Time & Perspective Quote by Otto Dix

Dix doesn’t romanticize inspiration; he medicalizes it. “All art is exorcism” treats painting less like decoration than a violent clearing-out, a ritual to drive something lodged in the psyche back into the dark. Coming from a man who served in World War I and then painted its aftermath with surgical cruelty, the line reads as both confession and method: he isn’t chasing beauty, he’s trying to survive his own inner archive.

The shrewd move is how he yokes the personal to the historical without letting either one become a comforting alibi. “I paint dreams and visions too; the dreams and visions of my time” reframes surreal imagery as reportage. These aren’t private fantasies; they’re the fever-dreams a society produces when it’s been fed mechanized slaughter, inflation, street violence, and political extremism. Dix’s so-called “visions” are what reality looks like when the moral order has been blown apart.

Then comes the austerity of “Painting is the effort to produce order; order in yourself.” He’s not claiming that art fixes the world. He’s saying it’s a discipline, a way to impose structure on what otherwise metastasizes into noise: trauma, lust, fear, rage. The final admission lands hardest because it refuses the myth of the artist as detached observer. “There is much chaos in me, much chaos in our time” is a double exposure: self-portrait and era-portrait aligned. Dix’s intent is to make the canvas a battlefield where chaos is confronted, not prettified, and where order is earned, not assumed.