Devil woman
With leopardskin, ripped arms and slanting cat’s eyes, Otto Dix’s Weimar-era devil woman is ready to pounce. If she doesn’t get you, the dog will.
Shock to the system
Dix’s paintings are calculated to give you a nasty jolt. Determined to be “famous or infamous”, his strategy was to shock the state into submission.
True blood
He seems to translate the horror he witnessed first-hand in the trenches into a vision of modern life as a vicious, depraved carnival of sideshow attractions. He followed up his early depictions of bodies destroyed on the battlefield, with a vampire demimonde.
Wicked game
There are echoes of Manet’s Olympia in this leopard lady’s confrontational gaze, but minus the humanity. In fact, when charged with obscenity in 1922, Dix claimed he was trying to show just how dehumanising prostitution was.
Hot damn
That’s only a fraction of the story, though. Dix’s paintings of gaunt, sagging, party animals revel in damnation as much as they moralise.
Part of Portraying a Nation: Germany 1919-1933, Tate Liverpool, to 15 October
