Otto Dix

In Germany during the Nazi era the works of Otto Dix and many modern painters, including Van Gogh, Matisse, Picasso and Chagall, were branded “degenerate art”. In June 1937 Joseph Goebbels charged Adolf Ziegler, head of the visual arts department, with confiscating such pictures from German museums and galleries. More than 200 of Dix’s works in all fell victim to the purges. The following month eight of Dix’s paintings, including his controversial picture War Cripples (1920), were shown at the “Degenerate Art” exhibition in Munich. Fleeing further Nazi censorship, Dix moved to the countryside, near Lake Constance in the south-west of the country, where he painted simple landscapes, such as View of the Hegau (1940). He said of his rural exile: “It doesn’t particularly interest me. Wherever I am, I work.”

From the page of Portrait of the Journalist Sylvia von Harden