Lot 149 D

The painting “Restaurant an der Elbe” belongs to a series of landscapes created in 1912, during the period when Otto Dix was completing his training at the Grand-Ducal Saxon School of Applied Arts in Dresden. The year 1912 brought a distinct stylistic break in the artist’s work: after visiting the major Van Gogh exhibition at Dresden’s Galerie Arnold, his classical realism was succeeded by an intensive exploration of the Dutch and French master’s use of colour and, particularly, brushwork.
For the painting offered here, Dix used a brush filled with green, a rusty red and many shades of grey to create his view of a restaurant located along the Elbe. From a raised vantage point, he has captured the diagonal line of the path, the simple restaurant building with its empty rows of tables and the green banks of the Elbe. He has used bold brushstrokes to mark the approaching storm clouds, which may also provide an explanation for the establishment’s lack of guests. The mast with lowered flag on the right traverses and simultaneously unites every level of the picture. Thus in this work, more than almost any other painting from the period, Dix has created a landscape dealing with the theme of momentary weather conditions in a late impressionist mode: in this case, the atmospherically charged air preceding a storm.