Androgyny is in for Sylvia von harden and Otto Dix.

This portrait is the product of what sounds like the set up to your least favorite of your dad’s Thanksgiving dinner-table-type jokes: so a painter passes a a journalist outside a bar and he says, “I must paint you! I simply must...you are representative of an entire epoch.” And so the journalist goes, she goes, “So you want to paint my lacklustre eyes, my ornate ears, my long nose, my thin lips; you want to paint my long hands, my short legs, my big feet...which can only scare people off and delight no one?” hahaha lol jk. The painting is the punchline.

To her point, Dix definitely didn’t make Sylvia von Harden look cute or ideal in any way. If the affected monocle didn’t scare you off from walking over to her bar table for a friendly chat the scowl probably did. If you’re imagining her voice sounds like the Monopoly man’s you’re only a little wrong. She wrote for a communist newspaper, so she’s sort of anti-capitalist and anti-monopoly, but Dix heightened her androgyny so she’s not not anything really. She is the New Woman: professionally ambitious, cigarette smoking, boyishly dressed, unafraid of solitude. Dix might have been interested in the New Woman, but he isn’t necessarily supportive of her choices, there’s nothing flattering about anything in the portrait.

Otto Dix is maybe a bag of misogynistic dix? But apparently this is his least-unflattering portrait of a New Woman, von Harden is not depicted as a whore, which is nice. She apparently liked the portrait, later in life she traveled to Paris to be photographed next to it in the Musée National d’Art Moderne (now the George Pompidou Center).

Maybe the real punchline of the joke is that the New Woman became a tidy little ad campaign when her subversive gender-bending proclivities were assimilated into standard, reproduction-oriented gender roles, just a new way to sell clothes or whatever else. And meanwhile von Harden had exiled herself in England where she was going broke and gunning for the grave. Like I said, it’s not a good joke.