.jpg?w=1)
拍品专文
Tropische Nacht (Tropical Night) is one of a significant group of heavily-worked and richly-coloured watercolours depicting a lone sailor wandering through the bordellos of an exotic foreign country at night that Dix painted in 1922. Such is the closeness in the composition and theme of these works that it seems likely that Dix saw them as preparation for an oil painting on the subject.
The Surabaya- Johnny-type sailor in these works - tattooed, bronzed from his travels and smoking a pipe - is usually also a self-portrait; a depiction of Dix in the guise of the lone and lusty male figure eagerly sampling the pleasures of the harbour. These 'pleasures', Dix makes clear in these pictures, come in a full range of types and in all shapes, colours and sizes. Doused overall by a pervasive red colouring evocative of the tropical sunset, the sailor's own state of arousal after being at sea for months and also that of the district through which he is wandering, these paintings are in one respect clearly a manifestation of the artist's own erotic fantasies.
At the time that they were made, Dix was living, impoverished in Dresden during the height of the inflationary period in Germany when poverty, malnutrition and a pervasive sense of decay were the widespread truths of daily existence. During this difficult period, Dix had fallen in love with Martha Koch whom he was later to marry and was travelling frequently between Dresden and Dusseldorf to see her. Dix had wooed Martha under the guise of his playful alter-ego 'Jimmy' a free-rolling, smartly-dressed dancing dandy and man-about-town not unlike the sailor-character he portrays himself as in these works.
Dix's art of this period is strongly characterized by the notion of the twin forces of sex and death operating in direct conjunction with one another throughout all levels of life. In the same way that he catalogued the pervasive decay of society all around him in his searingly accurate depictions of emaciated and impoverished mothers and street urchins on the grey colourless streets of Dresden at this time, the colour-drenched pictures of a dreamed-of foreign land of these works are infused with an invigorating sense of rich plenitude and erotic vitality that operates in direct contrast to these works. Dix, is always, as realistic in his depiction of such imagined scenes or fantasies as in his paintings of contemporary Dresden, The women populating his 'tropical night' are not in any way sentimentalised but are realistic-looking brothel types of the kind that Dix liked to select as his models from the Dresden Academy life-classes or of the type he had come across on a visit to the Reeperbahn Hamburg in 1921.
The Surabaya- Johnny-type sailor in these works - tattooed, bronzed from his travels and smoking a pipe - is usually also a self-portrait; a depiction of Dix in the guise of the lone and lusty male figure eagerly sampling the pleasures of the harbour. These 'pleasures', Dix makes clear in these pictures, come in a full range of types and in all shapes, colours and sizes. Doused overall by a pervasive red colouring evocative of the tropical sunset, the sailor's own state of arousal after being at sea for months and also that of the district through which he is wandering, these paintings are in one respect clearly a manifestation of the artist's own erotic fantasies.
At the time that they were made, Dix was living, impoverished in Dresden during the height of the inflationary period in Germany when poverty, malnutrition and a pervasive sense of decay were the widespread truths of daily existence. During this difficult period, Dix had fallen in love with Martha Koch whom he was later to marry and was travelling frequently between Dresden and Dusseldorf to see her. Dix had wooed Martha under the guise of his playful alter-ego 'Jimmy' a free-rolling, smartly-dressed dancing dandy and man-about-town not unlike the sailor-character he portrays himself as in these works.
Dix's art of this period is strongly characterized by the notion of the twin forces of sex and death operating in direct conjunction with one another throughout all levels of life. In the same way that he catalogued the pervasive decay of society all around him in his searingly accurate depictions of emaciated and impoverished mothers and street urchins on the grey colourless streets of Dresden at this time, the colour-drenched pictures of a dreamed-of foreign land of these works are infused with an invigorating sense of rich plenitude and erotic vitality that operates in direct contrast to these works. Dix, is always, as realistic in his depiction of such imagined scenes or fantasies as in his paintings of contemporary Dresden, The women populating his 'tropical night' are not in any way sentimentalised but are realistic-looking brothel types of the kind that Dix liked to select as his models from the Dresden Academy life-classes or of the type he had come across on a visit to the Reeperbahn Hamburg in 1921.