was Jewish,
and in 1939 had to leave Germany. Otto Dix’s
portraits are such a truthful mirror of this glittering,
doomed society. Roesberg is one of this cast of characters.
