Salvaging the Unseen:
Images of Prostitutes Lost in Scandal

Alicia Reid

 

In post-World-War-I urban Germany, two artists pursued printmaking
primarily because of its readiness to be seen and to be seen by many.
Both Otto Dix and George Grosz produced printed images of nude women
during this era, prints that were legally prosecuted for their
corruptive potential. In the scandal surrounding the "seeing" of these
works, something vital appears to have been overlooked. While these
images expose a great deal of their subjects' outer life, they do little
to represent their subjects as real living women. These images are often
cited as being representations of prostitutes. They give us no
indication of why these women are in the positions they are in or why
they are prostitutes. Is this a problem? Is it possible to gain more
from these two prints than what meets the eye in our "seeing" of these
images and to salvage something of their personal stories from their
scandalous histories?

As viewers taking part in the cycle of "seeing" visual art, the
most immediate, and therefore most vitally important, perception of
these images is ours at this moment. Can we be expected to see what has
been overlooked? Distance in time and place makes us veritable strangers
to the artists and their society; however, these images still stand to
be seen. Can we see today in these images, wrought from a strictly male
gaze, those neglected stories, or do their projections of prostitutes
leave too persistent an imprint to be denied?

Otto Dix lived just a block away from a brothel on the
Ziegelgasse, as his biographer Fritz Löffler records (31). Prostitutes
populated his neighborhood and their images populated his art. After
World War I, both he and artist George Grosz ceased their aesthetic
experiments in terms of fashionable "isms" like Expressionism or
Dadaism, opting instead to create direct, non-abstract, figurative
impressions of the observable world in works that collectively came to
be called Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity). According to Löffler, Dix
strove to focus instead on achieving "the strongest impression of
actuality" in his works (26). As Grosz scholars Ruth Berenson and
Norbert Muhlen report, Grosz similarly announced that he "would paint
and sketch what he saw with his own eyes" (14), creating works that
were, as he put it, "always unfavorable to all men equally" (qtd. in
Berenson and Muhlen 14). Both artists were concerned above all with
observing and depicting reality. In a 1963 conversation with friends,
Dix reputedly claimed in retrospect that he had "to see everything,"
explaining not only why he went to war, but also why he strove to
document the war and its aftermath (Dückers, "Portfolios" 80). As
Alexander Dückers relates, Grosz donned masks of sorts, submerging
himself into the post-war world whose worst truths he sought to unmask;
he often adopted pseudonyms to identify with the disparate characters of
the times ("Portfolios" 89). He acknowledges in his autobiography his
tendency to "totally forget" who he was, surrendering himself to the
vice, decadence, and political debate now characteristic (thanks perhaps
in part to his images) of the post-war German era (Grosz 119).

Both men turned to printmaking during post-war years. Dix
appreciated the directness of the print, purportedly realizing that he
could "in a much more penetrating way" create testimonies of the world
as he experienced it (qtd. in Löffler 35). Grosz's attitude toward the
use of the print as his medium was ambivalent. He found the reproductive
nature of printmaking as meaningless as seeing the world in distinct
shades of rights and wrongs; scholars believe the distinction between an
original print and a reproduction mattered less to Grosz than the
print's power to reach a wide audience (Carey and Griffiths 181).

For two visual artists newly intent on depicting a familiar
reality, prostitution was a readily available theme. The prostitute in
early twentieth-century Germany was a highly visible public figure. City
streets were a source of a new voyeurism not only for men, but also for
other women, as more women were working outside of the home inside
offices or shops. Prostitution may have been nothing new, but the
numbers of women working on the streets increased as a "result of forced
industrialization and urbanization," according to social historian
Katharina Von Ankum (165). The collision of many women within the city
made it difficult for men to differentiate between those who were
prostitutes and those who were bourgeois and independent. The image of a
lone woman on the street had become misleading. Bourgeois women, walking
alone, were often stopped, having been mistaken for prostitutes. The
police saw it as their duty to protect these bourgeois women.
"Respectable" women were encouraged to seek the police for "protection
from being accosted, while prostitutes were expected to carry on with
their business "concealed from the eyes of the passersby," as Von Ankum
relates (166-67).

While the prostitute on the street fell victim to being isolated
as a figure of public threat, the prostitute in the visual arts was
being appropriated as symbolic of the corruption of the post-war Weimar
Republic. Private anti-republican groups actively prosecuted artists for
the creation of images with salacious overtones; the existence of such
images alone was perceived to be indicative of a government submerged in
vice, as Peter Jelavich suggests (273). The image of the prostitute was
a readymade package for prosecution. She was as inaccurately perceived
by conservative groups in print as she was on the street: they saw her
everywhere as an embodiment of corruption.

