"How can I hurt you?" The author revisits two irreverent portraits of physicians by the German Expressionist Otto Dix in order to learn more about the sitters who submitted to the painter's fiercely satirical vision - Critical Essay - Biography

Sabine Rewald

Otto Dix was the most feared portraitist in Germany during the 1920s. Sitting for a portrait by Dix required strong nerves, self-confidence and, most importantly, a sturdy sense of humor. He liked to choose his own models and then mercilessly expose their weaknesses on canvas. Despite his ruthless realism, a surprising number of prominent people wanted to be portrayed by him. Among those he turned down were the dramatist Gerhart Hauptmann and the German chancellor Hans Luther. His sharpest portraits are of artists, poets, dancers, prostitutes and the rest of the glittering demimonde of the Weimar Republic, who did not object to being portrayed with an unflinching and brutal honesty.

Dix also painted a group of pictures of businessmen, lawyers, art dealers and doctors, often showing them with the attributes of their occupations. Memorable among these are his two portraits of doctors, Hans Koch and Wilhelm Mayer-Hermann, in which Dix subverts the conventional depiction of this honorable profession. Usually rendered as Good Samaritans, doctors in paintings typically hover near sickbeds or deathbeds, dispensing solace and advice. Not so in Dix's 1921 portrait of the urologist Hans Koch, in which the doctor inspires fear and foreboding.

Dr. Koch (1881-1952) was a specialist in bladder and kidney diseases in Dusseldorf. Shown armed with a red rubber catheter tube or tourniquet and an uplifted syringe, he seems about to jam an injection into a patient positioned outside the picture flame (the viewer, perhaps). His examination room gleams with menacing medical equipment. The high leather chair sprouts different stirrups for gynecological and urological examinations. Continuing a wayward Berlin Dada practice of the previous year, when he had added collage elements to his antiwar paintings, (1) Dix applied silver foil to the chair's spiky protruding metal tubes and screws, as well as the metal instruments that are arrayed on the glass table to the right. These are rendered with supply-catalogue exactness: the tweezers with bloody cotton swab, the vaginal speculum with a heavy handle reaching over the edge, the needle and the long forceps used to grab kidney stones. (2)

Above Dr. Koch's right shoulder, similar instruments peek through a glass cabinet, on top of which rest two rubber bladders. Bottles filled with mysterious tinctures line the shelves in the background near two suspended intravenous bottles filled with colored liquids. Under his open white physician's coat, Dr. Koch wears a vest and pants in the knobby fabric fashionable at the time. His rolled-up sleeves bare the thick forearms of a laborer. A slightly and glint shines in his eyes behind pince-nez. Two reddish dueling scars, badges of honor from his student days, glare prominently on his right cheek.

Over the years, commentators have compared Dr. Koch to a sorcerer, butcher and torturer in his chamber of horrors. A photograph of him taken around 1935, however, shows a mild and friendly looking man. Moreover, the urologist wore many different hats. In literary circles he was known as the author of expressionistic poems and novels. (3) He was also a critic, an art dealer and an enlightened collector, whose early taste leaned toward French art and who collected works by Vlaminck, Braque Ingres and Laurencin. (4) His house in Dusseldorf was a rare combination of domicile, doctor's office, wine cellar, and salon for artists and the literati. For two years, 1918 and 1919, Koch and his wife, Martha, operated a small gallery where they exhibited the works of young local artists from the Rhine and Dresden regions. They called it "Das graphische Kabinett von Bergh & Co.," using the name of a friend so that the enterprise would not conflict with his medical practice.

Dix had first contacted Koch in 1920, when the artist still lived in Dresden. That year marked his debut as an enfant terrible, with four ferocious and macabre antiwar pictures of war cripples. (5) These had brought Dix notoriety but no income, and at the end of the year he turned to portraiture and a more naturalistic approach. He also produced prints and sent four etchings to Koch, but had received no reply. Dix had learned about the doctor/collector from his friend, the painter Conrad Felixmuller (1897-1977). The latter's 1919 portrait of Koch, in a late expressionistic manner, shows the sitter in his role as writer or poet, complete with pince-nez, stiff collar and dark suit.

