The Online Otto Dix Project

Description: As the note behind them makes clear, Franz is now 62 and Louise is 61. Their working class status is quickly apparent, revealed by two sets of heavy hands with dirt under their nails.

Description: This unlikeliest of art dealers was known as "Mother Ey" to the artists she nutured. After a failed marriage, Johanna Ey opened a bakery near the Düsseldorf Academy of Arts where she helped and encouraged young artists. The cafe exhibited their works.

Her foray into the art world was initiated by friendship. The artists who frequented her cafe needed recognition and money. She provided them wall space and credit. On occasion, she even darned their socks. She soon became an energetic proponent of Modernism and an important regional dealer.

In the midst of the Great War, she closed the bakery and opened a gallery. It was shut down in 1934 when the Nazis branded her artists "degenerates." According to art historian Sergiusz Michalsky, "Johanna Ey's portrait was painted more often than that of any other woman in Germany."

Description: Three women ply their trade on the streets of post-War Berlin. Two are ladies of evening in search of customers. One turns her nose up at the other two and quickly scurries back home to her husband.

Description: Raised by a grandmother in Dresden, she fled to Berlin at age 16 where she supported herself in caberets. By the end of the war, she was dancing nude and performing in films. She was notorious and always in the company of lovers of both sexes. She could often be seen in hotel lobbies naked apart from an sable wrap, a pet monkey and a silver brooch packed with cocaine. She died of tuberculosis in 1928.

Description: In 1925, Hugo Simons won a lawsuit on Dix's behalf. The artist painted his portrait in a display of gratitude. He generally preferred to accentuate a subject's ungainly characteristics but this depiction was almost flattering. The pair maintained a friendship for the rest of their lives. When the Nuremberg Laws stripped him of citizenship, Simons fled Germany for Canada. He died in Montreal with Dix's portrait hanging on the wall opposite his bed.

Description: She walked in one direction and he in the other. Dix stopped in his tracks. "I must paint you, I simply must! You represent an entire epoch." She was amused. "You want to paint my lacklustre eyes, my ornate ears, my long nose, my thin lips. You want to paint my short legs, my big feet - things that can only frighten people and delight no one?" To Dix, her depiction was perfect. The portrait would represent a generation concerned not with the outward beauty of a woman but her psychological condition.

Description: Maureen Mullarkey described this work as an "unsettling variation on the effect of postwar deprivation on the socially marginal, particularly women of the red light district." The portrait, she says, "presents a blowzy hermaphroditic figure; a powdered male head sets on a shambling female form." Her heavy make-up attempts to mask the truth her body reveals. Life is hard on the down trodden.

Description: This Dr. Mayer-Hermann and his portrait both emigrated to New York City. Six years after he sat for Dix, the painting was donated to the Museum of Modern Art. Two years later, Mayer-Hermann emigrated to New York where he established a successful ear, nose and throat practice. It's said that he enjoyed visiting "himself" on display.

Description: Alfred Flechtheim entered the art world as a collector of Far Eastern art. In 1910, he married the daughter of a wealthy Dortmund merchant. This union helped provide him with the means to open a gallery in 1913. On the eve of the First World War, Flechtheim's gallery was filled with works by the French avant-garde. He had a reputation as Francophile with a particular affection for Cubism. In Düsseldorf, local artists unfairly suggested that he had turned his back on German art. In this unflattering, uncommissioned work by Dix, he is surrounded by Cubist works. He clutches one in one hand and bills in another. To Dix, he's little more than a salesman in a cheap suit, hawking foreign merchandise for the local Bourgeoisie.

Description: Iwar von Lücken was the last in the line of Baltic aristocrats. He was born into privilege and died in poverty under unknown circumstances. His aesthetics were of the avant garde while his family was entrenched in tradition, a difference that cast von Lücken as a black sheep.

Iwar von Lücken was a poet whose work is reduced to a thin single volume. He'd be a literary unknown if not for this portrait. Dix provided post mortem fame that he was unable to obtain with a pen.

To Otto Dix, von Lücken was a sorry figure and that's probably what drew him to the artist. Dix accentuates his poverty -- the poet's complexion is gaunt and his suit was cut before he grew thin. The poet slouches and needs a chair rail for support. Peter de Mendelssohn saw him Berlin soon after he posed for this portrait. The poet with the enobling "von" was seen begging for coins in a cafe.