Christian Schad
Sonja (Max Herrmann-Neisse in the background), 1928
Artist
Christian Schad
Title
Sonja (Max Herrmann-Neisse in the background)
Year of creation
1928
Technique and dimensions
oil on canvas, 90 x 60 cm
Year of acquisition
1997
Acquired with funds from the Ingeborg and Günter Milich Foundation, Berlin.
"The most distinctive, well-groomed and also the most beautiful women that I met during my various stays in Europe were the Berlin women" - this is how the painter Christian Schad saw the type of Berlin woman and with the portraits of "Lotte" (Sprengel Museum Hannover) and the "Sonja" was also painted in 1928 with incomparable nobility.
Sonja, the secretary, frequented the famous artists' and writers' meeting place of the "Romanisches Café" at the Memorial Church, which also forms the backdrop for her portrait. The "close-up" of an emancipated Berlin employee, dressed up in her black smock dress with a silk scarf, with shimmering skin on her upper arm, her legs casually crossed, the cigarette holder in her graceful hand, "Camel" is up to date.
A woman's face, austere, stern and boyishly beautiful: black-brown bobbed hair with languid curls falling over her forehead, the wave of sharply erased eyebrows above the large, shadowed eyes. Next to the phallic bottle neck on Sonja's shoulder is an open, pink silk camellia, a hint of erotic flair. Two men sit behind the melancholy, wide-awake beauty of the night. The only cropped bald man is the poet Max-Herrmann Neisse, a "nosferatu"-like figure with a bizarre bat ear. With him, "in this picture, Sonja is given a reference to a bar with a somewhat literary atmosphere - and thus to the circle in which the 'other' Berliner felt at home." (Christian Schad).
Further away from her sits the man in the red jacket, supposedly the sitter is Felix Bryk. Floral Art Deco backdrops are inserted in the background, the bare corridor leads into a metropolitan situation of vagueness and forlornness. Like a fashion designer, the painter then placed his signature on the right black sleeve as a final point: SCHAD 28.
With his Sonja, Christian Schad portrayed a Berlin woman "in front of" the men: young, intelligent, fashionable, beautiful and self-confident. An urban beauty that also commands distance in its delicately frosty coolness. In this timeless "class woman" from a simple background, despite all the new-objective zeitgeist of the "Golden Twenties", there is also something of the aristocratism of Joan of Aragon, which Schad appreciated so much in Raffaelo Santi and the painters of the Renaissance. With his exemplary urban plant of the Berliner "Sonja", Schad gives a cool, probing type portrait that goes beyond the specifically individual, but in which the social characterization is deliberately left out: "My interest lies in the inner being of people. I am less interested in the pragmatic, external events. "
Roland March
