MADRID, SPAIN.-Opening on 11 March at the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza is the exhibition Otto Dix: Portrait of Hugo Erfurth. Techniques and Secrets, the 21st in the Contexts of the Permanent Collection series. Once again, a work from the Museum’s collection will be the starting-point for a thematic exhibition that illustrates and investigates in depth the context in which it was created. On this occasion the work is Hugo Erfurth with Dog, executed in 1926 by one of the great German painters of the 20th century: Otto Dix.

The exhibition is the result of a joint research project undertaken by the Museum’s Departments of Modern Painting and Restoration, respectively led by Paloma Alarcó, Curator of Modern Painting, and Ubaldo Sedano, Chief Restorer. It has been structured from a dual perspective: firstly, it analyses Dix’s realist style and the artist’s relationship with his friend Erfurth, a celebrated portrait photographer. By doing so, it analyses in detail a key chapter in the artistic debate of the period, namely the relative merits of painting and photography. The exhibition will bring together works by both men to reveal how their mutual influence went beyond their close friendship and to compare Erfurth’s pictorialist style with Dix’s almost photographic one.

Secondly, the exhibition aims to reveal to the public the secrets of Otto Dix’s unique technique deployed in his paintings. Dix’s creative process at the period when he painted Erfurth’s portrait was marked by his interest in reviving the techniques of the great German Renaissance painters such as Dürer and Cranach. The preparatory drawings and the scientific tests and research undertaken by the Museum’s Restoration Department - illustrated here through a series of photographs, x-rays and other types of images - will allow the visitor to appreciate Dix’s portrait in a different and undoubtedly fascinating way.

Otto Dix. The Old Master of Modern Art

Otto Dix and Hugo Erfurth met in 1920. At that point Dix was still a young and unknown painter who had recently arrived in Dresden (in 1919) after four years at the Front. He enrolled at the Fine Arts Academy and made contact with numerous figures in the city’s cultural circles, among them Hugo Erfurth. Erfurth was fifteen years older than Dix and an established portrait photographer of leading figures of the Weimar Republic. His interest in photographing the new generation of artists living in Dresden (one of the most culturally active centres of the day) encouraged their friendship, which would continue for some years.

Having experimented with Expressionism, Futurism and even Dada, Dix finally opted for a realist language that allowed him to present a critical view of the society that surrounded him and which led him to become one of the leading representatives of New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit). His profound knowledge and admiration for the Old Masters, particularly the German Renaissance painters, led him to base his new style on a technique that revived their working methods. This included the use of panel rather than canvas as a support and a mixed technique of tempera and oil; his painstaking preparation of the support; his way of using the pigments and glazes, and even his signature in the form of a monogram in the manner of Lucas Cranach. These technical resources also provided him with a way to emphasise form over colour and to convey the critical objectivity that he desired, accentuating the realism of his style and endowing it with the critical, ironic and mordant tone that is so typical of his work.

At the same time, Dix’s revival of old techniques and styles, combined with this “return to order” on the part of a realist artist in opposition to the language of the contemporary avant-garde movements, was accompanied in his work (and in that of other German artists of the day) by an interest in rediscovering signs of national identity, establishing a link with the great heritage of German culture.

Otto Dix, painter / Hugo Erfurth, photographer

The portrait was one of the most frequently used genres in Dix’s work of the inter-war period. He deployed traditional compositional models but introduced elements of distortion in the details of the figures (the hands or gaze, for example), or the setting in which they were located. Dix painted Hugo Erfurth for the first time in 1922 and then again on various subsequent occasions. By the time he painted Hugo Erfurth with his Dog in 1926 Dix had abandoned the critical tone of his earlier works, although he still retained the use of mixed technique on panel. Dix also used this technique to paint Erfurth’s dog, Ajax, in another painting of 1928, this time depicting the animal on its own. The painting of Ajax, together with two preparatory drawings for the Thyssen portrait, can be seen in the present exhibition, alongside photographs by Erfurth including various portraits of Dix and his own self-portrait. Erfurth belonged to the generation of photographers that endeavoured to win photography the same status as painting. He did so by using pictorialist techniques and subjects and genres derived from painting, while he also aimed to convey the inner character of his sitters.

The comparison between painting and photography was a common topic of debate at this period. Dix and Erfurth shared an interest in portraiture and also depicted some of the same sitters. In addition, they were both aware that the rising medium of photography offered serious competition to the painted portrait and were directly involved in this debate. On various occasions, for example, Dix revealed his conviction that painting was superior to photography when capturing the inner nature of the sitter: “[…] photography can only capture an instant (and that in a merely external way), but it can never create the specific form of the individual, as this depends on the painter’s creative capacity and intuition.” (Reflections on the Art of Portraiture)

Techniques and Secrets

The exhibition and in its accompanying catalogue present the results of the research project undertaken by the Museum’s Restoration Department on Dix’s Hugo Erfurth with Dog. The intention was to study the technique used in the work’s execution and the materials employed by the artist through a scientific analysis of the painting. With this aim in mind, various techniques and types of equipment available in the Museum’s laboratory were employed. They include macro-photography, which makes it possible to see the unique characteristics of an artist’s technique on the surface not visible to the human eye, such as the nature of the brushwork, the richness of nuances, and the slips or merits of an artist as he or she works; infra-red reflectography, which reveals the drawing beneath the paint layers; X-rays, which reveal the distribution of the different layers of paint used to create the painting; and finally, the analysis of materials, which provide us with an image of the sequential order of the superimposed paint layers and the materials used by the artist.

The results obtained, together with an analysis of the preparatory drawings and cartoons for the final work (which can also be seen in the exhibition), have made it possible to obtain interesting conclusions regarding Dix’s working methods: the craftsmanship and care that he put into the creation of his paintings; the quality of the materials used; the technique used to transfer the preparatory drawing to the final painting; the way of applying the layers of pigment in order to achieve effects of light and transparency; the interest in and revival of the use of glazes, etc. Overall, the exhibition presents the scientific documentation of Dix’s working methods, in which he borrowed the techniques of the Renaissance masters but with