Produced under the editorship of Olaf Peters, the catalogue, with more than 250 pages and numerous illustrations, includes analyses by leading Otto Dix specialists. The English version is published by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, The Neue Galerie New York and Prestel and the French version by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and Prestel.

On sale at the Museum Boutique and Bookstore ($59.95 before tax).
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Foreword of the catalogue by Nathalie Bondil
Director and Chief Curator
The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts

The Portrait of the Lawyer Hugo Simons by Otto Dix
Düsseldorf 1925 — Montreal 1993
From Easel to Museum, a Cautionary Tale

This work of art should not be allowed to go without a fight.¹

''How Montreal could lose a masterpiece.'' ² In January of 1993, an event that shook the Montreal community was being talked about far beyond the city's limits. Otto Dix's The Portrait of the Lawyer Hugo Simons by Otto Dix was in danger of leaving the country. ''Are we to repeat the economic disaster of the Gustav Klimt portrait that we lost with no fuss a few years ago?'' ³ worried one concerned citizen, referring to the Portrait of Eugenia Primavesi that had been in the possession of the sitter's daughter, a resident of Montreal, but had been sold in New York before ending up in a Japanese museum. ''Should we buy a painting or fund an AID S hospice?'' ⁴ railed another newspaper reader. Rarely had a work of art inspired such controversy in the city. What followed was a textbook case—a cautionary tale.

Düsseldorf, 1925. Otto Dix was pleased. The lawyer he had chosen, the brilliant Hugo Simons (1892–1958), had just won a lawsuit on his behalf. Dix would finally be paid for the portrait commissioned by the father of a certain Miss Grünthal. The former had, in the end, refused to accept the painting on the grounds that it was a poor likeness. No less than artistic freedom of expression was on trial. A knowledgeable connoisseur, Hugo Simons admired the artists of the Neue Sachlichkeit movement and collected German Expressionist works. A man of conviction, he had a keen intellect and was extremely eloquent. Dix painted his portrait to thank him (cat. 150), but not only for that reason: ''When I tell people I would like to paint them, I already have their portrait in mind. I don't paint people who don't interest me.'' ⁵ A friendship sprung up between the two men that would last the rest of their lives, despite the persecutions that fate— and history—would throw in their way.

Berlin, 1933. ''The Third Reich is upon us after all . . . .I suppose that you have other worries now, but perhaps you don't see matters so tragically after all,'' wrote Dix⁶ to his friend, concerned about a future commission for a Simons family portrait, a work that would never see the light of day, and for good reason.⁷ The anti-Semitic Nuremberg Laws were enacted soon after. Simons was prohibited from practising his profession, and the family was stripped of their German citizenship. Warned one night by a cousin whose papers had just been confiscated by the Gestapo, Hugo Simons decided to flee along with his wife and children on the first train to The Hague, taking only a minimum of possessions— among them, his portrait. Simons remained there, living off his personal fortune as he could not practise law, until the brink of World War II. During those years, sometimes at the risk of his life, he helped many other Jews escape from Germany and settle in the Netherlands, as well as get their money out of German banks through a procedure that the Nazis themselves dubbed ''the Simons loophole.'' As for Dix, he was dismissed from his teaching position at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts, his art being considered ''degenerate,'' an outrage to public decency and patriotism. Hemmenhofen, 1946. ''Dear Dr. Simons,'' wrote Otto Dix,'' I was happy to hear from you again. Above all I am glad that you have escaped the filthy Nazi business. Perhaps you have heard that in these last twelve years I was constantly being harassed—house searches, arrests by the Gestapo and, to top it all off, conscription into the army and a year as a French prisoner of war. You probably also know that throughout the whole time I was not allowed to exhibit. But the filthy pigs did not consider it beneath their dignity to remove my works from museums and auction them off in Switzerland.'' ⁸

Along with his wife Madeleine, their two children⁹ and his mother-in-law, Simons had succeeded in escaping to Canada in 1939, settling, as did so many others, in Montreal. During this time of privation in the German countryside, Dix was reduced to asking for food parcels from his friend: ''The food is so boring without spices (there is a lack of spices as well) that one feels as if one were a cow.'' He went on to complain: ''And yet, I have exhibited for years at the Carnegie Institute, I have pictures in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, but apparently it doesn't occur to anyone there to help in any way. It is indeed a rather sorry thing that one has to turn like this to one's friends in the West with such requests.''¹⁰ Simons continued to provide support for his painter friend in spite of his own limited means. Unable to practise his profession in his new home, this highly educated man preferred to hold low-level jobs, rather than return to Germany and take up the prestigious position that had been offered to him. ''I am astonished that you are selling cooling systems. I thought it was already cold anyway, so that it would be more advantageous to sell central heating systems.''¹¹ Simons died in 1958. Dix's portrait of him always hung in his room on the wall opposite his bed.

Stuttgart, 1991. Andrea Hollmann, curator of the major exhibition celebrating the centenary of Otto Dix's birth, could not hold back her tears on seeing the painting that she believed had been lost forever, relates the sitter's youngest son, Jan Simons.¹² So many works from the period had been destroyed, but the Portrait of the Lawyer Hugo Simons was in pristine condition. Devoid of caricature, this warm, intense portrait also shows the technical experiments undertaken by Dix following his return from a trip to Italy. At that time the artist used a mixed media technique of egg tempera on wood panel covered by an oil glaze that allowed no room for improvisation. During its travels between Stuttgart, Berlin and London, the rediscovered painting quickly became a highly coveted work. In spite of many attractive opportunities to sell the work, the three Simons children, George, Jan and Ellyn, decided to offer it to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts for a fraction of its actual value. ''We have a close attachment to Montreal. Our family was made welcome here at the time when Canada was being difficult about immigrants.''¹³ At the end of a year-long saga, the money needed to acquire the work was finally raised thanks to the concerted efforts of a group led by the then-director of the Museum, Pierre Théberge, with the support of the city's mayor ''for the benefit of our people'' and the Société des musées québécois. The degree to which people rallied together for the sake of an artwork was without precedent in Canada. Under the pressure of public opinion and scathing media coverage, the federal minister responsible at the time ultimately agreed to follow the unanimous recommendation of the Canadian Cultural Property Export Review Board's experts and award a subsidy for its purchase. Nahum Gelber, Chairman of the Museum's Acquisition Committee, set up a special private sector fundraising initiative to collect the both large and small donations from many individuals that were necessary for finalizing the sale. For its part, the Simons family made one express condition: that the Museum pledge never to sell or exchange the painting.

Who could object to that? It is only natural, then, that this exhibition, the first major North American presentation of Otto Dix's work, also be held in Montreal. Among others, it relates the stories of two men, Hugo Simons and Otto Dix,¹⁴ whose fates were entwined by history, and of the battle over a highly symbolic work won by a determined city. I would like to thank the director of the Neue Galerie, Renée Price; its president, Ronald S. Lauder; and the exhibition curator, Olaf Peters, for having initiated this project. I also thank all those who fought to keep Otto Dix's painting in Montreal. This exhibition is a tribute to them.

Nathalie Bondil
Director and Chief Curator
The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts