Rouge Cabaret: The Terrifying and Beautiful World of Otto Dix
By Ludmila Rishkova
December 8, 2010
More explicit than the warning to the sensitive is the quote from Otto Dix that opens up the visit to the Rouge Cabaret exhibition at The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts: “I [...] don’t have the intention of revealing to astonished bourgeois and contemporaries the depths and the abyss within my soul”.
Born in 1891 in Germany, Otto Dix lived a life tainted by the violence and magnitude of the two World Wars. As a result, his art is captivating, mystifying, terrifying, desolating, and thought-provoking. Through it transpires a personality that was curious, troubled, with a dark sense of humour, a closet full of skeletons and a bottomless pit of emotion. From what I glimpsed, Otto Dix was a chameleon, an actor who adapts from medium to medium, from one shattering event life brings to another; in short he was an artist that fed off experience.
Open to viewers until January 2, 2011, Rouge Cabaret takes the viewer through a series of exhibitions: The Trenches, The Street, The Brothel, The Gallery, The Exhibition, The Lake: Inner Emigration.
The Trenches began when Dix volunteered for the front in order to experience things firsthand. He needed to see things as they truly were, to suffer the animalism of war directly. His graphic sketches, charcoal drawings and watercolour paintings portray the necessity of ‘being there’, of knowing what it’s like to have someone shot dead by your side. He portrayed war in full realistic horror and yet, among graphic depiction of desolation, madness and death, the terrifying world of Otto Dix is indeed beautiful. There is something poetic about the Skull, the way it retained its hair and moustache as vestiges of its former self. Worms are oozing out of its orifices, but they are also a part of it and their curves are almost sensual in their defilement. There is a sense of returning to the ‘basics’ in Ration Carriers Near Pilkim where the two soldiers are down on all fours, rations clamped in their jaws. They are not heroes, but rather meaningless animals struggling for survival. His charcoal Self-portrait, grinning, head resting on hand carries on with the theme. The grin has grown fangs. Madness has taken its toll seems to say a pencil sketch of a seated soldier, saucer-eyed with shock. Not knowing what to do with an acquired moment of peace, he smokes.
In The Brothel, it is all about women and sexuality as commodity. It’s about the toll of a prostitute’s profession on her body. It’s about power, vulnerability and haunting, although the power seems to rarely fall into the hands of the woman. She is rather the prey: of men, of the times, of her profession, of Dix himself. The women range from young and pretty to old and ugly, from fat to starved. The violence of the profession is metaphorical, expressed by the haunting stare of a retired prostitute, or the naked girl, curves yet inexistent, body translucent and almost fading into the background green. And yet, it is also physical, as it is in the lines and creases of heavy make-up, ageing skin, starved stick-thin figures and further than that: rape and murder. The sole figure of female power in the brothel is the Reclining Woman on Leopard, a portrait of actress Vera Simailowa, her curves exaggerated, the slant of her eyes hungry and predatory. But still, the power is ambiguous; the hyena in the background is a reminder of the profanity of her wisdom, treachery, social and sexual deviance. The Brothel is the violence and madness of war in the city, no less violent than that in The Trenches.
The Lake: Inner Emigration is perhaps the least expected and hence most astounding aspect of the exhibition. Categorised as ‘degenerate’ by Hitler and dismissed from his professorial position at Dresden Academy, Dix condemned himself to the relative safety of painting landscape. It is speculated that his paintings of gathering storms and ominous landscapes were a way of expressing his political views about the Nazi regime, and perhaps it truly was allegorical expression, but each painting also tells a story. Randegg in the Snow with Ravens is threatened by the ravens in the foreground, by gathering snow clouds and darkness in the background, but amidst all that, daily life goes on. A fire is lit and keeps a man warm as he chops wood, it seems to be the heart of the village, and the heart of the painting as it withstands the outward menace. It speaks of safety, simplicity, of life away from war. The cluster of the snowy roofs of Randegg seems to have force in numbers and is not all that desolating after all. It is also a harbour from disturbing visions encountered in previous works.
I have barely mentioned everything I wanted to mention, but I suspect Otto Dix is one of those artists that achieves several objectives at once: he captivates the eye and the mind, he pictures reality through a stark lens somewhat darkened by personal experience, he portrays life clearly, without editing or aesthetic cover-up tricks that artists can resort to, and most of all he transmits a historical account, saying this is how it was, and this is how I saw it: terrifying but indeed beautiful. And although his work might be infused with social comment and the stark madness of reality, it is also infused with beauty. Each gaze of his subjects is haunting and haunted by what it suffered, but it is also haunted by what was good and we must not forget that.