Dix's painting, titled Mädchen am Spiegel (Girl before Mirror,
now lost; see Scheckter) was confiscated in 1922, bringing Dix to trial
on charges of obscenity. Art historian Reinhold Heller maintains that
the artist's lithograph, Liegender Akt (Sitzende mit Zigarette)
(Reclining Nude [Seated Woman with Cigarette], Fig. 16) of 1923 is
similar in content and description to this lost painting. The court
ruling's description of Girl before Mirror serves to describe the print
as well: it depicts a woman clothed "so as to permit recognition of her
pubic hair and the rounding of her buttocks," a woman as a "prostitute
clearly display[ing] the traces of the degradation caused by her trade"
(qtd. in Heller, Stark 272). The young woman in Dix's lithograph of 1923
engages us from a decidedly cramped position. Closing the woman into the
space, Dix positions her crossing her arms and kicking one leg high up
over the other. This pose serves to accentuate, and perhaps proffer,
both her naked breasts and genitals. The woman stares sideways at us,
with a smirk, resigned to her position that suggests her role in society
as prostitute rather than as "respectable" bourgeoise. Dix stated, in
court, that he produced images like this one in Reclining Nude as moral
testimony "...to show people where the practice of her [the
prostitute's] deplorable trade of immorality would lead in the final
analysis" (qtd. in Heller, Stark 272). The court found Dix innocent.

Grosz, like Dix, produced many images of nude women in
suggestive positions. One such image, Entkleidung (Disrobing, Fig. 17)
part of the Ecce Homo portfolio published in 1923, brought Grosz's
prints to a wider audience than perhaps anticipated. Not a stranger to
court proceedings, Grosz was put on trial. Twenty-four of his Ecce Homo
plates were confiscated on grounds of blasphemy and obscenity. Grosz was
convicted and fined 6000 Marks (Carey and Griffiths 181). Disrobing, a
photolithograph, was singled out for its depiction of a woman (assumed
to be a prostitute) wearing a cross around her neck and very little else
(Berenson and Muhlen 15). Grosz worked from life in such a way as to
show everyone in an "unfavorable" light, perhaps to create printed
documents of social critique.

In Grosz's print we see a woman costumed much like the woman
featured in Dix's lithograph of the same year. Again, as in the Dix
image, we are thrust into an apparently intimate closeness to this
woman's life, as she stands turning to the side, hands clasped behind
her back so as not to censor her nudity from our view. Her breasts and
pubic hair are wrought in Grosz's stylized detail, drawing attention to
the natural reality of her body, from which, as the court assumed, she
makes her living. Grosz grants us a view of a woman in what appears to
be a real situation. She, like Dix's Reclining Nude, recognizes this
reality, holding her focus and our own there with her as she stands
framed by a man toasting her backside with his fly undone.

Regardless of whether or not these images were intended to be
moralizing or socially critical, it is vital to note that they were
produced by men: Dix and Grosz. From the titles, we cannot know that the
women before us are prostituting themselves. What we see from the images
are two women, scantily clad, in an intimate setting, but decidedly not
alone. We see them through the eyes of the male gaze - depicted
literally in the Grosz, presumed in the Dix. If the women before us
appear to be prostitutes, we, as viewers, engage in the male voyeur
roles of post-war Germany. We, like the many men on the street, may see
a glance or a certain way of dressing (or undressing) as indicative of a
certain social role. We may be limited in our scope by the male
perceptions that created these images, as the artists themselves had
limited access to all life experience. The scandals surrounding these
images by Dix and Grosz also served to limit their scope and/or eclipse
the reality of the lives of their subjects, isolating them as
prostitutes and therefore corruptive. The trials helped to define the
roles we, as viewers, and the artists are allowed to fill: those of the
consuming public.

Peter Jelavich, historian of modern European culture, writes
that although the constitution of the Weimar Republic stated that
"censorship will not be exercised," the arts of this era were still
subject to trial (265). From the days of Imperial Germany through those
of the post-war era, censorship was prompted not by the ruling
administration but by private groups. This "pressure from below" sought
to "denigrate the Weimar system" by drawing attention to the presence of
offensive art (Jelavich 272). Images such as the two prints by Dix and
Grosz were deemed offensive because of their portrayals of offensive
subject matter in a medium that could be reproduced, and therefore could
reach wider audiences. Jelavich argues convincingly that the images
produced by Grosz and Dix were welcomed by groups critical of the Weimar
Republic, as their presence proved that the administration was corrupt
enough to let the works be seen at all (273).

