Otto Dix and Weimar Media Culture: Time, Fashion and Photography in Portrait Paintings of the Neue Sachlichkeit by Anne Reimers (review)

Otto Dix has been deemed central to the Weimar-era Neue Sachlichkeit by contemporary critics and subsequent art historical study, and his work offers a vivid window into the tumult of Weimar Germany. Recently, writers have taken a more nuanced approach to Dix’s work and its relation to Weimar culture. Anne Reimers’s focused study of Dix’s portraiture is a welcome addition to this recent stream of art historical analysis, deftly creating a constellation of artist, artwork, and broader cultural forces and the ways that they impact each other.

Across four chapters, Reimers analyzes examples of Dix’s work through the major themes of fashion, temporality, and the mass media. These themes accumulate significance across the book, with each chapter returning to them with new perspectives and additional facets of analysis. Chapter one considers Dix’s Portrait of the Dancer Anita Berber from 1925 in relation to mass cultural and photographic mediation. Berber was an icon of Weimar culture, and her image was widely known through her performances, photography, and film. However, when Dix painted her portrait in 1925, her career and public image were in decline, the toll taken by her notorious drug and alcohol abuse. Rather than representing Berber as the fashionable beauty made familiar through mass media, Reimers argues convincingly that Dix’s portrait visualizes Berber’s decline through its expressive red hues and exaggerations of Berber’s appearance. The non-simultaneity of Dix’s portrait, painted in a glazing technique derived from the Old Masters, and media images of Berber already circulating highlight what painting could do that photography could not; namely, to capture a persona and a historical period in a moment of flux through form and technique. Chapter two expands the analysis of Dix’s techniques introduced earlier, arguing for a persistent interest in the haptic possibilities of painting in contrast to the optical emphasis that had marked its practice since at least Impressionism. Reimers demonstrates that Dix developed an increasingly complex and conceptual practice to engage viewers with the haptic effects of painting—first through the use of collage elements in 1920, then later with his hallmark Renaissance glazing technique—as an argument for the continued role of painting in a visual culture dominated by mechanical reproduction. In the third chapter, Reimers analyzes Dix’s reliance on photography as an integral aspect of artistic practice and professional development through the photographic reproduction of works of art. Dix and his colleagues relied heavily on the distribution of photographs of their works to gain access to exhibitions and the attention of critics and clients. Reimers argues that Dix’s Portrait of the Poet Herbert Eulenberg was widely reproduced not only because Eulenberg was a famous figure, but because it looked good in black-and-white reproduction. Intriguingly, she argues that Dix may have painted the portrait with crisp delineation of the figure and ground and bright colors, so as to capitalize on its appearance in photographic reproduction. Dix’s sophisticated yet overlooked photographic sensibility is further elucidated in a discussion of his relationship to the prominent portrait photographer Hugo Erfurth, who produced reproductions of Dix’s work, portraits of Dix, and posed himself for two large painted portraits and numerous sketches by Dix. One of the most original aspects of the book emerges in this chapter, when Reimers discusses the appropriation of the aesthetics of color oil prints by Dix and some of his colleagues. These mass cultural prints mimicked the effects of painting, with imprinted facture and applied varnish. Conversely, Dix and his colleagues created paintings that ironically appropriated the aesthetics of these prints, so much so that critics like Willi Wolfradt christened this type of painting “rehabilitierter Öldruck,” or “rehabilitated oil print.” Chapter four takes a step away from the analysis of Dix’s work toward a discussion of developments [End...