Of Fathers, Birthdays and Presidents

Dad (in straw hat), his sister (in front) a cousin & their Uncle

 down on the farm in Southern Illinois   ca. 1918

Yesterday would have been my father's 101st birthday. Hard to believe. He was born in 1910,  very much a turn of the century time in this country. William Howard Taft was President. Neither the telephone, the refrigerator or the zipper had been invented.  The Titanic would sink when Dad was two years old.  The U.S. was changing from a predominantly agrarian society to a manufacturing one. People who could no longer subsist on farms were moving to the cities as were immigrants making their way to the "land of opportunity". My father grew up on a farm in southern Illinois on the banks of the Ohio River. He always remembered it with great fondness and longing. They were poor but not starving. His father was an anomaly in those days:  he had a college degree in horticulture. His mother had been a milliner in the city of Chicago but his father moved her to the farm. She was, by all accounts, not happy about it.

Dad moved to Chicago to work for Florsheim Shoes in the advertising dept. He worked as a "paste up artist" which meant he cut and pasted drawings and words to sheets of paper in the form of a print ad. These were given to the newspaper to be typeset. It was 1929; he was 19 years old. He vividly recalled the stock market crash. His workspace in the Florsheim building was below street level, with those tiny grated windows looking onto the sidewalks at people's feet.  He remembered a jumper landing outside.  He watched his money carefully from then on.

Dad put himself through colleg,e taking night courses at Northwestern University. He never finished and it always bothered him. He eventually went to work in a new industry: radio. He was selling national advertising air time to big ad agencies for a company that represented radio stations across the U.S. and Canada.  The business was in its infancy and he was there.

Dad smoking (he'd quit by the 

time I was born) ca. WWII.  When

I was little, I thought he re-

sembled Frankenstein's Monster!

The United States entered the First World War, "the war to end all wars" to which it was mistakenly referred, in 1917.  Of course, the war reparations act led to a second world war.  As a result, my father enlisted in the Army Air Corps for WWII. By then, he'd moved to Los Angeles to start his own rep firm.  He walked away from the new business and beginnings of stability at the age of 31 to defend our country. It took him quite a few years to recover what he'd lost.  By then, he'd been married and it had been annulled; a fact I didn't learn til my mother died.  He kept it a secret but it explained much about him and his breaking his engagement to my mother and his melancholy.  But, that's another story.

                                                                                               

Dad and Mom were married in 1950 and together til her death in 1997.  He lived another ten years without her, on his own, in the lovely quiet area of the Central Coast of California, where they retired.

He died during a lunch of take-out Chinese, sitting with his caregiver, a lovely lady named Isabel. He had a heart attack and could not be revived.  I remember all the times we ordered Chinese take out or he'd take me to China Town in L.A..  It was his favorite food and I was happy he was enjoying it at the end.

Mother and Dad at Christmas time  circa 1967

                            

I flew to CA immediately and set to work on funeral arrangements, along with my brother, as well as the celebration I wanted to have at his home.  The turnout to Dad's service was amazing.  My brother and I thought maybe twenty five at the most.  We probably had closer to 60 and a bunch of my friends made the trip up as well.  That meant so much to me.   My brother and I gave eulogies; mine was about how crotchety Dad was but how loving and kind too.  He was a mixed bag as are most of us.  We gave him the military funeral he'd planned for and it was so moving.  He had full honors with an honor guard, the flag folding, taps and a 21 gun salute.  I'll never forget it.    

 My sons pay their last respects to PaPaw

He and my mom left my brother and I, my two sons, his two daughters and, so far, a granddaughter.  My brother and I think of him often.  We can laugh now at things that were not so funny when we were young.  I wish I could tell him that. 

                                                                          My sons, my nieces, me, my brother out on Dad's lawn 2007

Theme Thursday Brown

Wilhelm Heinrich Otto Dix, Germany 1891-1969,  is widely considered one of the most important artists of the Neue Sachlichkeit.   Thanks to the Brown Shirts, also known as the SA, much of his work was destroyed after Hitler's rise to power.  At the time, he was best known for harsh depictions of the Weimar Society between the world wars...

"...which in particular attached Germanic national myths which had been sculpted on the ideals of militarism and human sacrifice for country...and stood in contrast to the Weimar Republic's response of hedonistic escapism in the face of impending social chaos and economic doom." from"Addicted to the Trauma of Realism" MadamePickwickArtBlog

Portrait of the Dancer Anita Berber 1925


Dix paintings showed "art so tragic it borders on the comic. Its the surreal and fantastic looking, finding aesthetic form within an idiom of graphic depiction.A visual representation bordering on the burlesque, of straddling a new art zone between the romantic and reproductive, the product of modern warfare and its unlimited power to depersonalize and defigure the human spirit." MadamePickwickArtBlog

The Salon 1921

There are numerous half-nude female models, signaling an unrepentant, usually unflattering fixation on female breasts; Dix often seems to have equated women with dumbness, whether brute or weak. But he could be intermittently sympathetic, especially concerning the downtrodden or the creative, as evidenced by early portraits like “Working-Class Boy,” which calls to mind Alice Neel’s paintings, and “Unemployed Man,” and by later ones of the poet Iwar von Lücken and the philosopher Max Scheler. A borderline case is the rarely exhibited “Two Children” from 1921, whose subjects seem innocent and open, despite strangely deformed features, and is more Diane Arbus than Neel.    New York Times 3/11/10

Most astonishing about his work are the variety of styles in which he paints. He explore new genres over the course of his career changing his style continually.

