Jonah and the Whale [for Matthäus Evangelium (The Gospel of Matthew)]

Otto Dix

German, 1891 - 1969

Jonah and the Whale [for Matthäus Evangelium (The Gospel of Matthew)], 1960

Not on view

Lithograph on paper

Dimensions11 3/8 × 9 in. (28.9 × 22.9 cm)

Gift of Mr. Jack B. Pierson in memory of Mr. Robert Martin Purcell, 1979.24

Otto Dix was an apprentice to a decorative painter for four years before studying at the Dresden School of Arts and Crafts. After the war, Dix attended the Düsseldorf Academy from 1922 to 1925. At the academy, he acquired a reputation as a war critic. In 1927, he was given a professorship at the Dresden Academy but was dismissed in 1935 by the Nazis and forbidden to exhibit. Dix was jailed in 1939 in Dresden, allegedly for plotting the assassination of Adolf Hitler. Toward the end of World War II, he became a French prisoner. When the war ended, he returned to his post at the Dresden Academy, only to move to West Germany shortly afterward. In the mid-1920's, Otto Dix and George Grosz lead the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) movement, a reaction against all that was lyrical, personal and mystic in expressionism. Although the movement retained many expressionist techniques, artists turned to contemporary and realistic themes. The brutalities of gas and trench warfare horrified Dix, and he revealed them with unrelenting intensity in his pictures.

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