Otto Dix was born in Unternhaus, Germany in 1891. After attending elementary school he worked at various jobs until he was nineteen when he became a student at the Dresden School of Arts and Crafts. To help fund his education, he accepted commissions and painted portraits of the local people.

At the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, Dix volunteered for the German army and in the autumn of 1915 was sent to the Western Front where he served as a non-commissioned officer with a machine gun unit. He was at the Somme during the major allied offensive during the summer of 1916. Dix was wounded several times during the war and on one occasion nearly died when a shrapnel splinter hit him in the neck.

By the end of the war in 1918 Dix had won the Iron Cross medal and reached the rank of vice-sergeant-major. He had also developed left-wing views and his paintings and drawings became increasingly political. Like fellow German artist George Grosz, Dix was angry about the way that the wounded and crippled ex-soldiers were treated in Germany and this was reflected in his paintings. In 1923, Dix’s painting, ‘The Trench’ was purchased by the Wallraf-Richartz Museum. When the painting was exhibited in 1924, its depiction of decomposed corpses in a German trench created such a public outcry that the museum's director was forced to resign.
In 1924 Dix joined with other artists who had fought in the First World War to put on a travelling exhibition of paintings called ‘No More War’, he also produced a book of etchings, that was later described by one critic as "perhaps the most powerful as well as the most anti-war statement in modern art".

In 1933 Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany. Hitler and his Nazi government disliked Dix's anti-military paintings and arranged for him to be relieved from his post as art teacher at the Dresden Academy. Dix's dismissal letter said that his work "threatened to sap the will of the German people to defend themselves."

Although Dix mainly painted landscapes during this period, he still produced the occasional painting which contained coded attacks on the Nazi government.
In 1939 Dix was arrested and charged with involvement in a plot on Hitler's life. After being released he was conscripted into the German Army and at the end of the war was captured and put into a prisoner-of-war camp.
Dix was released in February of 1946 and returned to Dresden where he continued to paint and create though his work suffered as he was divided between two Germanys with opposing ideologies. Until the end of his life he continued painting religious, landscape and portrait paintings, but many say his work had lost the accuracy and energy of his earlier art. He continued painting however until his death in 1969.