Lot 327 D

“The landscapes of Dix do not provide a reproduction, but rather a concentration and intensification of reality. This occurs in diverse ways: through the arrangement of details, through the omission of individual passages, through the extreme emphasis placed on the most important points and through the renunciation of an embedding within the enveloping atmosphere that was so important to Impressionism. As the years passed, the landscape paintings of Dix also began to make use of the formal heritage of the Baroque, alongside characteristic stylistic elements of the Master of the Danube School. Thus, the picture plane is shifted and the landscape seen from a half bird's-eye view, which permits it to attain a greater layering of planes in depth. Remarkably, the figural artist Dix opted not to include any staffage figures in those years. [...] In late 1936 Dix moved to Hemmenhofen, a village on the banks of the Untersee, on the Höri peninsula not far from Radolfzell. This put an end to the motifs from Hegau, and they were replaced by lake landscapes until 1944.” (Fritz Löffler, Otto Dix, Leben und Werk, Dresden 1977, pp. 103 f.).
Dix very consciously selected motifs of great spatial breadth and depth because the meteorological and topographical situation could be particularly effectively represented by means of his technique of layered glazes. Weiler is a small community on the Höri peninsula, next to where Lake Constance flows out to the west, and it is surrounded by the Zellersee and the Rhine flowing towards Schaffhausen. The viewer's gaze stretches inland, above the roofs of Weiler and towards Bettnang and Bankholzen, and to the left towards the Schiener mountain as well as the Rhine valley located in the distance.