Who Was the Beautiful Emmi Hepp? - On a Portrait by Otto Dix, 1939

Lecture with images by Elisabeth Schraut After moving to the Hegau region in 1933 and to Hemmenhofen on the Höri peninsula in 1936, Otto Dix increasingly turned his attention to the subject of landscape. However, portrait painting also contributed to his livelihood. While the subject of landscape—and especially the question of whether Dix’s landscape paintings can also be interpreted politically—has long been debated in scholarship, little is known about his portraits from the 1930s. The portrait of Emmi Hepp emerged in 1939 from a competition between the two artist friends Otto Dix and Fritz Mühlenweg. Emmi Hepp’s husband, the Constance optician Eugen Hepp, had announced that he would buy the painting he liked better. His choice fell on Otto Dix’s portrait. In 2025 alone, the portrait of Emmi Hepp was featured twice in major exhibitions: at the Kunsthalle Mannheim (“New Objectivity”) and at the Museum Allerheiligen in Schaffhausen (“Otto Dix – Adolf Dietrich”). Nowhere, however, was there any indication of who she was, the beautiful Emmi Hepp—other than as the wife of Eugen Hepp. Not even her dates of birth and death could be found in the catalogs. A search in the literature proved unsuccessful. Cultural historian and curator Elisabeth Schraut, known in the Lake Constance region primarily for her former role as director of cultural institutions (including the Lindwurm Museum and the Chretzeturm Artists’ Residence) for the Jakob and Emma Windler Foundation in Stein am Rhein, set out to uncover the clues. Elisabeth Schraut has since succeeded, primarily through research in various archives and with members of the Hepp family of opticians from Konstanz and Singen, in reconstructing significant parts of the biography of the beautiful Emmi Hepp. She will present her findings to the public for the first time during her lecture on Wednesday, May 6, 2026, at 7:00 p.m., at the Museum Haus Dix. Admission is free. Donations to the Friends of the Museum Haus Dix are welcome.