ACADEMIA Letters

The German Artists Association Dresden vs. Otto Dix

Ann Murray

It is well documented that Otto Dix’s career was forced to a halt when the Nazis took control of
artistic activity in Germany in early 1933. It is little discussed, however, that the activities of a
völkisch artists’ group in Dresden, the extreme-nationalist Deutsche Kunstgesellschaft Dresden
(German Art Society Dresden, DKD), were instrumental in targeting his work as ‘degenerate’
from as early as 1927, leading to several of his major works being shown in the infamous
degenerate art exhibitions organised by the Nazis from mid-1933.[1] This short article traces
some of the DKD’s actions against Otto Dix from 1927-33.
The DKD was founded in the home of its most active campaigner and writer, Bettina Feistel-
Rohmeder (1873-1953) in 1920, and included then-prominent artist Richard Müller (1874-
1954).[2] Feistel-Rohmeder brought together ‘representatives of the artistic community and
völkisch organizations’ with the intention, ‘in the midst of cultural decline, to defend works of a
German nature’. The Association was the first ‘to make a tough stand against the nightmare of
November (bolshevist) Art’.[3] Paul Schultze-Naumburg, author of the infamous Art and Race
(1928) was an honorary member. The DKD worked to re-establish what they considered to be
truly Germanic art, such as that by Caspar David Friedrich and Hans Thoma, while condemning
the infiltration of ‘spiritually un-German’ art, which was any art that was modernist or borrowed
from international artistic styles.
Effectively dormant until late 1926, the International Art Exhibition in Dresden in 1926 –
the first such show in Germany since the end of World War I and a great success for Germany’s
modernist artists – catalysed the DKD’s campaign and Dix became a favourite target in their arts
report supplement, the Deutsche Kunstkorrespondenz, published for the first time in May
1927.[4]
Dix’s move to Dresden in early 1927 to take up his professorship at the Academy of Arts
allowed the DKD to monitor his activities more closely, particularly through Müller, Dix’s
colleague at the Academy.
From June 1927, Feistel-Rohmeder worked to justify the DKD’s condemnation of Dix and
his work at the Academy, as well as those who supported him such as collector Ida Bienert and

Academia Letters, June 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Ann Murray, annmrry@gmail.com

Citation: Murray, A. (2021). The German Artists Association Dresden vs. Otto Dix. Academia Letters, Article 1128.
https://doi.org/10.20935/AL1128.

1
the Dresden Stadtmuseum’s director of New Art, Paul Ferdinand Schmidt. One of Feistel-
Rohmeder’s earliest reviews expressed her anger at Dix’s role as jurist for the 1927 Graphische
Ausstellung des Deutschen Künstlerbunds, which she mockingly referred to as the ‘so-called
“German” Association of Artists”’. One could expect, she remarked, such ‘tastelessness’ when
the list of jurors for this ‘un-German and ugly show’ included Dix, Käthe Kollwitz and Max
Beckmann, among others.[5]
One of Feistel-Rohmeder’s most damning reports on Dix was published after the positive
critical reception of his triptych Metropolis at the show Saxon Art of Our Time, organised by
the Sächsische Kunstverein in Dresden from 21 July to 3 October 1928. Disgusted by Dix’s
portrayal of prostitutes, subjects she considered unsuitable for art, she also targeted the young
Nikolaus Pevsner, then assistant keeper at the Dresden Gallery (now the Old Masters Gallery)
who assisted with the 1926 show, and his review in the newspaper, the Dresdner Anzeiger:

[The exhibition] gives pride of place to a large three-piece picture by this Dresden
Academy professor. It […] depicts a dance scene in a pleasure house, in the side
panels streets of prostitutes. At the same time, one could admire in the gallery Neue
Kunst Fides […] a large exhibition of Dixian works, which without exception
demonstrate the joy of this educator of youth […] in the unsparing revelation of the
ugliest and lowest that one could bear […] and this in a style, which through the
apparently cool ‘neue Sachlichkeit’ is even more provocative. […] But where does
the press stand on such faux pas? That the socialist publications acclaim them is
understandable; with the help of this veritable ‘master’, the systematic
demoralisation of the German people progresses, a few years enjoyed in the
ambience of such a ‘master studio’ poisoning an entire generation of artists. That
the leading bourgeois newspapers are committed to such anal-art cannot be
tolerated at all! Nevertheless, e. g. the art reporter for the Dresdner Anzeiger, Dr
Pevsner, must admit that in Dixian art, there is ‘a strange, in many ways abhorrent
and unhealthy, in many ways gripping phenomenon’ […]: ‘In any case we look
forward to witnessing this development in Dresden and that the art academy in Dix
has gained one of the strongest personalities – as repulsive as it is attractive –
among the younger artists’. (Issue 447 of the Dresdner Anzeiger, 22.9.1928). We
have nothing to add to this joyful outburst.[6]

