Otto Dix and Weimar Media Culture
Author: Anne Reimers
Publisher: Peter Lang Publishing
Published: 2021
Total Pages:
ISBN-13: 9781800791237
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →"Otto Dix (1891-1969) was a leading figure of the Neue Sachlichkeit, or New Objectivity, movement in painting in 1920s Germany. This groundbreaking study analyses for the first time the relationship between Dix's verist-realist portrait paintings and the rapidly expanding mass media culture of the Weimar era that surrounded it. The book focuses on a small number of portrait paintings created in the first half of the 1920s to explore four specific aspects: the way Dix engaged with fashion and celebrity culture; how he responded to the challenge posed by photography and film; how he dealt with a situation where black-and-white reproductions were the most common way in which a diverse audience encountered his work; and the way in which Dix's career development ran in parallel with the commentary on his work in journalistic and specialist media publications. Temporality, medium-specificity and reproduction are identified as concerns that drove the artist's aesthetic responses to a historically specific environment. The book draws upon archival material, letters and interviews by the artist, and a broad variety of contemporary publications by art critics and art historians to reveal new information about key paintings such as his Portrait of the Dancer Anita Berber (1925)"--