Otto Dix – To Beauty

The May ’26 edition of the British Literary Review magazine has a striking front cover. On it, the wonderfully accomplished illustrator, Chris Riddell, has created an homage to Neue Sachlichkeit artists like Otto Dix and George Grosz, painters who depicted the life of inter-war Berlin through a satirical and politically censorious lens. Riddell’s cover drawing is a reference to a commentary inside the journal on two new books about Weimar Germany. One of these accounts, Weimar: Life on the Edge of Catastrophe by Katja Hoyer, is also BBC Radio Four’s Book of the Week at the time of writing. My interest in all this was piqued because I’ve long felt fascinated by the atmosphere of ‘anything goes’, the moral relativism that prevailed in the German capital in the 1920s and 30s and the part it played, if any, in the rise of fascism.

Otto Dix, To Beauty (An die Schönheit), 1922, oil and collage on canvas, Von der Hedyt Museum, Wuppertal

This was a period of extremes, when mass unemployment and hunger were rife, when war-wounded beggars were a common sight on the streets (see Dix’s The Match Seller), as were sex workers who plied their trade so brazenly. At the same time, social inequality, political turbulence and governmental venality were routinely criticised by artists and intellectuals - those members of the avant garde who castigated the ruling bourgeoisie while audaciously indulging themselves in the spirit of daring licentiousness that was also ushered in following war defeat. The modernist and sardonic art, literature and music that emerged at this time was born from this decadence, a culture that the Nazis were eventually to condemn for its degeneracy when they came to power.

Otto Dix, The Match Seller, 1920, oil on canvas and collage, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart

Specifically, Neue Sachlichkeit (loosely translated as ‘New Objectivity’) was a visual style that reacted against the spiritual idealisation in German art that had preceded it - the kind of emotional, soul-searching and vibrantly coloured expressionist works made by Franz Marc, Auguste Macke, and Gabriele Münter. Neue Sachlichkeit practitioners were determined to replace this with a kind of hard-hitting mannerist realism, with figures often executed in meticulous detail, but at times stiffly, even caricaturally posed to be super-illustrative of social types awkwardly trying to adjust to the prevailing zeitgeist.

The setting of the ironically titled To Beauty by Otto Dix for example, is a dimly lit nightclub. The central green sharkskin-suited figure is the artist himself as can be seen by comparing his face in it to the self-portrait he made just a couple of years later.

Otto Dix, Self-Portrait with Easel, 1926, tempera on wood, Leopold-Hoesch-Museum & Papiermuseum Düren

With one hand in his jacket pocket, in the other he holds a telephone handset, its funnel mouthpiece positioned suspiciously, even guiltily, close to his crotch and with its connecting cable trailing to the foot of the picture frame. The art critic Frank Whitford described nighttime Berlin and its dives in this period in vivid detail:

Its cabaret acts were outrageously explicit. Its brothels were well publicized. The tables in its dance halls were furnished with telephones to permit assignations between customers who had never met. In its clubs, pubs and doorways girls, rent boys and entire pharmacopeias of drugs, especially cocaine, could be had for less than the price of a decent dinner. (The Berlin of George Grosz, Drawings, Watercolours and Prints 1912-1930 by Frank Whitford).

This account made me wonder whether the depiction of the artist holding the phone in this painting was an admission by the artist of his enacting just such a casual hookup. His furtive, frowning, guilty-looking side-eye expression would suggest so. With the apparatus held not to his ear but either to answer or hang up, it looks as if we have just witnessed him caught in the act, causing him to blush, his shame alloyed with hostility. The artist has given himself a smart, if slightly spivvy outfit, his jacket a well-cut fit, his trousers carefully pressed, his tie a skinny reptilian constrictor. But this outward pseudo respectability runs counter to the sense of sordidness that his frequenting of the place engenders, in him and the viewer. Just as the palm leaves, the Corinthian columns and the elaborate ceiling cornice are attempts by its owner-operators to lend this establishment a sense of classical decorum to cloak the sleazy transactions within it, so the artist appears like a carefully groomed glamour boy attempting to camouflage his immoral impulses.

Despite Dix’s radical left political position and his tolerance and open-mindedness about the shenanigans of Berlin’s demimonde, his depiction of the black jazz drummer shown on the right is a troubling one, if admittedly a product of its time. There are grotesque minstrelsy connotations to the whites of the eyes and teeth contrasted with the extreme ebony of the skin. The arm is raised with drumstick in hand to signify the percussive beat and pulsating rhythms that characterised the new American music that was becoming more popular, but there is little doubt that this portrayal conforms to the racist stereotype of the black man as a ‘modern barbarian’, amusingly tamed and kitted out in European garb but whose underlying instincts and essential otherness were seen as  somehow thrillingly depraved. Even the bass drum that he sits behind is painted with the profile of another ‘primitive’, a feather headdress-wearing native American chief.

As if to emphasize the suggestion of arousal and abandon that inheres the scene, to the drummer’s rear, we see a corseted and blank-eyed prostitute dancing, as if bewitched by the pounding African tempo. Meanwhile on the left, a young couple sway cheek-to-cheek with eyes closed. Their mask-like features remind me of Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, the influential cubist work which Dix was certainly aware of and which dealt similarly with the objectification of the body. And then in the lower left corner we see something odd: the bust of mannequin wearing an old-fashioned hairstyle and lurid makeup, her decolletage offset by an artificial-looking rose. The effigy sits low down so that it too seems deliberately positioned to be at the level height to the artist’s genitalia. Is this figure a queasily caustic representation of the ‘beauty’ of the title?

Save for one waiter on the right rear, all faces point towards us. We are made complicit in the scene’s seediness, as if we too have just entered the joint and have thereby called attention to ourselves, and as if we too are just another punter driven by dissolute and unsatisfied longings. A spectral figure appears in the gloom of the left background, looking like one of the undead and the whole painting is washed by a green light, a cadaverous lividity that wouldn’t be amiss in the underworld.

We are left to imagine what debauchery might be happening through the door on the right and inside its red-walled rooms. The music and dancing we see in front of us may just be the warmup prelude to the climactic finale that happens off this particular stage. Dix was known to be a subversive artist, unafraid to look unblinkingly at the ugly realities of city life and willing to call out the political failures that caused them. That he was also willing to see himself as a shamefaced participant as much as a critic of social bankruptcy is testament to his honesty.