Otto Dix

“I am a child of my time.”

“I had to experience how someone beside me suddenly falls over and is dead and the bullet has hit him squarely. I had to experience that quite directly. I wanted it.”

“All art is exorcism. I paint dreams and visions too; the dreams and visions of my time.”

“I have to see things for myself, I have to experience all the sordid depths of life for myself; that's why I went to war, and that's why I went into the slums and to the brothels.”

“For me, the object is primary and determines the form.”

“You don't need to paint the horrors of war. The horrors of life are quite sufficient.”

“The painter does not paint what he sees, but what he has to be able to see.”

“I'm not a pacifist. I'm a realist.”

“The war was a horrible thing, but it was a great thing all the same. I wouldn't have missed it for the world.”

“People were already beginning to forget, what horrible suffering the war had brought them. I did not want to cause fear and panic, but to let people know how dreadful war is and so to stimulate people's powers of resistance.”

“I wanted to show things as they really are. You have to be truthful.”