In the context of The Match Seller, analyze the Scholarship of the Analysis.
According to art historian and curator Sabine Rewald, what set Dix apart from other painters associated with the Neue Sachlichkeit movement was his "fascination with the 'ugly'". Painted one year after the end of World War I and the Treaty of Versailles, The Match Seller is one of four "pictures of cripples" Dix completed while in Dresden to protest the brutality of the war and the lack of respect for the veterans among the contemporary German society. Otto Dix was a veteran himself, having served in a machine gun unit on the Western Front of World War I as a non-commissioned officer, and the experience of the war and its brutality deeply affected the artist.Moreover, the composition has also been interpreted as the artist’s political critique of the Weimar Republic, including the demoralization of its post-war society and the economic inequality that would contribute to the subsequent rise of the National Socialist government. Dix's depiction of the veteran as a "dehumanized outcast" has been compared to the The Beggars, a 1568 painting completed by the Netherlandish Renaissance artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Along with many other works by Dix, The Match Seller was included on the list of works of degenerate art in Nazi Germany and confiscated between 1937 and 1938.
World War I Otto Dix Pieter Bruegel the Elder The Beggars the Netherlandish Renaissance Treaty of Versailles Nazi Germany Western Front German Weimar Republic degenerate art non-commissioned officer Neue Sachlichkeit