Otto Dix - Hockender weiblicher Akt - image-1

Lot 374 R

Otto Dix - Hockender weiblicher Akt

Auction 1070 - overview Cologne
03.06.2016, 18:00 - Modern Art
Estimate: 22.000 € - 25.000 €
Result: 34.720 € (incl. premium)

Otto Dix

Hockender weiblicher Akt
1932

Charcoal and gouache on light card with blind embossing "KATASTRON" 57.7 x 47.3 cm Framed under glass. Signed and dated 'DIX 1932' with artist's signum lower right. - The card slightly irregularly cut and with a faint light stain in right margin. Some brownish foxing and a few drawing pin traces.

Otto Dix's obsessive interest in human existence predestined him to become a portrait painter. With a sharp eye, he explores the essential nature of his sitters through their distortion - relentlessly, but never pitilessly. Dix's portraits present people seen through the eyes of the artist. He stylises them into the realm of the grotesquely expressive and, with his veristic gaze, he eliminates all those aestheticist and sentimentalist elements from the image which could serve a consoling, edifying or beautifying function.
The present work from the early 1930s comes from a period in his oeuvre defined by great creative power. At that time the artist occupied himself intensively with the female nude, in which the yearning for sensual beauty is constantly confronted with a deformed human existence. At the same time his drawn works take on features that are directly reminiscent of the Old Masters. “Every means is used to work towards a painterly and material valorisation of the drawing into an autonomous work: combinations of drawing media on coloured papers or on drawing paper coated with a white or coloured ground, setting accents by means of richly nuanced heightening in chalk and particularly in white body colour with narrow and broader brushed textures, a whole 'palette' of lineation from the gossamer delicacy of silverpoint outlines to the sweeps of the stump in charcoal passages, and finally hatching which ranges from the extremely flexible to the ornamental, not infrequently citing the distinctive 'curling' of the Old Masters.” (Ulrike Lorenz, Das altmeisterliche Aktporträt [1930-1933], in: Otto Dix, Das Werkverzeichnis der Zeichnungen und Pastelle, vol. III, p. 1429)

Catalogue Raisonné

Lorenz III, NSK 12.2.24

Provenance

Collection Josef Haubrich, Cologne