How small details in the paintings of Otto Dix materialize the realities of a modern German artist.
 
Offering a fresh look at German art during a period of extraordinary transition and precarity, James A. van Dyke focuses on overlooked but critically significant details in works completed by Otto Dix between 1919 and 1936. A small lump of paint, a monogram, an almost invisible self-portrait, the verso of a drawing, a patch of discoloration, and a web of fine cracks—van Dyke reveals such details, hidden in plain sight, as coded dialogue through which Dix addressed audiences and art-world insiders amid the combative world of cultural production in Weimar Germany. Sly, cutting, and provocative, these are the material traces of social relationships between the painter and those who represented threats to his professional ambition: an avant-garde mentor and rival, an increasingly skeptical critic, a prominent bourgeois photographer, and a local Nazi authority.
 
Proving that small things offer insight into the big picture, this book highlights Dix’s satirical, transgressive work as nuanced and polyvocal, reflecting the complex fields of power and economics in which the field of art is located.
 

James A. van Dyke is associate professor and director of graduate studies in art history at the University of Missouri. He is the author of Franz Radziwill and the Contradictions of German Art History, 1919–1945 and president of the Historians of German, Scandinavian, and Central European Art and Architecture. He has contributed to numerous edited collections and exhibition catalogues on German art, and his work has appeared in Art History, Oxford Art Journal, German Quarterly, New German Critique, German Studies Review, and Kunst und Politik, among others.