Le marchand d’allumettes d’Otto Dix, une œuvre manifeste ?

Otto Dix’s Match Seller, a manifesto-work ? In 1920, after the events of the Kapp putsch at Dresden, and after the mutilation of one of Rubens’ paintings, Bathsheba ai the fountain (held by the town’s Museum of Fine Art), caused by the fighting, Oskar Kokoschka launched an appeal encouraging his artist peers to prevent the destruction of the German artistic heritage. This appeal sets off the Kunstlump controversy, one of the essential episodes in the debates which agitated the Weimar Republic’s artistic community around the question of the social role of artists and of art. In his painting, The Match Seller (1920), in which the main figure is a disabled ex-serviceman, Otto Dix brought his contribution to the polemics launched by George Grosz and John Heartfield. The painting incorporates an extract from the text of Kokoschka’s appeal and also a possibly unconscious quotation from Grünewald ’s Issenheim altar screen. This last is pointed out here by a brief study of the relations between the Big City triptych (1927-1928) and the old master’s masterpiece. These indications bring the debate more directly to bear on the social role that avant-garde artists now supposedly occupied. Consequendy, Dix’s work may not be seen as a purely circumstantial statement, stigmatizing the political attitudes which lead to war and to the Kapp putsch ; on the contrary, it is a deeper reflection on the real possibilities for art and the artist to have an influential role.Wermester Catherine. Le marchand d’allumettes d’Otto Dix, une œuvre manifeste ?. In: Histoire de l'art, N°20, 1992. Iconographie. pp. 89-97