New Objectivity - 908

Narrator (f):

Otto Dix was represented by seven paintings in Hartlaub’s exhibition of 1925. Along with George Grosz, he is regarded as a major representative of the left wing of New Objectivity. Looking back, he even claimed:

Narrator (m):

“The Expressionists made enough art. We wanted things entirely naked, almost without art. New Objectivity, I invented it.”

Narrator (f):

The experience of the war in particular left its mark on Dix’s attitude toward art and life. During his Dada phase around 1920, he was already engaging with social themes critically and reproachfully, creating the prototypes of the era in prostitutes, war invalids, and society’s losers. At the same time, Dix was an unsparing portraitist who immortalized important personalities of the time. His portrait of Anita Berber of 1925, a scandal-plagued actress and dancer whose nude performances both shocked and attracted the public en masse, has suggestive effects of color. The writer Klaus Mannn witnessed her as well:

Narrator (m):

“Anita Berber—her face frozen into a grim mask under the eerie curls of her purple coiffure—dances the coitus…. Her face as a gloomy and evil mask. The sharply curving mouth that one saw was by no means hers but rather a blood-red botched job from the makeup jar.”

Narrator (f):

Her fall was dramatic: addicted to alcohol and cocaine, Berber died in Berlin at the age of twenty-eight. Otto Dix had painted her three years earlier as if he foresaw her sad end. Her seductively offered body is at once veiled and exposed by her tightfitting, hiked dress. The color red transports a sense of passion and seduction, on the one hand, but also, on the other, of ruination and nefariousness. Warm and cold red are juxtaposed and thus also illustrate the inner conflict in the figure. Her erotic charm ultimately goes nowhere, the decline of the young woman resulting from her turn to a life of excess dominates the image.

Narrator (m):

When the National Socialists seized power, Dix lost his post at the Academy of the Fine Arts in Dresden in 1933 and withdrew to Lake Constance. In 1937, he was categorized as a “degenerate” artist and many of his paintings were confiscated. At the same time, however, he was able to continue working in a “moderate style.”