Description: She walked in one direction and he in the other. Dix stopped in his tracks. “I must paint you, I simply must! You represent an entire epoch.” She was amused. “You want to paint my lacklustre eyes, my ornate ears, my long nose, my thin lips. You want to paint my short legs, my big feet – things that can only frighten people and delight no one?” To Dix, her depiction was perfect. The portrait would represent a generation concerned not with the outward beauty of a woman but her psychological condition.
Publisher: Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart
http://www.ottodix.org/pix/catalog/gallery/1926-SylviaVonHarden-sm.jpg
http://www.ottodix.org/index/paintings#135.001
The portrait is extremely interesting . While it looks almost like a caricature of the New Woman that had just been emerging between the World Wars it also bore an uncanny resemblance to the reality of Harden, a poet and journalist of considerable fame of those days. But more important is the almost androgenised looks of the woman, a sort of de-sexualized woman- of- the- mind , a stereo-type of those days. I am not sure if she looked all that plain in real life but she definitely looked the modern woman, a liberated woman ,smoking in public and dressed in a patterned frock in keeping with the cylindrical shape of her figure,with a flatness of cultivated form-
There are no feminine curves about her body, just a disproportionate hand where breast would rise. The square patterns accentuate the lack of roundness in a form devoid largely of femininity and contrast with the pink wall behind with a roundness built into its plane.
Watch her monocled eye of sternness, a frosty ,forbidding manner , the largeness of her hands, while they still retained their artistic pointedness.
Love the portrait.
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