"How can I hurt you?" The author revisits two irreverent portraits of physicians by the German Expressionist Otto Dix in order to learn more about the sitters who submitted to the painter's fiercely satirical vision - Critical Essay - Biography

Art in America, April, 2004 by Sabine Rewald

Otto Dix was the most feared portraitist in Germany during the 1920s. Sitting for a portrait by Dix required strong nerves, self-confidence and, most importantly, a sturdy sense of humor. He liked to choose his own models and then mercilessly expose their weaknesses on canvas. Despite his ruthless realism, a surprising number of prominent people wanted to be portrayed by him. Among those he turned down were the dramatist Gerhart Hauptmann and the German chancellor Hans Luther. His sharpest portraits are of artists, poets, dancers, prostitutes and the rest of the glittering demimonde of the Weimar Republic, who did not object to being portrayed with an unflinching and brutal honesty.

Dix also painted a group of pictures of businessmen, lawyers, art dealers and doctors, often showing them with the attributes of their occupations. Memorable among these are his two portraits of doctors, Hans Koch and Wilhelm Mayer-Hermann, in which Dix subverts the conventional depiction of this honorable profession. Usually rendered as Good Samaritans, doctors in paintings typically hover near sickbeds or deathbeds, dispensing solace and advice. Not so in Dix's 1921 portrait of the urologist Hans Koch, in which the doctor inspires fear and foreboding.

Dr. Koch (1881-1952) was a specialist in bladder and kidney diseases in Dusseldorf. Shown armed with a red rubber catheter tube or tourniquet and an uplifted syringe, he seems about to jam an injection into a patient positioned outside the picture flame (the viewer, perhaps). His examination room gleams with menacing medical equipment. The high leather chair sprouts different stirrups for gynecological and urological examinations. Continuing a wayward Berlin Dada practice of the previous year, when he had added collage elements to his antiwar paintings, (1) Dix applied silver foil to the chair's spiky protruding metal tubes and screws, as well as the metal instruments that are arrayed on the glass table to the right. These are rendered with supply-catalogue exactness: the tweezers with bloody cotton swab, the vaginal speculum with a heavy handle reaching over the edge, the needle and the long forceps used to grab kidney stones. (2)

Above Dr. Koch's right shoulder, similar instruments peek through a glass cabinet, on top of which rest two rubber bladders. Bottles filled with mysterious tinctures line the shelves in the background near two suspended intravenous bottles filled with colored liquids. Under his open white physician's coat, Dr. Koch wears a vest and pants in the knobby fabric fashionable at the time. His rolled-up sleeves bare the thick forearms of a laborer. A slightly and glint shines in his eyes behind pince-nez. Two reddish dueling scars, badges of honor from his student days, glare prominently on his right cheek.

Over the years, commentators have compared Dr. Koch to a sorcerer, butcher and torturer in his chamber of horrors. A photograph of him taken around 1935, however, shows a mild and friendly looking man. Moreover, the urologist wore many different hats. In literary circles he was known as the author of expressionistic poems and novels. (3) He was also a critic, an art dealer and an enlightened collector, whose early taste leaned toward French art and who collected works by Vlaminck, Braque Ingres and Laurencin. (4) His house in Dusseldorf was a rare combination of domicile, doctor's office, wine cellar, and salon for artists and the literati. For two years, 1918 and 1919, Koch and his wife, Martha, operated a small gallery where they exhibited the works of young local artists from the Rhine and Dresden regions. They called it "Das graphische Kabinett von Bergh & Co.," using the name of a friend so that the enterprise would not conflict with his medical practice.

Dix had first contacted Koch in 1920, when the artist still lived in Dresden. That year marked his debut as an enfant terrible, with four ferocious and macabre antiwar pictures of war cripples. (5) These had brought Dix notoriety but no income, and at the end of the year he turned to portraiture and a more naturalistic approach. He also produced prints and sent four etchings to Koch, but had received no reply. Dix had learned about the doctor/collector from his friend, the painter Conrad Felixmuller (1897-1977). The latter's 1919 portrait of Koch, in a late expressionistic manner, shows the sitter in his role as writer or poet, complete with pince-nez, stiff collar and dark suit.

Though Dix's nearly caricatural portrait of Dr. Koch hints at gleeful cooperation between a "wicked" painter and a willing sitter, the latter's precise response to the painting is unknown. In 1923 Koch sold the painting to the Cologne collector Josef Haubrich, who donated his 20th-century art, including this painting, to his native city in 1946. The portrait hangs there today in the Museum Ludwig.

Meanwhile, Dix and Koch became friends. (6) And, at the same time, Dix and Martha Koch became lovers, sharing, among other things, a passion for dancing. When Dix returned to Dresden at the end of 1921, Martha Koch followed him, leaving her husband and two children behind. Koch remained unperturbed, however, because he had already begun an affair with his wife's older sister, Maria Lindner. Two new couples formed. Koch and Dix became brothers-in-law, and the friendship continued until Koch's death in 1952. (7)