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Artist or Maker: Otto Dix (1891-1969)
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Provenance: Galleria Galatea, Turin.
Acquired from the above by the father of the present owner in 1969.
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Exhibited: Zurich, Kunstsalon Wolfsberg, Sonder-Ausstellung Otto Dix, Gemälde, Aquarelle, Zeichnungen, Graphik, February - April, 1929, no. 26a.
Berlin, Galerie Nierendorf, Otto Dix, Bilder, Aquarelle, Zeichnungen, Das graphische Gesamtwerk 1913-1960, January - April 1961, no. 40 (illustrated in the catalogue p. 11).
Darmstadt, Hessisches Landesmuseum, Otto Dix, Gemälde, Handzeichnungen, Aquarelle, June - August 1962, no. 81.
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Literature: O. Conzelmann, Otto Dix, Weiber, Frankfurt, 1976 (illustrated p. 111).
B. Barton, Otto Dix and 'Die Neue Sachlichkeit 1918-1925', Michigan, 1981, no. VI B 54 (illustrated p. 145).
S. Pfäffle, Otto Dix, Werkverzeichnis der Aquarelle und Gouachen, Stuttgart, 1991, no. A1923/16 (illustrated p. 180).
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Notes: PROPERTY FROM A PRIVATE ITALIAN COLLECTION
This rarely seen watercolour which, as its title suggests, is 'Dedicated to Fetishists', is one of a rare series of fantastical erotic watercolours that Dix painted in the early 1920s. Ranging from depictions of deviant sado-masochistic sexual practice to the gruesome 'Lustmords' taking place in suburban apartments, Dix's work during the inflation years of the Weimar Republic catalogues the exotic and debauched extremes of human behaviour in this unique period of desperation and frivolity.
Fetischisten Gewidmet is unlike these other works however in being very much a joyful celebration of its subject rather than a work of harsh realism providing a voyeuristic insight into a sordid underworld of sexual deviancy and bestial murder. It was evidently one of Dix's favourite works at this time as he priced it in his handlist at the extraordinary price of 120 gold marks. The highest of any price listed for his works, it is one that suggests he was anxious not to part with the work.
Creating a fashion parade of extraordinary costume and naked flesh, the fetishists in this watercolour are self-fetishising women proudly donning unique outfits that display their erotic features (their large breasts and backsides) as fetishistic attributes. Dix evidently applauds this self-celebration of the very attributes in a woman with which he himself obsessed. His love of large breasts and fleshy buttocks is well documented and seemingly derives from a well-endowed nursemaid he remembered seeing naked when he was a boy (see S. Pfäffle, Otto Dix, Werkverzeichnis der Aquarelle und Gouachen, Stuttgart, 1991, p. 53). In Fetischisten Gewidmet he has clearly reveled in his subject matter paying tribute to women who, in his eyes, have gone to extreme lengths to celebrate the self-same attributes he enjoyed in them.
Dix, like many artists of his generation, had a great fascination for the outsiders of society, those whom Jack Kerouac would later describe for his generation as the 'mad ones'. In Weimar Berlin these were the sailors and adventurers, the freaks and circus performers, criminals, prostitutes, cripples and other outcasts. Sadists, murderers, cocaine addicts and suicides too became other subjects worthy of note to artists, like Dix, interested in any examples of life outside or on the periphery of the hated grey, normal existence of everyday metropolitan life. Erotomaniacs too, such as those depicted in this joyous and brilliantly coloured watercolour were also to be applauded and celebrated for raising themselves above the level of the humdrum and the banal and it is in this way that this painting is both a tribute and an homage.
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