Travelling exhibition on German painter Otto Dix (Gera, Germany, 1891 – Singen, Germany, 1969), a figure of German expressionism. The proposal to hold the exhibition in Lisbon was made to the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation by the Goethe Institut in Portugal.

In a note by the Exhibitions and Museography Department, the service responsible for organising the exhibition, the director, José Sommer Ribeiro, presented the following reasons for the exhibition to be held in Lisbon: “I believe the conditions to be highly acceptable and the pieces chosen will provide a very thorough overview of the artist’s work, a figure who played a very important role in German expressionism, having been a teacher at the Dresden Academy from 1927 to 1933, when he was recognised and considered a ‘degenerate artist’. Following the Second World War, he lived close to Lake Constance, painting religious themes, when all his previous painting had been social in nature” (Note by the Exhibitions and Museography Department, 16 Feb. 1977, Gulbenkian Archives, SEM 00105).

The event brought together a set of 135 works made between 1914 and 1969 (the year of the painter’s death) on a wide variety of media, including painting, drawing, gouache, watercolour and printmaking. The exhibition included the important “The War” series, comprising 51 etchings on the horrors of the First World War, made from sketches drawn during the war in 1915-1918 and others from memory.

The marks of war are a constant presence in Dix’s work; having enlisted in the German army in 1915, he ended up on the front line of some devastating battles. The resulting work took on historical and artistic importance similar to Los Desastres de la Guerra (1810-1815) by Spanish painter Francisco Goya (1746-1828). Painter Fernando de Azevedo would say the following in an article for Colóquio. Artes magazine written about the exhibition: “In Otto Dix’s work, war is, as it is for Goya, the ‘disaster’, or the apocalyptic sum of disasters, that oblige men, on one side or the other of its reason for existence, to engage in the same behaviour, in the same way they are matched in their own human misery” (Azevedo, Colóquio. Artes, Jun. 1977, p. 71).

The Portuguese event for this travelling exhibition was expanded in comparison with the others, thanks to the cooperation of the artist’s widow, the Goethe Institut and the Klihm Gallery in Munich.

Complementing the exhibition, a conference dedicated to the life and work of Otto Dix was also held, given by German art historian Otto Conzelmann (1909-1992).