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Otto-erotic exhilaration

No one did decadence better than Otto Dix. He and his Neue Sachlichkeit (“New Objectivity”) colleagues — with their paintings of bloated bureaucrats, dissipated cigarette girls and haunted children — defined the Germany of “Cabaret” times, all that glamour gone to seed and innocence squandered.

If you’ve seen any Dix pix — say, MoMA’s portrait of the moonfaced ear-nose-throat doctor, Dr. Mayer-Hermann, beneath his big scary mirror — you’ve probably wanted to see more.

Now you can — at the Neue Galerie, where Dix (1891-1969) is getting a rare and riveting one-man show.

Arranged by theme (war, portraits, sexuality, allegories), “Otto Dix” spills from one gallery to the next with paintings, drawings and etchings from his most feverish period, the 1920s and ’30s.

Some, especially the war scenes — drawn from his time in the trenches of World War I — are almost too painful to look at. But it’s all mesmerizing, thanks to his unflinching eye, acid wit and kinky sexuality.

For the last, check the self-portraits that show him looking like a stiffly handsome, impassive Marlboro man beside some awkward, naked model — a Vargas girl gone to pot.

Dix liked to say he could define someone with a color. In “Portrait of the Dancer Anita Berber” (1925), that color is red: her clinging gown, her hair, her nails, even one cocaine-rouged nostril. True to her color, she was a hard-living, fiery woman who flamed out before she turned 30.

Red, too, is the lipstick on his “Reclining Woman on Leopard Skin” (1927), she of the cat-shaped green eyes and feral crouch. And red can be yours, too: They’re selling “Berlin Red” lipsticks in the gift shop ($30).

Tender, if twisted, are Dix’s portraits of children. The “Little Girl in Front of Curtain” (1920) is naked and emaciated, with a roadmap of blue veins crossing her porcelain skin. A soft pink flower clings to the curtain behind her, but the garish red bow in her hair and her haunted eyes suggest that childhood, and innocence, are already behind her.

Some of his works seem prophetic: In the Jewish cemetery Dix painted in 1935, the stones poke up forlornly under skeletal trees and leaden skies. Perhaps it’s no surprise the Nazis denounced Dix as a “degenerate” artist.

How could he not paint the horrors he saw?

“Otto Dix” runs through Aug. 30 at the Neue Galerie, 1048 Fifth Ave.; Thursdays through Mondays from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.; free on

the first Friday of each month from 6 to 8 p.m.; neuegalerie.org.