Though Dix's nearly caricatural portrait of Dr. Koch hints at gleeful cooperation between a "wicked" painter and a willing sitter, the latter's precise response to the painting is unknown. In 1923 Koch sold the painting to the Cologne collector Josef Haubrich, who donated his 20th-century art, including this painting, to his native city in 1946. The portrait hangs there today in the Museum Ludwig.

Meanwhile, Dix and Koch became friends. (6) And, at the same time, Dix and Martha Koch became lovers, sharing, among other things, a passion for dancing. When Dix returned to Dresden at the end of 1921, Martha Koch followed him, leaving her husband and two children behind. Koch remained unperturbed, however, because he had already begun an affair with his wife's older sister, Maria Lindner. Two new couples formed. Koch and Dix became brothers-in-law, and the friendship continued until Koch's death in 1952. (7)

In 1925 Dix moved to Berlin, where, one year later, he painted his second chilling portrait of a doctor, Wilhelm Mayer-Hermann (1890-1945), a prominent ear, nose and throat specialist. Unlike Dr. Koch, who is surrounded by a multitude of threatening medical instruments, Dr. Mayer-Hermann is seated in a sparse setting dominated by a fearsome apparatus. Above him, the large metal sphere of a mechanism used for light treatments mirrors the office. (8) The sphere is attached to a machine of burnished metal, with a crank to raise and lower it, which is plugged into a black electrical outlet on the left. Also on the left hangs a case with a dial, probably for the timing of light dosages. From the lower left of the apparatus protrudes a long tube that is inserted into patients' mouths.

In this picture Dix displays great technical virtuosity. Emulating the old masters, he used tempera and oil over gesso on wood, then covered the surface with transparent glaze. Likewise, the distorted reflection in the metal sphere above the doctor's head evokes the convex mirror in Jan van Eyck's Portrait of Giovanni Arnolfini and His Wife (1434), which reflects the room in which it is depicted. Here, a ceiling fixture casts harsh light over the darkened window, the empty shelves, a vacant doorway looming on the right and an empty examination chair with a red light facing the doctor. Strapped to his forehead by a white headband, the physician's reflector catches that red light (which he would then use to peer into a patient's throat). Dix again applied silver foil, this time to the screws and clasps that affix the reflector to the band.

Wrapped tightly in his white coat, Dr. Mayer-Hermann has been compared to a "white Buddha." The portly doctor's round face and hands find echoes in the composition's many circular shapes. His pear-shaped head, with its thick nose, narrow-set and long-lashed eyes, sensuous mouth and double chin, blends into sloping shoulders and curved arms.

Dix made exhaustive studies for the portrait of Dr. Mayer-Hermann (we do not know if any were made for Dr. Koch). Between 1925 and 1926, he filled a small sketchbook with 18 drawings in which he played with the placement of those two dominant spheres, one white smocked, one metal, in addition to making two large studies of the apparatus alone. (9) The lifesize cartoon of the entire composition was destroyed by fire. (10)

In view of the artist's acerbic approach to portraiture, it comes as no surprise that a photograph of Mayer-Hermann, taken in the late 1930s, shows trim to be a handsome man. What is known about Mayer-Hermann? His obituary in the New York Times of June 14, 1945, reports: "Dr. William S. Mayer-Hermann of 55 East 66th Street, specialist in diseases of the ear, nose, and throat, whose patients included several Metropolitan Opera stars, died yesterday morning at Sydenham Hospital, Manhattan Avenue and 123rd Street, after a day's illness. He was 53 [sic] years old. Dr. Mayer-Hermann, who came here from Berlin in 1934, leaves two children, Elsie [sic] and Claus." (11)

