Hexensabbat

A vortex of shifting, triangular forms and fiercely drawn intersecting charcoal lines, Otto Dix’s Hexensabbat of 1918 is a tour de force produced at the height of his artistic powers. Representative of the tumultuous socio-political climate of the early 20th century and executed towards the end of the First World War, it alludes to the distressing landscape of warfare and the fracturing of Germany. As suggested in the title of the work, sorcerous imagery is ubiquitous in the explosion of shard-like elements, glimpsed limbs and razor-sharp forks, drawing on the iconography of Walpurgis Night and the Witches’ Sabbath. From the late Middle Ages, the use of dark magic and the conjuring of demonic spirits by witchcraft in the Witches’ Sabbath was condemned and violently feared by society, and by 1918, so too had the use of modern warfare, felt en masse for the first time during this war. The kinetic energy of Dix’s dynamic hand is palpable in the diagonal motion of the violently cascading witches, combining this Dionysian imagery with that of the trenches and physical violence.

Radically different from the artist’s approach to the set of prints he produced a few years later such as Der Kreig (lot 347), the visceral depth of the charcoal in Hexensabbat is simultaneously terrifying and enthralling, drawing the viewer further into the tectonic mass like a magnetic pull, ever closer to the petrifying, earth-shattering reality of conflict and the nebulous sphere of nightmares. Towards the centre of the work, a dark oval form invokes images of the female sexual organ, which are echoed throughout the composition. Recalling the vociferous imagery of Ludwig Meidner’s Apokalyptische Vision (lot 344), produced just four years prior on the eve of the war, Hexensabbat presents a powerful combination of the themes of sex and death that fascinated Dix.