Lot 90 D

It is indisputable that the paintings Otto Dix created in the 1930s and 1940s, during his withdrawal into a so-called “inner immigration”, must be acknowledged as a second, though entirely dissimilar, pinnacle in the artist's painted body of work. In order to escape the Nazis' attention and surveillance, Dix moved to the Lake Constance area just weeks after his forced dismissal from his teaching position at the Dresden Academy, and he concentrated completely on painting landscapes and portraits. At the same time, he immersed himself in the study of medieval art, specifically that of the so-called Danube School, and he learned to expertly master their demanding technique. The extremely sound craftsmanship of execution - with its graphic precision, which permits nothing vague or approximate - as well as that harmonious colouring with which the pictures of the 1920s had already been painted were now also joined by a lucidity and a luminosity in their colours, which was achieved by means of the historical wash technique of the medieval masters and provided the paintings with the same power and magnificence that had already characterised the creations of Altdorfer, Cranach and Baldung-Grien.
From an elevated vantage point the viewer's gaze wanders across the fields, with their fully matured corn and lush meadows, to the little inlet of Lake Constance and on to the distant Steckborn, lying opposite Gaienhofen, on the Swiss side. The large size of the objects viewed on the near shore is perspectivally out of balance with the smallness of the townscape - an optical trick used in the painting of the Golden Age for depicting so-called pictures of the world. Optical phenomena above the surface of the water lead into a translucently shimmering, endless distance. The composition simultaneously takes on a rounded form through the cloud-treetop equivalencies and forms an ovoid passage of lake at the centre of the picture. The exceptional calmness of the expansive landscape is disturbed through a storm that appears to be approaching - iconographically incorporating, to a certain extent, the political situation.