Otto Dix

"..it become a lightning rod the following winter when Paul F. Schmidt purchased it for the Dresden Museum. Later when Hitler came to power, it was seized and displayed in the Nazi's Degenerate Art exhibition. It was captioned, "Slander against the German Heroes of the World War".. .In this painting, Dix leaves no one unscathed. He damns the military for butchering his generation, the public for its fascination with these reconstituted men and the cripples themselves for their undiminished national pride.. .It's location is currently unknown and it is presumed destroyed."

"I'm a man who is concerned with reality. I have to see everything. I have to plumb the depths of life. And so I go to war. That's why I volunteered [in the German army]. And when I tell people that nowadays, they say, "Good grief, so Dix was an out-and-out militarist! How does that fit together? He painted a war picture that was so frightful, so horrific, and now he says he was a militarist?" Yes, that's just it! What I said was: "If you want to be a hero, you have to see this whole mess and still say yes to it."

"I had to experience how someone beside me suddenly falls over and is dead and the bullet has hit him squarely. I had to experience that quite directly. I wanted it. I'm therefore not a pacifist at all – or am I? Perhaps I was an inquisitive person. I had to see all that for myself. I’m such a realist, you know, that I have to see everything with my own eyes in order to confirm that it's like that. I have to experience all the ghastly, bottomless depths of life for myself; it's for that reason that I went to war, and for that reason I volunteered. [in the German army during world War 1. (1914-1918)]"

"During the war, Dix kept a diary and a sketchbook with which he chronicled his experience. They would provide material for a major work of fifty prints called simply, The War. Dix was profoundly affected by the war. He described a recurring nightmare in which he crawled through bombed out houses. His experience with war and its aftermath became a dominant theme in the art he produced after 1914."

"War too, must be seen as a natural occurrence."

"Lice, rats, barbed wire, fleas, shells, bombs, caves, corpses, blood, liquor, mice, cats, gas, artillery, filth, bullets, mortars, fire, steel: that is what war is! It is all the work of the Devil!"

"My nerves fell apart before I saw the front this time, the decaying corpses and piercing wire; for a while, they made me harmless, locking me up in order to undertake a special diagnosis of whatever military ability I might still have. The nerves, every last fiber, repugnance, repulsion!"

"If I can't be famous, I want at least to be infamous."

"RADIO – DADA DIX whose monumental painting 'Barricade' [now lost] created such a sensation in Dresden"

"Nobody wants to look at it. What is it all supposed to mean.. ..the old whores and the old, worn out women, and of life is cares?. .It doesn't make anybody happy. No gallery wants to exhibit it.[ his work]. Why do you even bother to paint it."

"[..it had been fun] to be able to draw in the midst of boredom and misery.."

"I had the feeling that there was a dimension of reality that had not been dealt with in art: the dimension of ugliness."

"After Herberholz had shown me all sorts of techniques, I suddenly got very interested in etching. I had a lot to say, I had a subject. Wash off the acid, put on the aquatint: a wonderful technique that you can use to get as many different shades and tones as you want. The 'doing' aspect of art becomes tremendously interesting when you start doing etchings; you get to be a real alchemist."

"Ich werde mich an den Sünden und Tugenden meiner Vorfahren rächen."

"Die dritte Person bei einem Gespräch ist der Kork, der verhindert, daß das Gespräch in die Tiefe geht."

"Auch den Krieg muß man als ein Naturereignis betrachten."