On having a table on our own

Otto Dix, Portrait of Journalist Sylvia von Harden, 1926.

‘But, where ARE you?,’ the lady sitting next to me screams into her iPhone. Dressed in black tights and something between a sweater and a dress, super stylish, she reminds me of Otto Dix’s Portrait of Journalist Sylvia von Harden (1926). All that is missing is the cigarette and the cocktail. Suddenly, she yells ‘I AM HERE!!!!’ but offers no location or further explanation. People around her are giving her meaningful stares, intimating that she should speak in a lower voice or maybe not even speak at all. But we’re in a crowded, noisy café, so she doesn’t bother me.

I saw the painting by Dix at the Pompidou this fall. ‘People must gravitate around this lady,’I thought while studying it. She looks as if she’s seen it all. Von Harden, who worked as a journalist in Berlin in the 1920s, sits at a small table in the Romanische Café, on which sit a cocktail and a cigarette case. The museum writes about the painting: ‘the cold, satirical realism typifies the New Objectivity movement to which the painter belonged. Inspired by early 16th-century German masters (Cranach, Holbein), he embraced the tempera on wood panel technique as well as the choice to exhibit the ugliness of humankind.’

But she isn’t ugly to me. In her red-check sweater dress and dark red lipstick, cigarette in hand, she sits in her pink corner of the café as if she owns the place The only thing that doesn’t seem right to me in the image is that the painter has given her a stocking that is sagging around her knee. This small detail seems staged, falsely painted into the work by Dix. Somehow, it suggests prejudice against her, like that of the people annoyed by the noisy woman in the café next to me. 

She’s done with her call now, and is busy gathering her things to leave. Maybe she’s going to meet the person she was talking to on the phone. I hope she doesn’t feel she has to go, or that she has to be quiet, to take up less space. I think we should do the opposite: be like Von Harden in the 1920s. Have a table of our own. Talk more and louder. Claim our space.