Charles Haimoff Fellows in German Studies

James van Dyke

Class of Fall 2026

Associate Professor of Art History, School of Visual Studies

University of Missouri

Painting the Metropolis and Mental Life in Interwar Germany: The "Dämonie" of Otto Dix's Realism

At the Academy, van Dyke is examining the German artist Otto Dix, who is associated with the New Objectivity movement in painting and best known for his controversial representations of trench warfare, scandalous depictions of modern German life, and scurrilous portraits of Weimar Germany’s bohemia. Van Dyke is focusing on a less discussed yet crucial aspect of Dix’s work, namely his interest in visions and hallucinations, ghosts and inner demons—”Dämonie” (uncanny, threatening power). Looking at this in relationship to Nietzsche and Freud, to Simmel and Benjamin, and to the popular taste for horror, van Dyke suggests that the fascinating, transgressive power of Dix’s work is not only a product of the morally and politically charged objects and bodies he depicted, but also an effect of his engagement with the intensely psychological reality of modernity, in which the boundaries broke down between the objective and the subjective, the material and the mental, the living and the dead.

James van Dyke is an associate professor of Art History at the University of Missouri, where he teaches in the School of Visual Studies with an emphasis on modern European art, twentieth-century and contemporary art and theory. Trained in the social history of art, he is a specialist in twentieth-century German painting and politics, with a particular interest in the ways in which artworks, artists, and artistic institutions have been shaped by catastrophic historical events, structural social contradictions, and extreme ideological responses to them. He holds a BA from The College of Wooster and an MA and a PhD from Northwestern University. Van Dyke is the author of Franz Radziwill and the Contradictions of German Art History, 1919-1945, (University of Michigan Press, 2010) and Otto Dix in Detail: Painting and Precarity in the Field of Weimar Culture, (University of Chicago Press, September 2026). He has contributed to numerous edited collections and exhibition catalogues on German art, and his work has appeared in Art History, Oxford Art Journal, German Quarterly, New German Critique, German Studies Review, and Kunst und Politik, among others. In January and February 2024, van Dyke served as the Paul Mellon Visiting Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA) at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. His research has been supported by grants and fellowships from, among others, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), Gerda-Henkel-Stiftung, Getty Research Library, and National Humanities Center. For nearly a decade, van Dyke was president of the Historians of German, Scandinavian, and Central European Art Group, a prominent association of scholars in art history.