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Artist or Maker: Otto Dix (1891-1969)
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Provenance: Galerie Nierendorf, Berlin, until 14 August 1922.
Acquired by the family of the present owner in the 1920s.
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Exhibited: Berlin, Kronprinzenpalais, Dix-Aquarellausstellung , November 1924. Stuttgart, Galerie der Stadt, Otto Dix , September - November 1991, no. 70 (illustrated); this exhibition later travelled to Berlin, Nationalgalerie Staatliche Museen, Preussischer Kulturbesitz, November 1991 - February 1992 and to London, Tate Gallery, March - May 1992.
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Notes: PROPERTY FROM A PRIVATE GERMAN COLLECTION
Der Gott der Konditoren is part of a series of exquisite watercolours executed by Dix around 1922 when he had just arrived in Dresden. These works stand out in Dix's oeuvre as being extraordinarily rich in colour and of great tonal variation. The God of Confectioners is one of the 'Gods' created out of everyday workers by Otto Dix. The other Gods, created the same year, are the Gods of Gents' and Ladies' Tailors (Pfäffle, no. A 20er J/26), now lost, and the God of Hairdressers , which is today part of the Buchheim Collection in Bernried (Pfäffle, no. A 1922/5).
Dix's humour and wit reach their peak in Der Gott der Konditoren , as he savagely criticises bourgeois society and middle-class vanities. Dix's 'God of Confectioners' is a chubby semi-naked man floating happily into his own confectioner's shop, identified as the chef-cook only by his white hat. The shop is decorated with a heavy red curtain and is overloaded with Baroque ornaments in the background. In the foreground, a selection of wondrous sweets and cakes of fairy-tale proportions, fills up the table. Suse Pfäffle suggests that these patisseries recall the still lives of the artist Paul Kleinschmidt (1883-1949), thematically and stylistically. Dix's ironic and disgusted portrayal of bourgeois gluttony in the present work, and vanity in Der Gott der Friseure translates an age-old theme, exemplified by Hieronymus Bosch in his masterpiece The Seven Deadly Sins (c.1485; Prado, Madrid), into a cautionary lesson for the modern man.