In the Kunstkorrespondenz of December 1928 she described Dresden as an ‘Art-City in

Danger’, targeting the Neue Kunst Fides gallery, which regularly displayed Dix’s work, as a
major threat.[7] In the January 1929 Kunstkorrespondenz, she published the letter which the

Academia Letters, June 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Ann Murray, annmrry@gmail.com

Citation: Murray, A. (2021). The German Artists Association Dresden vs. Otto Dix. Academia Letters, Article 1128.
https://doi.org/10.20935/AL1128.

2
DKD and six other groups signed and sent to President Paul von Hindenburg, urging an end to
his support of modernist artists. That eight völkisch groups were named reflects their growing
prominence; they claimed to represent 10,000 people.[8] The signatories and groups were:
Reinhold Rehm (Der Bund [The League]), Heinrich Blume (DKD); Eugen Friedrich Hopf
(Friends of German Art Dresden); Max Robert Gerstenhauer (Germany League); Paul Schultze-
Naumburg (The Block); Guida Diehl (German Women’s Combat League and the Newland
Movement) and Professor Malguth (League of Völkisch Teachers). All protested Hindenburg’s
patronage of the 1926 show.
Among other slights on Dix in the meantime, an exhibition of Dix’s students’ work at the
Academy of Arts in March 1932 was held by Feistel-Rohmeder as evidence of Dix’s power to
destroy the German artistic spirit: ‘the German-sensitive visitor is looking at the products of
Dix’s students! Professor Dix has shown himself to be a destroyer of German youth through this
student show’.[9]
Three months after the Nazis assumed power in January 1933, Müller, a party member since
1932, was made Director of the Academy and co-organised the first major Degenerate Art
exhibition in Dresden (23 September – 18 October 1933) which included several of Dix’s works.
War Cripples (1920) and The Trench (1920-23), the latter controversial due to its unsparing
depiction of dead German soldiers and purchased for the Stadtmuseum in 1927, were
prominently placed (Figure 1), due to their ‘defeatist’ and ‘un-German’ portrayals of Germany’s
war heroes (Figure 1). Müller spotlighted the works’ ‘degeneracy’ in the Dresdner Anzeiger:

In the main hall [we] notice the large scale of The War by Otto Dix. […] In this
picture you can see the inside of a trench after the bombardment. The seriously
wounded, corpses, body parts, torn skulls lie in a tangled mess. And a rat gnaws on
a shot head, the brain of which is exposed. A portrayal of the war that any active
panopticon owner might incorporate as an attraction in his war section in the hope
of getting a good deal of business. The main thing is the thrill – it does not matter
whether a trade is made with the heroes of a people, with the holy dead. One could
also think of the painting as a demonstration piece by communist agitators shouting
to the excited crowd that there are people to be seen here who were stupid enough
to defend their fatherland. […] The picture would receive a just appreciation if one
wanted to see it as a degradation of the fallen German front-line soldier – who
deserves to have an honourable memorial erected in his honour after his heroic
death, not one that consists of such horrific portrayal of misery. […] One would
recommend [the critics] to take a closer look at ‘the trenches’ for its technical

Academia Letters, June 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Ann Murray, annmrry@gmail.com

Citation: Murray, A. (2021). The German Artists Association Dresden vs. Otto Dix. Academia Letters, Article 1128.
https://doi.org/10.20935/AL1128.

3
 deficiencies - perhaps also the ‘war cripples’ from 1920: four frontline soldiers are
the target of mockery because of their lost limbs […], an image that represents the
utmost meanness that could be shown to decent people. […] What grave guilt some
people took on themselves when they appointed this man, of all people, as a teacher
at the art academy, thus exposing the youth to his poisoning influence for years, an
activity which was brought to a well-deserved end by his dismissal in spring this
year.[10]

Figure 1. Scene from the documentary Zeitdokumente: Ausstellung ‘Entartete Kunst’ im

Lichthof des Dresdner Rathauses, with visitors before Dix‘s Trench. © SLUB/Deutsche
Fotothek, Christian Borchert, 1933.

