Dix, Portrait of the Journalist Sylvia von Harden

(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)