Martha Dix

In addition to music, she was also interested in fine arts and design from an early age, so she attended the Cologne Sonderbund exhibition when she was 17.

[4] In October 1921, Otto Dix came to Düsseldorf at the invitation of Johanna Ey and Hans Koch, where he sold the latter two works and received his first portrait commission from him.

[5] A love affair quickly developed between Martha Koch and Otto Dix, which culminated in the fact that she went to Dresden with him for a few months before returning to Düsseldorf.

In 1935/1936, after the death of her father, Martha Dix had her own house and studio built with her inheritance in Hemmenhofen on the Lake Constance; she herself was registered as the client.

Otto Dix traveled to Dresden until 1943 and annually after 1947, where he had a long-time lover Käthe König, with whom he had a daughter born in 1939.

After she had a first heart attack in 1979, Martha Dix moved to Sarrians in Provence, France, to live with her granddaughter Bettina, from where she made further trips to Greece and Turkey.

[10] She handed over the house in Hemmenhofen and the rights to her husband's estate to the Otto Dix Foundation, which she founded in 1983, and whose shareholders were her two sons and granddaughter Bettina Dix-Pfefferkorn.

Most of the pictures were done in Düsseldorf, Dresden and Berlin, starting with portrait sketches in October 1921, when the couple was just getting to know each other in the Koch house, to the first representative oil painting that shows her as a complex personality, in black fur with a red hat.

A penultimate drawing, which differs greatly from the previous illustrations, Mutz Sitting was created in 1933, “distant and without illusions”.