Dame mit schleier

‘We wanted to appeal to the man in the street… with a simple, very precise, clear style of painting. We don’t know whether [he would be] pleased with that. We didn’t try to force him to like it. Most people would prefer to see a group of dancing elves. They would never hang something like this on their walls. But you just have to give them the bitter pill and say. “Look this is how you are: this is life. And you’re so interesting, so precious, so worth painting that someone paints you.”’ (Otto Dix, quoted in Otto Dix, Der böse Blick exh. cat. Dusseldorf, 2016, p. 236)

Dame mit Schleier (Lady with a Veil) is one of the great series of watercolour portraits of city streetwalkers that Otto Dix painted repeatedly between 1922 and 1923 and which today form one of the artist’s most important bodies of work. It is these watercolours, for example, that most strongly characterize the development of Dix’s painting out of the exaggerated Dadaist satire of the immediate post-war period and into the shockingly perceptive Verist style of portraiture that was to distinguish his best-known work of the 1920s.

Painted in August 1923, Dame mit Schleier derives from the height of the period of hyper-inflation madness in Germany when the value of its currency went into free-fall, much of the respectable middle-class went bankrupt and the fabric of orderly society collapsed into the kind of decadence and chaos for which the fragile Weimar Republic is often today best known. Dix, like many artists, during this difficult period when oil paintings were difficult to sell and the materials they required were expensive to source, had turned to the medium of watercolour as his primary means of painting and soon came to be recognized as one of the leading contemporary masters of the medium.

Executed using an extraordinary variety of techniques including rough washes, smears, scratches and scrapings with the wrong end of his brush, Dame mit Schleier is a magnificent example of how quickly Dix mastered the medium. Like so many of these works, the picture depicts one of the ghostly faces of the city night - a street-walking prostitute - dressed garishly in a red dress, a fur stole and staring confrontationally through a widow’s veil (a common attire for street prostitutes from the war years onwards). Through this veil, the piercing green eyes of this ‘artiste of life’, as Dix liked to refer to such women, glare like streetlamps directly at the viewer, her whole face a haunting spectre of the harsh age in which she lived. Along with her pouting, red-painted lips, the intensity of this woman’s gaze is vibrantly echoed by the same red and green of her low-cut and tight-fitting dress. Dix’s rich watercolour technique has here been used to display all the textural and sensual pleasures that this woman’s elaborate attire has put on show. His deliberately crude and raw handling of the watercolour medium also reinforces the rough-edged ugliness and decay that lay at the heart of the cheap love that was then offered for sale on the city streets. Revelling in the nightmarish nature of his imagery, Dix reveals here the eternally interconnected forces of Eros and Thanatos working their way across the faces of the often desperate and malnourished women of a broken country in a broken time.

Writing in 1924, the art historian Willi Wolfradt attempted to sum up Dix’s radical approach in such watercolours by describing his work as a ‘cuttingly cold, spotlight garish verism that omits nothing’. The ‘meticulousness that Dix often takes to the limit, detailed down to the last hair’, Wolfradt wrote, revealed the artist taking a ‘pagan pleasure in painting’ and ‘a rebellious yearning for vulgar amusements and orgies of kitsch, for honest thrills and junky confections’ as ‘a reaction against elegance and culture and other complicated swindles.’ Such an ‘inversion of taste,’ Wolfradt argued, was ‘ubiquitous in our age…and corresponds with a general preference for dissonances and contrasts’. It was reflective of the same kind of combination of ‘sentimentality and cynicism’, that had ‘echoed throughout recent literature, [and] in Wedekind [in particular], whose Pandora’s Box, he said, ‘seems almost subdued and optimistic alongside Otto Dix’s awful burlesque paintings of whores…[and] the torturous rigorism of his portrayal. [Dix’s] paintings are also cruel mirages... that revel in the wild fantasies of witches who are desperately decked out in make-up…[They are a combination of] a contrary and extravagant sympathizing and, at the same time, cold horror.’ (Willi Wolfradt Otto Dix, Leipzig, 1924, pp. 8-9)