Kurt Weill and Bertholt Brecht's Berlin

Pride/"Salon I"

The Otto Dix painting, “The Salon I,” depicts four prostitutes sitting around a table, waiting for customers. Each one is “past her prime; they all wear cheap finery which fails to hide their years”(Fulmer 2015). The prostitutes in this painting are not painted to appear attractive. Their breasts are sagging and their makeup is caked on. Their expressions suggest weariness-- they are not enjoying their work. This painting suggests the humiliation of women, as these women may have once been younger and of higher status than they are in the painting. Dix regularly represented the broken bodies of soldiers and the exhaustion of prostitutes in his work because he saw this as representing the true reality of life. Dix was “a key supporter of the New Objectivity,” and his paintings depicting the horrors and humiliation of living in post-war Germany represent what he saw as life “almost without art.” (“Five Things to Know: Otto Dix”) This painting depicts what Dix certainly saw as reality; the fall of these women from a once proud, respectable position in society. It seems to comment both on the loss of pride of the prostitutes, and on Dix’s opinion of these prostitutes falling from respectability.

Bibliography:

“Five Things to Know: Otto Dix,” The Tate Museum, accessed April 29, 2018, http://www.tate.org.uk/art/lists/five-things-know-otto-dix.
Fulmer, Jeffery. "Catalog Paintings." The Online Otto Dix Project: A German Artist and Print Maker. 2015. Accessed April 29, 2018. https://www.ottodix.org/catalog-paintings/page/2/.

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