Early Life, Family and Artistic Training Untermhaus, Germany, 2 December 1891. The environment shaping Otto Dix is one of stark industrial labor and quiet, poetic undertones. His father, Franz Dix, works in an iron foundry, a setting defined by heavy toil. His mother, Louise, a seamstress, carries a history of writing poetry. This domestic landscape provides the first, subtle friction between the grit of manual labor and the impulse toward creative expression. The path toward professional training begins in 1906. Dix enters an apprenticeship under the painter Carl Senff, a period of study t…