(jazzy music)
Voiceover: We are looking at Otto Dix's
painting "Portrait of Sylvia von Harden"
and it's from 1926.
Voiceover: Who was Sylvia von Harden?
Voiceover: Sylvia von Harden was a fantastic,
fabulous figure who was not actually a journalist
even though the title says that she's a journalist.
She was less of a journalist but actually
a poet and a short story writer who worked in Germany.
This shows her in the Romanisches Cafe
in Berlin, which was huge hangout for all
of the cool avant-garde artists
and writers and poets of the 1920s.
Sylvia von Harden is pictured here in this
little corner where she would have hung out
at a little cafe table.
She was an avant-garde neue frau.
She was friendly with various artists
and poets and writers of the era.
Voiceover: So neue frau is the new woman in Germany
in the early 20th century.
We're in between the Great War and World War II here.
The new woman, is that the woman in
the public sphere who goes out and works?
She has close-cropped hair, I see,
which makes her rather androgynous.
Her hands are very large.
Do these things have to do with representing
the new woman in a work of art, perhaps?
Voiceover: It does.
It has to do with the new woman in general,
but it also has to do with Otto Dix's style of portraiture.
One thing that Otto Dix was famed for
was making his sitters quite ugly
and quite unattractive.
Sylvia von Harden does look like this in real life
but not to quite the extent that Dix shows her.
Things like her hair;
she did have a close-cropped haircut.
In Germany this cut had a very funny
specific name, called the Bubikopf,
which was in style all throughout the '20s.
She did have a sort of androgynous appearance.
This dress is based on a dress that she actually wore.
It does have a lot of basis in reality.
But things like her hands, he elongates
and sort of creates these immense hands.
I think that has a lot to do with deflection
and placement as it draws your attention to things like
the area where her breasts should be,
which, because she's such an androgynous figure,
she doesn't really have any.
She's wearing this very geometric patterned dress
that hides any kind of feminine figure that she might have.
She's covered up.
It even has a turtleneck so we don't
even get to see her neck.
Then you see the other hand kind of
draped across her lap, covering it up.
There are other elements that you
might be able to see that signal different things.
Voiceover: In the body?
Voiceover: If you look actually at this great detail.
The sagging stocking you can kind of see.
That's a really great moment of realism
that Dix captures.
You don't want to have your stockings
be shown as sagging.
It sort of implies a kind of messiness.
She doesn't seem to have a very polished air about her.
On the other hand, it kind of gives her
this sort of subversive quality.
She's sitting there and she's looking out.
She has a monocle even.
She has these particular features,
all these little accessories that pinpoint
her as a particular kind of woman;
the sagging stocking, the large hands,
the monocle which highlights the kind of sight
and gaze that a new woman might have.
Then she has cigarettes.
She's smoking in a public place.
That's all kind of building a particular
sort of identity for this character,
and Dix was really talented at doing that in his painting.
Voiceover: The patterned dress seems to really
emphasize a sense of surface and flatness
instead of her body.
Her neck seems very cylindrical and almost
mechanical rather than a human organic form as well.
Voiceover: I think one of the things that I like
about this painting, too, is the way that Dix
uses these kind of geometric areas and shapes
and throws it into contrast with, if you see behind her,
she's sitting on this really ornately patterned chair.
Those kind of curves are more feminine
than her body is, which I think is a great
kind of a comment to make.
Then there's the circle of her monocle;
there's the circle of the marble table;
the circle of the glass, which has a very
particular kind of cocktail in it
that was popular at the time.
So those things, and then things that are
longer and flatter, like her body, which really
should be the least flat if you're thinking
about what bodies look like.
Are bodies round and sort of curvaceous
and sensual things or are they desexualized,
androgynized forms which Dix does here?
Voiceover: We should probably contextualize
this in terms of the new objectivity,
or neue Sachlichkeit.
Voiceover: Yeah, Sachlichkeit.
Voiceover: Which was occurring at this time,
a movement in between the wars, which went back
to a bit more of a figural style, a bit more naturalism;
relatively more naturalistic than what one might
be familiar with in terms of Kirchner
or German expressionism or Kandinsky of course;
other artists who were working in Germany at the time.
Why going back to this style, which is
a bit more naturalistic?
Voiceover: I think that the realism is,
there are many things that are important about it
at this time, but this is 1926.
There's this sort of general sense in Germany,
this is going on in other countries in Europe as well,
kind of a return to order; kind of looking back at tradition,
a kind of sense that they wanted to create
something new, but they wanted it to have
a particular kind of meaning and a rootedness
in something that was very German.
So Otto Dix is really looking back to traditions
of portraiture in Germany.
He looks back to Holbein who creates
incredibly important portraits
and sort of bringing out that German quality.
Voiceover: Holbein's hyper-naturalistic, isn't he?
Voiceover: Yes, he is hyper-naturalistic.
What he does is he takes naturalism
and realism and he sort of lifts it to another level
where it almost is caricature.
So it kind of falls between that.
A lot of neue Sachlichkeit painters did that;
a kind of photographic realism, almost,
but also taken to an extreme.
Voiceover: That's interesting that it's
characterized as a kind of call to order
or a return to order, while we're
representing someone who is apparently
overturning some very longstanding gender
hierarchies and ordered ways of thinking
about men and women as very separate.
The new woman, particularly as it's embodied
here by Sylvia, seems to be confounding
those categories rather than reveling
in how neat and ordered they are.
Voiceover: She's definitely about
overturning things.
Even her name is actually made up.
It's a pseudonym.
She changed her name when she started her writing career.
She's not a huge, very popular writer,
but she's one of many poets and writers
who are working on different pieces
that are published in small journals
that very small audiences have read.
She's definitely overturning different kinds
of cultural stereotypes and gender stereotypes,
and kind of in that space of subversion
in the cafe culture of Germany at the time.
Voiceover: What did Dix's sitters think
about the fact that he liked to make people ugly?
Did that bother them?
Voiceover: Sometimes it did.
A lot of times it was almost like a privilege
to be painted by Dix and portrayed
in this particularly ugly kind of way.
One or two sitters did have a problem with it.
He was commissioned by sitters
because he was so well known,
and at this point, in '26, he's very well known
for his painting style.
Earlier than that, some of his more wealthy
business clients did not particularly like
the way that they were painted.
Sylvia von Harden, as far as I know,
loved the way that this painting worked.
She even sat with it.
It's at the Pompidou Center now.
In the '60s she even sat and had a photograph
taken of herself in front of the portrait.
You can see even at that point that she still
sort of looks a little bit like the figure in it.
I just think it's a great portrait.
Voiceover: Me too.
(jazzy music)