During lockdown, the study of German expressionist artists George Grosz and Otto Dix, and their portrayals of women, made Claire Thomson recognise the stark truth of the body.
In Otto Dix’s Portrait of the Journalist Sylvia von Harden, 1926, Lottie Whalen sees both an insouciant New Woman and Dix’s embodiment of a dangerously dissolute era. Recalling a recent encounter with the painting in Paris, she reflects on the freedoms we stand to lose in the time of Covid-19.