Vier Masken. 1948.
Oil on fibreboard.
Not in Löffler. Monogrammed and dated upper left. With label on verso, there typographically dated, titled and inscribed "Verzeichnis Löffler/Beck Nr. 1948/55". 40 x 50 cm (15,7 x 19,6 in).

PROVENANCE: Galerie Widmer, Switzerland.

After expressionistic and dadaistic beginnings Dix turned to the New Objectivity in 1922, moved to Berlin in 1925 and became the most distinguished portrait painter of the bohemia in Berlin and the intellectual society of the Weimar Republic. In 1927 he was appointed professor at the Dresden Akademie, but was dismissed again in 1933 and was finally no longer permitted to exhibit his works as an 'unwanted artist'. Since 1950 there was a thematical and stylistic change in his late works, which led from the urban culture to bucolism, from the polemically realistic to the carefree-expressionistic. Dix was still interested in portraits, but religious subjects and landscapes also played a dominant role. Otto Dix is counted among the most important German artists of the 20th century. His work mirrors in its lively changeability the caesurae of the century, without abstraction, which was dismissed and criticised by Dix up to a great age. [SM].