A Man's Place in a Woman's World: Otto Dix, Social Dancing, and Constructions of Masculinity in Weimar Germany

Abstract

Focusing on Otto Dix's 1922 painting To Beauty, this article explores how Dix, a German working-class artist, promoted himself in the work as an Americanized, bourgeois, jazz-loving dancer. In so doing, Dix utilized the painting's composition, symbolism, and cultural context to argue for a masculine, multiracial dominance in the female-associated world of dance. By fundamentally questioning gendered divisions within Weimar dance culture, Dix's example demonstrates how men were seminal participants in dance's vitality. This examination reconceptualizes historical gender align ments in cultural spheres, and thus envisions new modes of cultural par ticipation in which masculinity, like femininity, changes over time. (SLF) In the German cultural world of the 1920s, artist Otto Dix fre quently positioned himself in the spotlight. Born in 1891 to a working class family in southeastern Germany, Dix served in the trenches during World War I, attended the Academy of Applied Arts in Dresden, and by the mid-1920s became a prominent Berlin portraitist and one of the most recognized realist artists of his time. His rise to fame, orchestrated by his enterprising art dealer, Karl Nierendorf, included two major public ity-garnering scandals in 1923: first, when the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne, which had purchased his gruesome anti-war painting The Trenches (Der Schitzengraben, 1923), returned it due to extensive neg ative attention; and second, an obscenity trial for his painting Girl before a Mirror (Mddchen vor dem Spiegel, 1921), for which Dix was later acquitted (Schr6ck-Schmidt 16 1-64; Strobl 67-79, 88-97). During the same period as his careful career maneuverings, Dix danced. A talented amateur social dancer, Dix favored the shimmy, an African-American jazz dance popular in the early 1920s, as well as the Charleston and the