DescriptionOtto Dix, who was associated with the Neue Sachlichkeit artistic style that arose during Germany’s chaotic Weimar Republic (1918 – 1933) appropriated themes and motifs used by Old Master artists and manipulated them to address both his personal anxieties and Germany’s unstable present. He specifically engaged Old Master motifs pertaining to death, decay and women who cause men harm including the Totentanz, vanitas motifs, the Judgment of Paris and witches. He made no secret of his admiration for artists of the past such as Hans Baldung Grien, Lucas Cranach and Albrecht Dürer and his calculated references to their works were not only acknowledgements of the inspiration he found in them but also challenges to their artistic legacies. Dix was particularly intrigued by Old Master motifs that linked women, sex and death as these themes coincided with key elements of the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. During the interwar years, anxieties about gender politics manifested themselves in debates pertaining to the changing status and roles of women. In particular, the economically and sexually liberated Neue Frau was perceived as posing a threat to the patriarchal social order and to German masculinity. In light of Germany’s humiliating defeat, “deviant” women, including New Women and prostitutes, were perceived as being socially and morally suspect and were accused of a variety of offenses ranging from the corruption of society to the emasculation of German men. In many of his Weimar works, Dix linked the ideas of death and decay with images of “fallen” women, such as New Women, widows and prostitutes. In these ambiguous representations of “deviant” females in which the distinctions between prostitutes and non-prostitutes are elided, the tensions between perceptions and images of prostitutes and New Women are confronted but never fully resolved. In these works, Dix deliberately referenced and ambitiously manipulated Old Master motifs and incorporated elements of Nietzsche’s philosophy in order to make a case for his own artistic legacy and to propagate a public persona that fulfilled Nietzschean ideals of the Übermensch.