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Poor ol' Otto. I find his work most evocative of a period & timeless in its "distortions" of the human form, no less (more?) suggestive than Blake's. (Of course, someone's going to cry "misogynist" against him too.) I don't see that his women come off worse than his men (in the riotous brothel scenes, for example), and his pictures of war are stunning; I just had a look on the net to revive my memories ~ there's a very good French enthusiast's site (Le Tour d'Otto Dix ~ sorry, I can't seem to beam down that hyperlink) with a lot of the best work, the Stuttgart gallery being very miserly in that respect ~ and I was awed by the " forms and colours like living reality" as he put it, the range & intensity. There's a letter by him (in French on the site) in which he says he'd prefer no discussion of his work at the level of "the opinion of the people", they'd had enough of that ~ this was 1927! Every petit bourgeois was rabid to tell the artist WHAT he had to paint, but the HOW was the thing... Another "horrifying" painter of "distorted" social realities was Ludwig Meidner, there's life & death in them thar paintings ~ put your recording of Schoenberg's _Begleitmusik für eine Lichtspielszene_ or Berg's _Lulu-Sinfonie_ on loud and go on a trip... I'm probably so impassioned about this because I watched a very good documentary based on Viktor Klemperer's diaries last night, and I shall go back to them toot sweet this summer for sure, I've only read dribs & drabs so far; if you read one book about that time, then this, straight from the inferno by a man who knew what beauty involved (love, truthfulness, realization, relatedness) & noticed everything. Heartbreaking to think of the Germany that was, with all its faults... Martin