Dance, drugs and vampiric people: Anita Berber and Otto Dix, Berlin 1925
Reimers, Anne (2015) Dance, drugs and vampiric people: Anita Berber and Otto Dix, Berlin 1925. In: Disseminating Dress: Britain and the Fashion World, 28-30 May 2015, University of York, UK. (Unpublished)
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In the late 1910s, the Berlin-based dancer Anita Berber became internationally famous for her fashionable style and nude dancing. She became a cult figure whose image was disseminated across many media forms, from newspapers to postcards, and porcelain figurines. She was photographed for upmarket, Berlin-based fashion magazines such as Elegante Welt and Die Dame, and painted by many artists in different on- and off-stage personas.
My paper will focus on the famous Portrait of the Dancer Anita Berber (1925) by the painter Otto
Dix. It will argue that an understanding of ‘fashionability’ and its dynamics was as necessary as it
was problematic for realist painters in the 1920s. Issues of fashion trends, media exposure and temporality had to be carefully navigated, due to their potential effect on critical and long-term career success. My study aims to contribute to the ongoing re-evaluation the relationship
between fashion, avant-garde and mass culture in the Weimar Republic, relying largely on primary material, from letters to interviews and newspaper-articles, art journals and fashion magazines, paintings and photographs. This paper combines materialist and semiotic approaches in order to propose a new reading of this painting, after investigating how the travelling routes of what is 'fashionable' - across networks of medial surfaces, images, texts, and representations – within one field of the visual, from the avant-garde and to the mass-cultural - have come to bear on the traditional medium of painting: on what and how it is painted. It will dissect how 'fashionability' became a challenge for representation.
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