Otto Dix was the most numerous feared portraitist in Germany during the 1920 Sitting for a portrait from Dix required strong nerves.

Otto Dix was the most numerous feared portraitist in Germany during the 1920 Sitting for a portrait from Dix required strong nerves, self-confidence and, in the greatest degree importantly, a sturdy sense of humor. He liked to select his own models and then mercilessly show up their weaknesses on canvas. Despite his ruthles realism, a surprising number of prominent the community wanted to be portrayed on him. Among those he bended down were the dramatist Gerhart Hauptmann and the German chancellor Hans Luther. His sharpest portraits are of artists, bards dancers, prostitutes and the interval of the glittering demimonde of the Weimar Republic, who did not final cause to being portrayed with an unflinching and brutal honesty

Dix also painted a cluster of pictures of businessmen, lawyers, art dealers and doctors, oftentimes showing them with the attributes of their occupations. Memorable among these are his sum of two units portraits of doctors, Hans Koch and Wilhelm Mayer-Hermann, in which Dix overthrows the conventional depiction of this honorable profession. Usually restoreed as Good Samaritans, doctors in paintings typically flutter near sickbeds or deathbeds, dispensing solace and advice. Not in the way that 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 r rubber catheter tube or tourniquet and an uplifted syringe, he appear to bes about to jam an injection into a patient positioned outside the picture flame (the viewer, perhaps). His examination expanse gleams with menacing medical equipment. The high leather chair shoot forths different stirrups for gynecological and urological examinations. Continuing a wayward Berlin Dada practice of the previous year, when he had added collage components to his antiwar paintings, (1) Dix applied silver foil to the chair's spiky protruding metal tubes and extortioners as well as the metal instruments that are arrayed upon the glass table to the right. These are assigned with supply-catalogue exactness: the tweezers with sanguinary cotton swab, the vaginal mirror with a heavy handle reaching athwart the edge, the needle and the protracted forceps used to grab kidney stones. (2)

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

through the whole extent of 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, displays a mild and friendly looking man. Moreover, the urologist wore many different hats. In literary circles he was known as the author of expressionistic metrical compositions and novels. (3) He was also a critic, an art dealer and an enlightened collector, whose early taste leaned toward French art and who gathered 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 pair 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 in such a manner 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 first attempt as an enfant terrible, with four ferocious and macabre antiwar pictures of war cripples. (5) These had brought Dix notoriety further no income, and at the extremity of the year he inflected to portraiture and a more naturalistic approach. He also produc prints and sent four etchings to Koch if it were not that 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, exhibits the sitter in his part as writer or poet, thorough with pince-nez, stiff collar and dark suit.

granting Dix's nearly caricatural portrait of Dr Koch hints at gay cooperation between a "wicked" painter and a willing sitter, the latter's precise replication to the painting is unknown. In 1923 Koch sold the painting to the eau-de-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 lover sharing, among other things, a passion for dancing. When Dix answered to Dresden at the completion of 1921, Martha Koch followed him, leaving her husband and couple children behind. Koch remained unperturbed, however, because he had already begun an affair with his wife's older sister, Maria Lindner. brace new couples formed. Koch and Dix became brothers-in-law, and the friendship continued until Koch's death in 1952 (7)