It was my good fortune that Mayer-Hermann's daughter, Else, agreed to receive me recently. Dr. Else Goldstein is a practicing psychologist in Manhattan. Although she was only 14 years old when her father died in 1945, she has vivid recollections of this "bon vivant" and ladies' man. Else graciously shared some of her memories, and they helped to outline the life of this unusual and flamboyant man. Her father's given name was Wilhelm Mayer. (12) He only later added Hermann, which was his mother's maiden name. Dr. Mayer-Hermann was born in Carlsbad, a spa in Bohemia, the youngest of five children. His father, Jacques Mayer, was a prosperous internist with offices in Berlin and Carlsbad. Mayer-Hermann went to school in Berlin and, as had his father and several of his siblings, studied medicine. (13) His father gave him the blue lapis lazuli ring that he wears on his right pinky--the only personal note in the portrait--after Mayer-Hermann passed his medical exams. In Berlin, he won fame for the treatment of the larynx, and singers and actors sought him out. Peter Lorre, who won notoriety playing a psychopathic child killer in Fritz Lang's M (1931), was among his patients. So was Dix.

In 1927, Dr. Mayer-Hermann married Thea Zerkowski, one of his students and his junior by 13 years, with whom he had the two children mentioned above. Being Jewish, Mayer-Hermann emigrated with his family from Nazi Germany to New York. (14) He later became an American citizen and wanted to join the Armed Forces to fight the Germans, but was told he was too old. After completing the obligatory medical internship for immigrants, Dr. Mayer-Hermann opened an office in Manhattan, first at 47 E. 72nd St., and later on the lower floor of a brownstone at 55 E. 66th St. (15) As in Berlin, this charismatic vocal-cord specialist once again attracted stage, opera and film performers. Among the "Metropolitan Opera stars" alluded to by the New York Times who flocked to his office were the soprano Lotte Lehmann and the conductor Bruno Walter. According to his children, the waiting room resembled a "salon" and was filled with famous singers and movie stars whose autographed photographs lined the walls.

Else remembers her father taking her to the Metropolitan Opera and to the Museum of Modern Art, where the portrait by Dix had hung on permanent view since Philip Johnson presented it to the museum in 1932. Indeed, Mayer-Hermann never owned the painting. It was shown in a 1926 exhibition of Dix's work at the Galerie Neumann-Nierendorf in Berlin and illustrated in the accompanying catalogue. Dix subsequently lent the portrait to the exhibition "Modern German Painting and Sculpture," organized by Alfred H. Barr, Jr., at the Museum of Modern Art in 1931. Philip Johnson, then the director of the museum's architecture department and a member of the advisory committee, purchased the portrait and gave it to MOMA the following year. (16)

During those museum visits, Dr. Mayer-Hermann liked to linger in front of his portrait and also enjoyed listening to the derogatory comments made by some of the visitors. Among those his daughter recalls were "he looks like a butcher!" and "I would never go to a doctor who looks like that." Dr. Mayer-Hermann agreed, and is said to have remarked: "If anyone recognized me from the picture, they would never come to me as a patient!" (17) He evidently possessed not only the necessary nerve and serf-confidence to sit for Dix, but also the requisite humor to enjoy the brutal visual jokes made at his expense by Dix, then at the height of his most "clinical" New Objectivity style.

For his part, Dix showed fine consistency in choosing unusually talented and brilliant individuals as models for two portraits that skewer an ostensibly noble profession. To a surprising degree, both of these genial and generous men shared a similar joie de vivre and--with the visual arts and poetry in Koch's case, the vocal arts and theater in Mayer-Hermann's--led rich lives beyond medicine.

(1.) Dix had used silver paper on the mechanical jaw replacement of one of the three crippled war veterans in the painting Skat Players (Berlin, Nationalgalerie).

(2.) I am grateful to Dr. Lester Sumner Freeman, an ear, nose and throat specialist in New York, for identifying these instruments. I also want to thank Dr. Stephan Diedrich, curator at the Museum Ludwig, for giving me access to the archival file on this painting.

(3.) Dr. Koch was the author, among other works, of the expressionist novella Proleten (Proletarians), 1908, and the collection of poems Mein Leben geht auf krummen Wegen (My Life Follows Crooked Paths), 1906. The information on Dr. Koch is taken from the exemplary catalogue devoted to his life and collection, Das Graphische Kabinett von Bergh & Co., text by Peta Barth, published by the Galerie Remmert und Barth in Dusseldorf, 1992.

