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 alignments in cultural spheres, and thus envisions new modes of cultural participation in which masculinity, like femininity, changes over time.

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