Feistel-Rohmeder replicated segments of Müller’s report in the German Art Report [Deutscher
Kunstbericht], the interim title for The Picture [Das Bild], a new, lengthier DKD publication.

Academia Letters, June 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Ann Murray, annmrry@gmail.com

Citation: Murray, A. (2021). The German Artists Association Dresden vs. Otto Dix. Academia Letters, Article 1128.
https://doi.org/10.20935/AL1128.

4
 Summarising her numerous attempts to put an end to Dix’s career since 1927, and reiterating
Müller’s criticism of Dix, she added that the purchase of the ‘infamous War’ by the patrons of
the Stadtmuseum in November 1928 was the ‘most egregious case’ in the purchasing of new art
in Dresden, and a terrible waste of 10,000 marks.[11]
On 6 April 1933, Müller wrote to the Reichskommissar for Saxony, Manfred von
Killinger, to inform him that Dix was to be dismissed without a pension and forbidden to enter
the grounds of the Academy.[12] Eventually banned from exhibiting, Dix would not be able to
recommence his career until after World War II.

References
[1] The paucity of discussion may be due to the destruction of the DKD’s archives in the Dresden
bombings in February 1945. See Joan L. Clinefelter, Artists for the Reich (Oxford: Berg, 2005),
p. 7. Additionally, Dix’s letters in the Otto Dix Foundation in Vaduz and the German Art Archive
in Nuremburg do not mention the DKD.
[2] Clinefelter, p. 29. The DKD were one of several far-right-leaning cultural groups in Dresden at
the time.
[3] Bettina Feistel-Rohmeder, Im Terror des Kunstbolschewismus. Urkundensammlung des
’Deutschen Kunstberichtes’ aus den Jahren 1927-33 (Karlsruhe: C. F. Müler Verlag, 1938), p.
195. ‘November’ or ‘Bolshevist’ Art was a reference to the November Group, to which Dix
belonged, whose members were linked to each other through shared social ideals.
[4] Ibid. pp. 7, 11. The DKD published their magazine Deutsche Bildkunst and arts report
supplement the Bartelsbund-Korrespondenz for the first time in January 1927. By May that year,
the report was renamed the Deutsche Kunstkorrespondenz and appeared monthly. For insight to
the International Art Exhibition Dresden, see Stephen Games, Pevsner. The Early Life: Germany
and Art (London: Continuum, 2010), especially pp. 131-140. See also Will Grohmann et al, eds,
Dresden 1926 Internationale Kunstausstellung/Jubiläums Gartenbau-Ausstellung, Der
Cicerone 12 (Leipzig: Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1926).
[5] Review of the Graphische Ausstellung des Deutschen Künstlerbunds, Dresden 1927, reproduced
in Feistel-Rohmeder, p. 16.
[6] Ibid. pp. 39-40. See also Games, p. 139.
[7] Feistel-Rohmeder, p. 46.
[8] Ibid. pp. 47-48.
[9] Ibid. pp. 162-63.

Academia Letters, June 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Ann Murray, annmrry@gmail.com

Citation: Murray, A. (2021). The German Artists Association Dresden vs. Otto Dix. Academia Letters, Article 1128.
https://doi.org/10.20935/AL1128.

5
[10] Richard Müller, ‘Die Ausstellung Spiegelbilder des Verfalls in der Kunst’, Dresdner Anzeiger,
23 September 1933, Archiv HfBK Dresden, Akte 01/41, 103. The Trench was sometimes called
The War, as in this article.
[11] Feistel-Rohmeder, pp. 204-05. The Trench is here again referred to as The War.
[12] Richard Müller, ‘Letter from Richard Müller to Reichskommissar for Saxony, Manfred von
Killinger’, 1933, Nachlaß Otto Dix, Deutsches Kunstarchiv, Nuremburg.

Academia Letters, June 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Ann Murray, annmrry@gmail.com

Citation: Murray, A. (2021). The German Artists Association Dresden vs. Otto Dix. Academia Letters, Article 1128.
https://doi.org/10.20935/AL1128.