Art Throb #5: Portrait of the Dancer Anita Berber (1925) by Otto Dix

Portrait of  the Dancer Anita Berber (1925) by Otto Dix, 120x65 cm

Galerie der Stadt, Stuttgart

Otto Dix was the subject of my Masters dissertation, in which I wrote about three of his lesser-known paintings, all of which happened to be of prostitutes. But I want to avoid doing an Art Throb on one of those as it seems a bit of a cop-out and may be better off kept in reserve, perhaps, for when I'm more pushed for time.
 
This is one of his more well-known pieces – perhaps the most famous of all – and I've chosen it because at the moment I have a bit of a thing about Anita Berber, a fascinating figure who smashed through boundaries and taboos and lived life on her own terms. Dix painted her after seeing her dance; they become friends and he attended her funeral when she died in 1928 at the age of 29. According to what I've read, no one else has come to personify Weimar Berlin more than she – when she died, the era went down with her. She's been called the original rockstar, the first tabloid celebrity for her scandalous personal life, and makes Amy Winehouse and Courtney Love look like Ann Widecombe. If you can conceive it, she did it. Married three times (one of her husbands was the gay dancer and actor Sebastian Droste) she took male and female lovers, ingested every kind of drug there was (she was addicted to alcohol, cocaine and heroin, and would appear naked in public save for a fur coat and a brooch filled with white powder), and was not above prostitution to fund her habits. She also pre-empted Josephine Baker as the first dancer to appear naked onstage in around 1919.

Sebastian Droste - I love this pic of him

Existing literature tends to focus on her private life (people are easily shocked), at the expense of her artistic achievements. A serious artist who studied and trained in gymnastics,  music and ballet, and started her career as a model, she had a pioneering attitude to subject matter which still remains controversial. Two of the films she appeared in was Anders als die Andern (Different from the Others), which tackled social attitudes to homosexuality, and Unheimlich Geschiten (Eerie Tales).  

In the above painting Otto Dix transposes Anita Berber from black and white film to a colour painting with a vengeance – the fiercest fire engine red – and she is saturated in it, a scarlet woman, a vamp. Not only does her dress cover every possible part of her body, but even her hair, nails and the inside of her nostrils are a flaming, dangerous red (suggestive of her reportedly prodigious cocaine use).  This red dress is a second skin which perhaps she is about to slough off like a snake. That he chose to present her fully clothed as opposed to naked, however, hints at an understanding of her as a more complex character than her popular image suggests. The exterior reflects the inner condition. The viper-like left arm implies sin and temptation. Her dazzling white skin looms out of the red like the chiaroscuro in a Caravaggio painting. She is stood as if at the top of the stairs to hell.

Weimar Berlin reminds me a bit of the early years of Deadwood in the 1870s, a place that drew gamblers, prostitutes, opportunists. This painting is as much about the Weimar era as the subject herself.