                     
                


left:  Sunday Stroll

   
right: 
Prague Street 1921







   
   

                                                                The Match Seller 1920
                                                                          
                                                                                                
As with most German artists of his generation, Dix’s formative experience was World War I. He emerged from nearly four years in the trenches physically unscathed but psychically scarred. He attempted exorcism with “Der Krieg” (“The War”), a suite of 50 mostly masterly etchings published by Nierendorf in 1924. They convey a searing sense of the physical horror of war — most prominently wounded and rotting flesh — that remains unmatched in the history of art."    New York Times 3/11/10


Dix’s fifty prints that make up "War" are absolutely horrific and utterly terrifying. The pieces are smaller and darker than Beckmann’s, and more frightening. While Beckmann’s war takes place at home, on the streets and inside houses, Dix’s war is fought in the trenches, where soldiers become rotting skeletons, bodies hang from barbed wire, and even the survivors are battling death. Using different techniques, including etching and drypoint, Dix, who earned the Iron Cross in WWI, relates the hellish nature of war in gloomy panels that, taken together, would make one scary graphic novel — and are just as relevant today as when he made them in 1924. In "Soldiers’ Graves Between the Lines," the moon casts an eerie shadow on the dark night. Two skulls appear to be drowning in the earth in "Buried Alive." In "Shock Troops Advance Under Gas," four ghostly figures are charging forward in gas masks, evoking current fears of bioterrorism. There appears to be no relief in sight for the troops in "The Second Company Will Be Relieved Tonight." Several pieces show soldiers dancing with grotesque women, some of whom look like ghosts. In "The Madwoman of St.-Marie-à-Py," a lady erupts, a dead body at her knees. The "Dead Man" from St. Clement at first could be sleeping — until you look closer and see his brains oozing out of his head. Don’t rush through this powerful room; walk through it several times, take a seat, and breathe in the horror. It’s an exhilarating yet paralyzing experience.   This Week in New York

As German painters often still do, Dix believed that the medium’s entire history — especially the German part — was available for his use. He painted in the small-brush smooth-surface manner of Albrecht Dürer and looked to Lucas Cranach for inspiration. With contemporaries like Christian Schad, he contributed to a perverse new style of realist painting, called the New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit) that emerged in 1926. wikipedia

                                                                    Bertolt Brecht 1926                                                                         

                                                             Dr. Mayer -Hermann Berlin  1926
                                                                               

"Otto Dix created this painting titled The Seven Deadly Sins in 1933. It is an allegorical painting representing the political situation in Germany at the time, and was created immediately after the Nazis had Dix removed from his teaching position at the Dresden Art Academy.

                                                               The Seven Deadly Sins 1933
The figures are Avarice (an old, bent over hag clutching at money), Envy (who rides the back of Avarice), Sloth (the figure in the skeleton of Avarice, wears a mask of Adolf Hitler. As a matter of precaution, Dix did not paint in the Hitler mustache until after the War! The figure of Sloth is prominently featured because the Artist blamed the German people's lack of alarm and concern as a primary reason for the Nazis rise to power. This Oil and Tempera painting done on Wood shows Dix to have been one of Germany's grecostume who holds the scythe, and whose legs and arms form a rough swastika), Lust (who dances in a lascivious way behind Death, Anger (the horned Demon behind Death), Pride (the enormous head behind the scythe, whose ears are plugged and who has an anus for a mouth), and Gluttony (represented by the figure in the uppermost right corner who wears a cooking pot on his head). The figure of Envy, who rides the back of Avarice wears a mask of Adolf Hitler. As a matter of precaution, Dix did not paint in the Hitler mustache until after the war.. .Art for a Change by Mark Vallen

The Hitler Nazi regime destroyed many of Otto Dix’s paintings after the 1937 exhibition, ”Reflections on Decadence”. He must have been incredibly prolific. There are hundreds of images on the internet.

WAR/HELL: MASTER PRINTS

BY OTTO DIX AND MAX BECKMANN

Neue Galerie, third floor

1048 Fifth Ave. at 86th St.

Through September 26

Admission: $10

212-628-6200

http://www.neuegalerie.org/neuemain.html

Veteran's Day Salute

 Old Glory by Cole Scott

As the daughter of a WWII  USAF Lt. Col and the cousin of a USAF Master Sgt. and the mother of a son with friends in Special Ops and the US Coast Guard, as a person who is opposed to the wars in which we are presently engaged but who is supportive of all those who fight for our country, I salute the men and women, past and present, of the United States Armed Forces.