.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Selbstbildnis 1933 was executed the same year the artist was dismissed as Professor of Painting at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts - an affront he had anticipated with the rise to power of the Nazis and their condemnation of ‘degenerate’ art.
In this charged self-portrait, Dix portrays his gaze as both defiant and suspicious, knowing yet determined. He includes a scar near the throat, which shows up emphatically against the plainness of his artist’s smock. This is doubtless evidence of the neck wound he received during the First World War, starkly exposed as if in a silent rebuke to those who would doubt his honour, service and personal bravery.
The present work departs from the satirical Neue Sachlichkeit style that had been denounced by the country’s fascist regime, who castigated the movement’s unflinching images of the Weimar Republic’s social realities. Instead, it recalls the realism that inhered in Germany’s artistic heritage, the meticulous anatomical accuracy and craftsmanship of Renaissance masters such as Albrecht Dürer, Matthias Grünewald and Hans Holbein. Dix’s masterful handling as well as his use and placement of the monogram in Selbstbildnis 1933 evokes an homage to these great virtuosi.
Like Dürer before him, Dix uses silverpoint, an uncommon and unforgiving medium for the period, where the resulting mark-making must be confident and, as a result, scrupulously painstaking. This is evident in the forward-combed hair, the individual straggling hairs on the eyebrows and at the base of the neck, as well as in the wrinkles of the forehead and the incipient chin bristles, while the exuberant cross-hatching of the cheekbone adds a sharpness and a bruised nobility to the profile. These initially silver-coloured marks oxidise with exposure to air to become warmer in tone, so that the artist would have been fully conscious of the portrait’s maturation over time. No doubt Dix believed that like this image, like his reputation would strengthen as history unfurled.
In this charged self-portrait, Dix portrays his gaze as both defiant and suspicious, knowing yet determined. He includes a scar near the throat, which shows up emphatically against the plainness of his artist’s smock. This is doubtless evidence of the neck wound he received during the First World War, starkly exposed as if in a silent rebuke to those who would doubt his honour, service and personal bravery.
The present work departs from the satirical Neue Sachlichkeit style that had been denounced by the country’s fascist regime, who castigated the movement’s unflinching images of the Weimar Republic’s social realities. Instead, it recalls the realism that inhered in Germany’s artistic heritage, the meticulous anatomical accuracy and craftsmanship of Renaissance masters such as Albrecht Dürer, Matthias Grünewald and Hans Holbein. Dix’s masterful handling as well as his use and placement of the monogram in Selbstbildnis 1933 evokes an homage to these great virtuosi.
Like Dürer before him, Dix uses silverpoint, an uncommon and unforgiving medium for the period, where the resulting mark-making must be confident and, as a result, scrupulously painstaking. This is evident in the forward-combed hair, the individual straggling hairs on the eyebrows and at the base of the neck, as well as in the wrinkles of the forehead and the incipient chin bristles, while the exuberant cross-hatching of the cheekbone adds a sharpness and a bruised nobility to the profile. These initially silver-coloured marks oxidise with exposure to air to become warmer in tone, so that the artist would have been fully conscious of the portrait’s maturation over time. No doubt Dix believed that like this image, like his reputation would strengthen as history unfurled.