Otto Dix - Master of "primal themes of humanity"
It is the "primal themes of humanity" life and death, that we find at the heart of Otto Dix's fascinating and diverse oeuvre. After Impressionist beginnings, the 21-year-old Dix attained formal clarity and striking expressiveness by 1912 with his "Self-Portrait with Carnation" (The Detroit Institute of Arts, Michigan), which is based on medieval portrait art. The work would set the course for the rest of his career: Be it the visions of war dissected in cubist manner, or the figures he captured in a disconcertingly exaggerated critical realism in which he decried social grievances, poverty, and the hardships of the common people. Dix's work is also characterized by the enormous cruelty of World War I that he lived through in four years of military service, the sight of high-piled corpses and death all around him, the pungent stench of fear and terror. Dix devoted himself to the subject of war more intensively than almost any other German artist, leaving behind the most terrifying images of this human horror in drawings, prints, and paintings. Existential themes that he continued to explore with unwaning and unsettling directness six years after the end of the war - around the same time that he made this "Bilderbuch für Hana" - in his famous etching series entitled "Der Krieg" (1924) - one of his major graphic works. His female nudes from this period also show an exaggerated physicality of disillusioned figures scarred by work and life. Finally, from 1928 to 1932, Dix worked on his famous war triptych, an homage to the medieval altarpiece, which is now part of the collection of the ‘Staatliche Kunstsammlungen’ in Dresden. All of these life’s horrors that Dix explored artistically are of key significance in understanding Dix's unrelenting enthusiasm for the beginning of life. Not only his scarce unique children's books, but also his paintings of pregnant women, his Mary-like depictions of mother and child, and his famous paintings of children, above all the painting "Neugeborener mit Nabelschnur auf Tuch (Ursus)" (Newborn with Umbilical Cord on Cloth, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden), in which the newly born infant cries its way to life with a distorted, red face, are devoted to the dawn of life. With the birth of his three children Nelly, Ursus, and Jan between 1923 and 1928, this motif became even more important for the artist. He seemed to have been deeply fascinated with the naturalness and purity inherent in this hopeful departure into life.


Otto Dix's watercolor children's books - the fascination with the beginning of life
Between 1927 and 1931, Otto Dix created books with vibrant watercolors for his three young children, giving each of them their very own, highly imaginative artistic parallel world in compilations of large-format watercolors. However, two children's books preceded these books for Dix's children: The two books he had made for Hana and Martin, Martha Dix's children from her first marriage, who lived with her first husband, the Düsseldorf physician and collector Dr. Hans Koch and his second wife, Martha's older sister Maria, after their divorce. Hans Koch had been in love with Maria from the start, but as Maria couldn't have children, he initially married her younger sister Martha. When Dix visited Düsseldorf in 1921 to make a portrait of Dr. Hans Koch (Museum Ludwig, Cologne), the artist fell madly in love with the then 26-year-old lady of the house, who had given birth to her second child Hana a year earlier. At the same time, Hans Koch had an affair with his true love, Martha's older sister Maria. Martha followed Otto Dix to Dresden without further ado, and Hans Koch lived with Maria in Düsseldorf, and the Dix-Koch love quartet would soon reach its emotional climax: Martha and Hans Koch divorced in 1922 so that she could marry Otto Dix in February 1923 after ten months of separation. Their first child Nelly was born in June 1923. Martha's daughter Hana from her first marriage was only three years old when they broke up. From then on, Hana and her older brother Martin were raised by their father Hans Koch, and Martha's sister Maria in Düsseldorf. Young Martha tried to maintain contact with her young children. Dix supported her by repeatedly making imaginative drawings and watercolors for the children. Dix loved children, and the unrestrained youthful innocence and joie de vivre of Martha's children probably touched his heart, especially after the atrocities he had witnessed in World War I.


"Bilderbuch für Hana" – a spectacular rediscovery
As early as spring 1922, Otto Dix created his first picture book with 15 large-format watercolors for Martin, Martha's first-born, and Martha wrote on April 3, 1922: "Jim [Otto Dix] made 1 picture book for Muggeli [Martin] for Easter. Watercolors. We want to have it bound, the sheets have to be mounted, it is going to be very beautiful + refined + will therefore cost a lot of money, 300 M, which we cannot afford as all debtors keep ignoring us + we are poor people. But we want to have it done. Hansli [Hans Koch] will send the money. Muggeli will have a lot of fun with it, we have had a lot of fun ourselves. [...]” (Martha Dix, April 3, 1922, quoted from Otto Dix. Bilderbuch für Hana und andere Trouvaillen, ex. cat. Galerie Remmert und Barth, Düsseldorf 2016, p. 18).
However, it was long unknown that Otto Dix had also made a wonderful picture book for Martin's little sister Hana shortly afterward, a fascinating compendium of 14 large and imaginative watercolors showing a wide range of motifs from mythology, the Bible, and the world of fairy tales. It must have been around her fifth birthday that Hana Koch (1920-2006) received this outstanding artist's book from "Uncle Jimmy", her affectionate nickname for Otto Dix. She guarded this impressive watercolor album like gold until the end of her life. It was never documented or exhibited; she only allowed a small glimpse of it in 1994, showing just a single watercolor. Therefore, the discovery and complete disclosure of this long-kept secret in collaboration with Hana's daughter Olga in 2016 was key to this art-historical sensation.


