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Lot Essay
This cartoon for Dix's 1930 painting Melancholie (fig. 1), clearly demonstrates the precise manner in which Dix formally orchestrated the final painting's complex composition, arranging the two precariously seated figures in such a way that they lean apart from one other and yet remain ominously united by and centred on the image of a skull.
In a variation on the theme of the Vanitas which had preoccupied him throughout the 1920s, Dix presents in this picture the image of a young temptress (already on the point of physical decay) and a disinterested but powerless, faceless man. Formally echoing the figure of the stuffed mannequin that had appeared in his 1924 take on this theme in Stilleben im Atelier, the male figure is in part a de Chiricoesque mannequin. He is both the impotent plaything of his seductress and an anonymous symbol of the depersonalising influence of the machine age. Despite these shortcomings however it is he, who seems to observe the oncoming catastrophe in the outer world. Leaning away from his naked companion to observe what in the finished painting is clearly a terrifying sky filled with the portents of disaster, he is held back by a disinterested female counterpart who, concentrating only on the foreboding of her inner thoughts, reclines awkwardly on a stool. Her naked body exposed to the viewer in such a way as to make clear the physical nature of her power over her automaton-like partner, she looks inward. Her impending physical decay, already signified by her scrawny limbs and sagging breasts, is emphasised by the precariousness of the pose. With each figure seeming to rely on the other for balance, their collapse seems both inevitable and imminent. United by their precariousness the two figures create a circle of opposites - a common compositional feature of Dix's work. This intention is made obvious here by the clearly visible geometric lines of construction that he has used to guide him in the drafting of the figures' poses.
In giving this work the title Melancholie, Dix would clearly have been aware of the precedent set by Dürer's famous 1514 engraving of the same name, in which the Renaissance painter created an enduring allegory of artistic creativity rendered impotent. Painted in 1930 amidst a dramatically worsening political climate in Weimar Germany, it is also possible to see this work as more than a mere Vanitas, but as also an allegory of Dix's own personal pessimism and fear for the future.
In a variation on the theme of the Vanitas which had preoccupied him throughout the 1920s, Dix presents in this picture the image of a young temptress (already on the point of physical decay) and a disinterested but powerless, faceless man. Formally echoing the figure of the stuffed mannequin that had appeared in his 1924 take on this theme in Stilleben im Atelier, the male figure is in part a de Chiricoesque mannequin. He is both the impotent plaything of his seductress and an anonymous symbol of the depersonalising influence of the machine age. Despite these shortcomings however it is he, who seems to observe the oncoming catastrophe in the outer world. Leaning away from his naked companion to observe what in the finished painting is clearly a terrifying sky filled with the portents of disaster, he is held back by a disinterested female counterpart who, concentrating only on the foreboding of her inner thoughts, reclines awkwardly on a stool. Her naked body exposed to the viewer in such a way as to make clear the physical nature of her power over her automaton-like partner, she looks inward. Her impending physical decay, already signified by her scrawny limbs and sagging breasts, is emphasised by the precariousness of the pose. With each figure seeming to rely on the other for balance, their collapse seems both inevitable and imminent. United by their precariousness the two figures create a circle of opposites - a common compositional feature of Dix's work. This intention is made obvious here by the clearly visible geometric lines of construction that he has used to guide him in the drafting of the figures' poses.
In giving this work the title Melancholie, Dix would clearly have been aware of the precedent set by Dürer's famous 1514 engraving of the same name, in which the Renaissance painter created an enduring allegory of artistic creativity rendered impotent. Painted in 1930 amidst a dramatically worsening political climate in Weimar Germany, it is also possible to see this work as more than a mere Vanitas, but as also an allegory of Dix's own personal pessimism and fear for the future.