Reclining Woman on Leopard (Portrait of Vera Simailowa) (1927) by Otto Dix. Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University. (Montreal Museum of Fine Arts)If the 20th century is indeed the Age of Extremes, no artist better reflects this notion than Otto Dix, whose disturbingly carnal depictions of German society in the decades after the First World War are the subject of a major show opening Sept. 24 at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.

Otto Dix was obsessed with revealing the predatory animal within the human psyche.

Rouge Cabaret: The Terrifying and Beautiful World of Otto Dix is the first North American solo exhibit of the controversial German artist (1891-1969), who is considered one of the 20th century's most important painters. Dix is celebrated both for his technical mastery and his unflinching portrayal of the violence, poverty and decadence of German society in the chaotic years between the two world wars.

Dix came of age during the Weimar Republic (1919-1933), a period of social, political and economic upheaval. A First World War veteran, fascinated by man's impulse to kill and harm, Dix was obsessed with revealing the predatory animal within the human psyche.

Self-Portrait in the City (1921) by Otto Dix. Serge Sabarsky Collection, New York. (Montreal Museum of Fine Arts)“After serving in the war, he felt like both a victim and an executioner. It was a major trauma for those soldiers. They had seen the apocalypse,” says Nathalie Bondil, director and chief curator of the museum. “Dix explores the barbarian aspect of humanity. He portrayed a society that was experiencing a deep malaise.”

The exhibit of 220 works is curated by German art historian Olaf Peter. It made its debut this spring at New York's Neue Galerie, but Bondil has completely transformed it to meet what she believes are the needs of the North American audience. “In New York they provided no context,” she says. “But I believe that in North America, we don’t really understand the impact of World War I, particularly young people. I wanted them to understand the context of his work. Without context, Dix's art seems very weird.”

As a result, the exhibit, which divides Dix’s life and work into six themes, includes background on the two World Wars and the Weimar Republic, footage from some classic German films of the time, and information about his major influences, such as the Expressionist and Dada movements.

Dead Sentry in Trench (from the portfolio War, 1924) by Otto Dix. (Montreal Museum of Fine Arts)The first part of the exhibit plunges us into the trenches of the First World War. Dix, who served as a machine gunner and regularly took part in direct hand-to-hand combat, drew incessantly during that time. But it wasn’t until the early 1920s, when he completed his 50 Der Krieg prints – inspired by Francisco de Goya's 19th-century etchings Los Desastres de la guerra (The Disasters of War) – that he began to fully express his experience.

A master of the techniques of graphic design and printing, Dix’s elaborately detailed black-and-white series portrays the war with disturbing, comic-book humour: skeletons smile, worms wiggle out of skulls and soldiers have the monstrous features of evil characters from a Grimm Brothers fairy tale. Unlike the war victims in Goya’s deeply compassionate etchings, Dix’s images of war lack humanity and are therefore completely terrifying. I found them technically extraordinary but was repelled by their cynicism.

Although the peace movement lauded the Der Krieg prints as anti-war, Dix refused to be labelled a pacifist. “I didn’t paint war pictures in order to prevent war,” he said. “I would never have been so presumptuous. I painted them to exorcise war.”

Some of the most powerful works in the exhibit are the portraits and drawings of those made destitute by the war. They include The Skat Players, which depicts three soldiers attempting to play cards with their prosthetic limbs, and Matchbook Seller, a portrait of a legless man hawking matchbooks on the street. One of the more tender works in the exhibit is Dix’s painting of a poor boy and girl (The Children, 1921), their heads large and pale on their thin bodies.

Half-Nude (1926) by Otto Dix. Private Collection, New York. (Montreal Museum of Fine Arts)Sex, a major preoccupation for the artist, is front and centre in this exhibit. Prostitutes were ever present during the wild days of the Weimar Republic, and Dix painted them with a fervour that some have called misogynistic. The artist’s renderings of street walkers, some with distended bellies and sagging breasts, are both erotic and ugly. In their press material, the exhibition’s curators put forward that his portraits of prostitutes are a “veiled critique of the dubious and absurd German mania for physical fitness,” at the time. Perhaps, but it’s clear Dix was turned on by his subjects. Many of the prostitutes appear to be performers in a lewd circus of Dix’s imagination.

Equally arresting are his series on post-war sex murders, which increased in Germany during the Weimar Republic. In the watercolour Scene II (Murder), Dix paints a prostitute with her throat slit – a ring of red blood surrounds her head, her naked body pale and fully exposed. While many of Dix’s portraits of sex workers seem to hold women in contempt Scene II is delicate and touching. It portrays the victim as vulnerable rather than grotesque. The oil and tempera portrait Half-Nude, from 1926, also stands out for its compassionate rendering of a naked middle-aged woman anxiously covering her breasts.

Dix was a complex man and an extraordinary artist. His work shocks because of its apparent amorality. Was he disgusted by war or did he relish it? Did he care about prostitutes, murder victims and crippled soldiers or, like a tabloid photographer, was he simply drawn to the spectacle of human misery?

The German artist always maintained that his principal goal was to see the world clearly. “I studied war closely. It must be represented realistically, so that it is understood. The artist works so that others can see that such a thing existed.”

Rouge Cabaret: The Terrifying and Beautiful World of Otto Dix runs from Sept. 24 to Jan. 2 at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.

Patricia Bailey is a writer based in Montreal.