"Bilderbuch für Hana" - a virtuoso panorama of Otto Dix's rich pictorial world
But what was it exactly that Otto Dix, the master of the "primal themes of humanity", wanted to pass on to little Hana's cheerful and innocent soul at the beginning of her journey through life? What were the themes that Dix considered essential or even vital after the exhaustive wartime experiences? With this children's book, Otto Dix laid out his rich pictorial world in front of our eyes, and the very first watercolor shows a cornucopia carried by three putti, from which the title of this incomparable artistic masterpiece " Bilderbuch für Hana" ("Picture Book for Hana") tumbles towards us with childlike ease. The fact that the rich artistic universe of these watercolors was also of great artistic value to Otto Dix is demonstrated by the outstanding compositional quality of each sheet, as well as by his signature, which he left on each of the 14 watercolors.
The second watercolor, a kind of frontispiece that shows Hana's family in chivalry costume led by the physician and art collector Dr. Hans Koch, Martha's first husband, mounted on horseback in armor wearing Windsor glasses and wielding an over-sized syringe, bears witness to Dix's biting humor. He is followed by Martha's sister Maria, the children Martin and little Hana, who are also on horseback. The latter looks at the viewer with bright and perky eyes. The medieval castle in the background is an allusion to Schloss Randegg, a castle near Constance, which Hans Koch acquired as a summer residence for his family at a reasonable price during a period of economic inflation in 1923. The castle explains why Dix depicted the Koch family as magical medieval lords with a slight notion of mockery. In addition, he also addressed the sense of protection and unity that the family gave little Hana in uncertain times.
This also provides a thematic link to the following watercolor, which shows a scene from the famous fairy tale "Town Musicians of Bremen" by the Brothers Grimm, in which the rooster, the cat, the dog, and the donkey manage, despite their frail health, to drive off robbers by working together. A story that tells us to never give up and that friendship matters in even the most hopeless situations and that it can give us a new sense of purpose.
The next scene is from the dramatic biblical story of "Jonah and the Whale", which Dix staged under dark storm clouds and in torrential rain. The sea is rough, the ship is about to sink and the huge head and mouth of the whale with the seemingly moribund Jonah halfway in it emerges in the foreground. But, as we know, the whale had come on God's behalf to rescue faithful Jonah and, after three days in the whale's stomach, spit him back ashore safe and sound. This is followed by the story of “Daniel in the Lions' Den”. Again, it is a menacing monster, which, according to biblical tradition, the faithful man with steadfast trust in God need not fear, as Daniel survives the night in the lions' den thanks to his unwavering faith. This is another story of confidence, faith, and hope. The beasts that Dix presents to the viewer within his " Bilderbuch für Hana" are intriguingly surreal, among them the following two figurative scenes: "St. Christopher" and "David and Goliath", the one being the protective and the other only a seemingly dangerous giant. St. Christopher is a saint and one of the 14 Holy Helpers of the Catholic Church, Goliath the leader of the faithless Philistines, who was beaten by David with a slingshot, ushering in the triumph of the people of Israel. Little Hana was familiar with these captivating stories from the Bible, and the surreal imagery must have fascinated her, too. However, the messages these images convey about life will have certainly only become comprehensible to Hana - and to today's viewers - over time.
This is followed by six more top-class watercolors, "The Seven Deadly Sins", "Noah's Ark", "Samson and the Lion", "The Temptation of St. Anthony", "St. George with the Dragon" and "St. Anthony Preaching to the Fish", which captivate the viewer with their exciting compositions and fancifully exaggerated depictions of landscapes and animals. It is the incessant fight against evil, the constant struggle for a better world, that provides the thematic link between these extremely diverse scenes and that is fundamental to the timeless topicality of the fascinating imagery of Dix's" Bilderbuch für Hana".


Dix's " Bilderbuch für Hana" - A socio-critical masterpiece of lasting topicality
But which picture did Otto Dix choose for the end of this masterful presentation of the agonizing challenges of life, this life-long battle of virtue against vice, faith against disbelief, good against evil? It is the contemplative scene of "Miracle in the Stable", in which Dix confronts us not only with the infant Jesus but with the purity of the child with all its vulnerability and innocence at the very beginning of life. Preserving this purity and virtue for as long as possible amidst the storms of life is a wish that Otto Dix expresses in these powerful images - for little Hana, as well as for humanity as a whole. Once again, this art-historical treasure - its discovery in 2016 being a small sensation - shows the complexity and devotion with which Dix's work revolves around existential themes of life and death. They also testify to his mastery in artistic adaptation and transformation, and his genius in using the art-historical pictorial tradition for his artistic purposes. With "Bilderbuch für Hana", Otto Dix left us a socially critical and yet hopeful masterpiece on the existential "primal themes of humanity", which, shockingly, has lost none of its topicality to this day. [JS]