Sylvia von Harden and Otto Dix

Who hasn’t seen this picture from 1926 by Otto Dix ? An emancipated intellectual, a image of the New Woman, it shows her with bobbed hair and monocle, sitting at a cafe table with a cigarette in her hand and a cocktail in front of her. With her grayish skin, her spidery fingers, her bony body and masculine look, this woman has become one of the faces that best sums up the art movement from the 1920s called "the New Objectivity."

That the woman's name was Sylvia von Harden is no secret; indeed, it can be read in the painting's title. But, who was she ?

The real Sylvia von Harden

She was born in Hamburg in 1894 but lived during the 1920s in Berlin, writing for magazines like Das junge Deutschland and Die Rote Erde and for newspapers as Berliner Tageblatt and Frankfurter Zeitung. A book of poetry, "Verworrene Städte" (Confused Towns) appeared in 1920 and a second one The Italian Gondola, in 1927.

The painting, an important example of the New Objectivity movement, may be admired in Paris, at the Centre Georges Pompidou.

As Sylvia von Harden recalls, what Dix aimed to accomplish was a portrait which would represent a whole epoch.

Von Harden left Germany for England when Hitler came to power. She died there in 1963.