Works that were at risk of being prosecuted were usually those
whose definitions as high or low art were ambiguous. Art historian Lynda
Nead writes that these "borderline cases" are "those that blur the
distinguishing characteristics of art and pornography, those that
confuse the media, locations, and audiences associated with these
cultural categories" (94). Images that idealized their subjects, most
notably the female nude as subject, "had a good shot at claiming to be
'art,' and thus [were] granted more freedom" as Jelavich contends (277).
With modern works like these of Grosz and Dix thrown into the mix,
grotesquely realistic portrayals of actual women in their intimate daily
contexts challenged a system that traditionally regarded art, in
Jelavich's words, "as a sphere of disinterested contemplation removed
from the quotidian world" (277). These prints, whose content alone
wrestled with the definition of art, were particularly effective fodder
for private groups. As printed works, they were marketable and could
more easily reach a wide audience (see MacDonald). In the eyes of some
"morality crusaders," the existence of prints like these of Grosz and
Dix were evidence that the republic encouraged public consumption of
offensive images, images dallying with definitions of art and
pornography.

These censorship cases were often "widely and heatedly discussed
in the news media," Jelavich reports, thereby reaching an audience even
greater than one composed of paying consumers. With so much publicity,
sales of those works by the artists that had not yet been confiscated
often increased, while sales of the once-confiscated images soared
(Jelavich 268). Bourgeois men, the likes of whom were often depicted in
Grosz's unforgiving signature, scrambled to buy these prints. They were
"amused, entertained, and grateful" of the scandal (Berenson and Muhlen
16). The censorship of these images had, in fact, made the prints more
visible and more valuable.

In all the heightened visibility of these images, the lived
reality that inspired them was eclipsed by the prints' notoriety as
objects of scandal. The women in these images were typed as prostitutes,
harbingers of a corrupt republic, threats not only to their customers,
but also to the "respectable" women who then filled the streets. These
images exist as documents of the lives led by their artists and as
marketable objects scandalized by their salacious overtones. Can these
images also exist to remind us of the stories that went
underrepresented? What we have missed in these images is a sense of the
reality of the women featured so prominently and exposed so
unrelentingly. Dix and Grosz sought to present a reality. As male
artists during the post-war age in Germany, they had social limitations.
As much as Dix wanted "to see everything" and Grosz to don the mask of
any social role, they could not traverse these limitations. Their images
show us a reality, but a reality seen through their experience. As
viewers of their images, can we see beyond the stage that they have set?
Could we see the value of these images as documents of the women's
reality?

The image of the prostitute in modern Germany was actively
sought, depicted, debated, and shunned. Illusions of prostitutes
populated print portfolios, court proceedings, news media, and city
streets. Their images in post-war Germany were used to tell narrow,
biased stories, as symbols of corrupt government, of experiences shared
by male artists, and of the bourgeois woman's fear of being mistaken as
a commodity. Today, two prints of prostitutes inhabit space on our
gallery wall. In this new context, can we see these images without the
shroud of their history, but through to a new story, real stories of
real women, or do we need new images?

Is this a question of the gendered gaze? Do images created
through a female gaze offer us a more complete story? Art historian
Marsha Meskimmon, in her book, We Weren't Modern Enough: Women Artists
and the Limits of German Modernism, highlights lesser-known women
artists of Weimar Germany who created images of prostitutes that show us
different versions of their stories. Without essentializing men and
women, Meskimmon suggests that women artists depicted prostitutes
differently. She writes that one artist, Gerta Overbeck, as a woman,
encountered a prostitute "as an ordinary working woman buying the tools
of her trade" (25). The woman in Overbeck's sketch Prostitute of 1923
stands at midday, clothed, holding up for her inspection a douche (a
contraceptive choice), reminding us that in this profession, she
endangers herself and her future more than the greater republic.
Overbeck's perception, albeit as a woman attuned to women's concerns,
may be a bourgeois projection that does not coincide with that of the
woman depicted. Although the artist shows us the woman outside the realm
of temptation and corruption, the figure remains a prostitute,
endangered or endangering, and little more. The question remains for us
today of whether we can see in these so-called realistic portrayals the
real life lived by the subjects, or if the realistic images are in fact
representations only of the artists' projections.

This is not merely a question of the gendered gaze, then;
rather, this is a question of the possibility of artistic objectivity
and the historicity of representation. The artists in question chose not
to depict observed real women in portraits, with real names and
individual attributes. Instead, Dix, Grosz, and Overbeck created images
in which the women are generalized as types. As the audience today,
while we cannot help but perceive these women in the same objectifying
light, we are able to see them representing more than victims of vice or
symbols of social corruption. The histories of these images remain bound
to scandal in Weimar Germany. However, they need no longer typify a
corrupt Republic; rather, we can see the images now as representations
of a society in which some artists (of all genders) and their consuming
public neglected trying to "see" the real women behind the imprints of
prostitution.