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.<sup>1</sup><br><br>The ‘golden twenties’ of Weimar Berlin was a period characterised by liberalism and decadence yet growing social inequality. <em>Neue Sachlichkeit</em> (or New Objectivity), the art movement that Dix would come to represent, held up a mirror to this society, seeking to reveal its hypocrisy.<sup>2</sup> In his painting, Dix portrays von Harden as a stereotypical ‘New Woman’, yet in a harshly realistic way.<br><br>The New Woman emerged in Weimar Germany after women were granted the right to vote in 1919. Seen as independent and sexually liberated,<sup>3</sup> these women represented modernity and Berlin’s liberal culture.<sup>4</sup> The New Woman disrupted traditional feminine ideals and symbolised Germany’s rapidly changing society. To the artists of <em>Neue Sachlichkeit</em> this creature was indicative of Germany’s social decline, which the movement sought to criticise and satirise.<br><br>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. <br><br>The chance encounter between Dix and von Harden would immortalise her as an icon of both Weimar Berlin and <em>Neue Sachlichkeit</em>, and indeed she stayed in contact with Dix until shortly before her death in 1964.<sup>5</sup><br>