Die kartenspieler otto dix biography

Artist
Otto Dix

Title
The Skat Players (War Cripples Playing Cards)

Year of creation
1920

Technique and dimensions
Oil and collage on canvas, 110 x 87 cm

Year of acquisition
1995

In April 1919, war returnee Otto Dix witnessed how angry war invalids threw the Saxon defense minister Neuring into the Elbe and shot him. In 1920, the begging war cripples on the famous Prague Street became a disturbing presence for the painter. The shock of the experience was deep, with sympathy but also distance, Dix painted, glued and sewed together his four-picture series of war cripples in a crude, strikingly simplified grotesque style between March and June 1920.

Dix had seen the cripples playing cards in a back room of a Dresden coffee house. “The Skat Players” was staged by the “director” Otto Dix as a grotesque chamber play with three invalids in a late-night coffee house. A conspirato