Tradition, Innovation and the Construction of Identity in Otto Dix's Portraits and Self-Portraits 1912--1925

This dissertation investigates Otto Dix's response to the dramatic shift in German cultural identity within the first two decades of the twentieth century through a series of portraits and self-portraits. It rethinks the phenomenology of representation in portraiture in Germany between the Wilhelmine era (1890-1914) and the first half of the Weimar Republic (1919-1925) to consider Dix's interpretative role in depicting himself and his sitters within the circumstances faced by German society prior to, and directly following, the First World War. In focusing on his portraits and self-portraits, it addresses a central paradox of Dix's work: his consistent commitment to a genre whose very existence in terms of specificity and occasionality militates against the idea of modernism, which is frequently concerned with the rejection of mimesis and the representational traditions of the past. Though Dix's dogged adherence to portraiture would seem to be both anomalous and anachronistic, he used the genre to engage the German art-historical tradition in a critical dialogue. However much Dix appeared to be at the vanguard of a new aesthetic moment in German painting as the alleged progenitor of Neue Sachlichkeit portraiture, he painted with an innate conservatism that technically and iconographically involved harnessing the art-historical past. One of the central questions posed in this dissertation is why Dix returned to historicizing modes of portraiture and how he operated within the larger constraints of tradition, not in order to pay homage to the past, but to demonstrate the dialectical relationship between modern artistic innovation and received tradition.