Inscribing temporality, containing fashion: Otto Dix's portrait of the dancer Anita Berber recontextualized
Reimers, Anne (2018) Inscribing temporality, containing fashion: Otto Dix's portrait of the dancer Anita Berber recontextualized. Art History. ISSN 0141-6790
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Using Kracauer’s essay ‘Photography’ as a starting point, this article argues that Otto Dix’s Portrait of the Dancer Anita Berber (1925) should be understood as an intervention in Weimar Modernity’s discourse about the relevance of painted portraits in an image economy increasingly dominated by photographic reproductions. A strategy of historical retrieval will reveal how the painter dealt strategically with issues of celebrity, beauty and commodification to neutralize the contagion of fashion and its destructive temporal dynamics for avant-garde painters, simultaneously engaging the work in a demonstration of his own mastery of a new temporal order. The artwork is reframed as a pastiche that marks endpoint and synthesis in a chain of production and reproduction of images - from dancer Anita Berber to actress Lya de Putti and distant art history, and it demonstrates the new openness of processes through which images from mass media culture enter art history.
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