(4.) Koch acquired these works from Alfred Flechtheim (1878-1937), a collector-turned-dealer who opened his first gallery in Dusseldorf in December 1913. After the war, Flechtheim became a great and influential German dealer of mainly Fauve and Cubist art, with branches of his gallery in Berlin, Cologne, Dusseldorf and Frankfurt. In 1926 Dix painted a portrait of Flechtheim in Berlin, showing the dealer as a rapacious figure surrounded by and clutching Cubist paintings. The painting is in the collection of the Nationalgalerie, Berlin.

(5.) Three of the four works, all from 1920, survive: March Vendors (Stuttgart, Stantsgalerie), Prager Strasse (Stuttgart, Galerie der Stadt) and the above-mentioned Skat Players. The fourth and most notorious, The War Cripples (with Self-Portrait), was shown at the Dada Fair in Berlin to much controversy. Confiscated in 1937 by the National Socialists, it was included in that year's infamous "Degenerate Art" exhibition and is presumed destroyed.

(6.) Koch acquired the artist's notorious paintings Salon I (today in the Galerie der Stadt, Stuttgart) and Salon II (now lost), both of 1921. The two paintings depict aged and grotesquely misshapen prostitutes waiting in bordellos for clients.

(7.) Koch remained in Dusseldorf until 1938 and then moved to Singen, a small town near Lake Constance, where he opened another office and remained until his death.

(8.) Earlier writers have erroneously described the instrument as an X-ray machine. I am grateful to Arlene Sharer, reference librarian of file Historical Collection at the New York Academy of Medicine, for helping me to identify this instrument and to Dr. Freeman, who referred me to Ms. Sharer.

(9.) See Ulrike Lorenz, Otto Dix: Das Werkverzeichnis der Zeichnungen und Pastelle: herauzgegeben van der Otto Dix Stiflung Vaduz, Weimar, 2003, vol. III, nos. NSk 2.5.1 to NSk 2.5.18 and NSk 2.5.20 to NSk 2.5. 21, ill. pp. 1001-08.

(10.) Ibid., No. NSk 2.5.22, ill. p. 1008.

(11.) My thanks to Angela Lange, curatorial assistant in the department of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, for allowing me access to the archival file of this painting, which contained the obituary from the New York Times, and for helping me to find Mayer-Hermann's daughter, Else.

(12.) Else kindly showed me her father's marriage certificate, dated Feb. 5, 1927, in which ins name is still recorded as Wilhelm Mayer, although between 1925 and 1926 his prescriptions and letterheads already listed the double name. The latter information is from Beate Pickert, a daughter from an earlier relationship and now a retired internist in Berlin.

(13.) He graduated with a doctoral thesis on a gynecological topic, according to Beate Pickert.

(14.) Mayer-Hermann and his wife separated when they arrived in New York. Thea Zerkowski became a general practitioner in a hospital in New York. Both children lived with their mother.

(15.) His apartment was behind his office and, according to his son, William Herman (also known as Claus Mayer-Hermann), now a retired psychologist in Florida, a large tortoise had the run of both places.

(16.) The portrait was sold to Philip Johnson through the intermediary of Neue Kunst Fides Gallery, Dresden, and the artist's agent, I.B. (Israel Ber) Neumann, New Art Circle, New York, in April 1931. The New York Times and the New York Herald Tribune announced Johnson's gift to MOMA on Sept. 18, 1932. Undoubtedly relying on the same source, both described the work as the "first important modern German painting to be acquired by a New York museum."

(17.) Telephone conversation with William Herman, Aug. 21, 2003.

Works by Otto Dix are included in the exhibition "Arcadia and Metropolis: Masterworks from the Nationalgalerie Berlin," on view in New York at the Neue Galerie, Mar. 12-June 7.

Author: Sabine Rewald is curator of modern art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

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