Inscribing Temporality, Containing Fashion: Otto Dix’s Portrait of the Dancer Anita Berber recontextualised

This is what the film diva looks like. She is twenty-four years old, featured on the cover of an illustrated magazine, … Time: the present. The caption calls her demonic: our demonic diva. … Everyone recognizes her with delight, since everyone has already seen the original on the screen.1 (Siegfried Kracauer, 1927).

Otto Dix's Portrait of the Dancer Anita Berber, painted in 1925, is one of the most intense and well-known paintings in his oeuvre and it has been described as ‘without a doubt the icon of the Weimar Republic’. The portrait and its subject, its exceptional emotional charge and dramatic aesthetics, seem to exemplify many cultural and social developments of 1920s Berlin, based on the knowledge of Berber's scandalous performances and life, as well as her early death in 1928. What deserves further attention, however, is the fact that this is a portrait unlike any other in Dix's oeuvre: the subject of this portrait was a famous dancer and film actress, an icon and celebrity, whose mediated image was already widely distributed in a wider economy of images. This exposure made her image extremely unstable. In fact, Berber's popularity had been in steep decline for more than a year when the artist decided to paint her. The ways in which the painter negotiated the temporal dynamics of rise and decline that Berber – and by extension his painting – were caught in will be examined, and the relationship of Dix's work to contemporary fashionable tropes and images will be revealed. Artistic developments in a wider cultural field will be considered alongside this, with a focus on their currency at the time the painting was first displayed at the Neumann-Nierendorf Gallery in Berlin from February to April 1926.