Walking down a cosmopolitan Berlin street in 1926, the artist Otto Dix is said to have spied Sylvia von Harden and exclaimed, ‘I must paint you, I simply must!’ Dix saw in von Harden, a journalist, the ‘entire epoch’ of postwar Germany.1
The ‘golden twenties’ of Weimar Berlin was a period characterised by liberalism and decadence yet growing social inequality. Neue Sachlichkeit (or New Objectivity), the art movement that Dix would come to represent, held up a mirror to this society, seeking to reveal its hypocrisy.2 In his painting, Dix portrays von Harden as a stereotypical ‘New Woman’, yet in a harshly realistic way.
The New Woman emerged in Weimar Germany after women were granted the right to vote in 1919. Seen as independent and sexually liberated,3 these women represented modernity and Berlin’s liberal culture.4 The New Woman disrupted traditional feminine ideals and symbolised Germany’s rapidly changing society. To the artists of Neue Sachlichkeit this creature was indicative of Germany’s social decline, which the movement sought to criticise and satirise.
By depicting von Harden as a New Woman in a stark and unforgiving style, Dix subverts stereotypes both of femininity and of the modern woman. She is androgynous, with a masculine haircut, boxy dress and monocle. He distorts traditionally feminine elements showing von Harden’s stocking unravelling slightly below her hemline — a comment on the degeneration of German society itself and the sexual freedoms associated with the New Woman.
The chance encounter between Dix and von Harden would immortalise her as an icon of both Weimar Berlin and Neue Sachlichkeit, and indeed she stayed in contact with Dix until shortly before her death in 1964.5
Hake, Sabine. German National Cinema. s.l.:Routledge. 2002. 26
Petro, P.. Perceptions of Difference: Women as Spectator and Spectacle. In: K. v. Ankum, ed. Women in the metropolis: gender and modernity in Weimar culture. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1997
McCormick, Richard. Gender and sexuality in Weimar Modernity: Film, Literature, and “New Objectivity”. New York: Palgrave. 2001. 2
Zieper, Linda. Dictionary of Artists’ Models, Edited by Jill Berk Jiminez and Joanna Banham. London and Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn. 2001. 263
Zoe Willis
London, UK
During my studies of German culture and history at university, the Weimar Republic as a period has always interested me. Having studied Expressionism in silent film and the liberal, hedonistic culture so iconic of Weimar Berlin, I wanted to examine the movement that developed as a reaction against these ideals, providing an insight into the culture of the time.
