On my recent visit to the Otto Dix exhibit at the Neue Galerie, I again had an opportunity to confront one of the more difficult issues that I've wrestled with ever since an early school field trip to the Guggenheim: The question of 'What is art?' This can surely be answered in many ways, but the Dix visit brought some new perspectives on the issue.

Both modern and contemporary art lend the question of art - its purposes, its boundaries - added significance. Works ranging from the paint splatters of Jackson Pollock to the shapes of color field paintings to canvasses decked out in a single solid color - all of them challenge us to expand our conception of what is valid as art. And the question doesn't only arise when we look at the most avant-garde, abstract art: I've occasionally wondered if some artists create 'innovative' forms simply to compensate for inadequate drafting skills. But after enjoying the exquisite detail and penetrating eyes in his Portrait of Jakob Edwin Wolfensberger, from 1929, I knew that Dix wasn't among the 'couldn't draw' crowd.

As one of the leading painters in Germany's Weimar Republic of the 1920s, Dix is closely associated with Neue Sachlichkeit, a style renowned for its clarity, and its sharp, clean lines. He had studied the methods of the earlier European masters, and, at his best, his portraiture is simply exquisite. Yet many of Dix's portraits are startlingly unreal. Why so?

In the same way that a later generation worried about the VCR killing the movie theater, painters of the 1920s and 1930s often feared that their craft would suffer under the onslaught of the camera lens. Of course, neither of these events came to pass, because neither of those new technologies could replicate the emotions engendered by their predecessor. In fact, new technology may have brought liberation: the rise of photography meant that the ability to deliver a realistic picture of the world was becoming less important to artists. After endless centuries of trying to imitate nature on everything from cave walls to canvas, Dix and his peers saw an opportunity - and a necessity - to create works that go beyond the literal representation of the natural world rendered by the camera.

For some artists, this encouraged them to use only abstract shapes, textures and colors to communicate feelings and emotion. Dix chose instead to create images that represent people in a way that reflects their true character, expanding on the realistic image to represent their entire personalities in a way a camera never could - resorting to caricature, satire, and expressive distortion. You may find some of his works difficult to handle. The exhibit includes over a hundred drawings and paintings from the 1920s and 1930s, a period during which he was often haunted by his traumatic experiences in the First World War. He entered the army with great enthusiasm, and commanded a machine gun squad on the front lines in France. But the first hand experience of the blood and guts and gore of battle left him disillusioned, and many of his post war works reflect this in graphic detail. His Wounded Veteran (1922) depicts a realistic image of a soldier gazing at you with his one good eye, while the other side of his face consists primarily of grotesquely disfigured facial remnants. Dix's portraits weren't always flattering, but that was invariably the point.

Many of Dix's works are lost. His war paintings weren't popular with the Nazis, and the Nazis tended to destroy pictures they couldn't sell. In order to continue his work during the 1930's, he moved to an obscure part of Germany and began crafting non-controversial works such as landscapes. Even there, he managed to develop the occasional visual metaphor for his political beliefs in works such as Jewish Cemetery of Randegg in Winter with Hohenstoffein. Created in 1935, as Hitler's hold on Germany was becoming complete, it is both a subtle protest, and a terrible prediction of events to come.

Sipping an Einspanner [Double espresso with whipped cream in a glass] and munching on sliced knackwurst-salad at the gallery's adjoining Cafe Sabarsky, I reflected on Dix's life under the Nazis, and on his works in the years leading up to that. It's hard to appreciate the entirety of an artists' career in a single visit to a museum, but my Sunday afternoon at the Neue Galerie certainly provided a worthwhile start. Dix had changed so much, trying out at various times a vigorous Expressionism, a cool-minded realism, and even pure flights of fancy. Defining what art meant to Dix was like trying to follow a moving target - and perhaps that's a lesson for us all in asking "What is art?"

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