Doppelporträt

In this work, Wilfried Otto presents us with the figure of a young woman in a white blouse and an open coat against a green background. Standing next to her is a young man holding a paintbrush in his left hand and looking directly at the viewer. Whether he represents the painter himself has yet to be clarified. His concentrated gaze, however, suggests an artist’s powers of observation. The young couple look serious and are clothed in the fashion of the “Golden Twenties.”

Thanks to Gustav Friedrich Hartlaub, the second director of the Kunsthalle Mannheim, Otto was promoted early in his career. In 1925 he exhibited one painting in the historically important exhibition New Objectivity – German Painting since Expressionism, organized at the Kunsthalle by Hartlaub. Like other artists featured in this exhibition—for example Otto Dix (1891–1969) and George Grosz (1893–1959)—Otto devoted himself to representational painting, despite the form and color experiments of the Expressionists. After World War II he worked as a stage designer at the State Theater of Baden in Karlsruhe.