100 Artists Dodo 1907-1998
#05
IF YOU want to get a flavour of decadent, fashionable life in Weimar Germany, then look to the work of the artist Dodo. Her colourful gouaches, published by the satirical magazine ULK were set against backgrounds such as cafés, bars, theatres and nightclubs. Earlier, as a fashion designer, she created costumes for cabaret singer and actress Margo Lion, and for a young Marlene Dietrich.
Born Dörte Wolff into a middle class Jewish family in Berlin, in 1907, she adopted the name Dodo — her nickname — which she felt was more suited to her appearance as a “very dark Jewish little girl”. Her work showed her affinity with Black people, including a Black alter ego, she also used her pictures to comment on relationships between the sexes. Always stylish, she was known for her boyish appearance.
In 1929 she married a much older Jewish layer Dr Hans Bürgner but after the marriage faltered, she started an affair with the Jungian psychoanalyst, Dr Gerhard Adler (1904–1988), at a time when she was undergoing analysis with Jung’s assistant in Zurich — her often hallucinatory artwork of the 1930s reflecting her troubled state of mind. She came to England in 1936, working as a not-verycompetent domestic help, followed by her husband and two young children in 1938, then divorced and married Adler — then divorced him, and eventually in 1946 remarried Bürgner. In England she designed packaging and clothes, and illustrated children’s books under the name Dorthe Adler. In later years she took art classes in Hampstead and completed tapestries of her own design. She died, in 1998, aged 91.
Her work had been largely forgotten, but in the 2000s she was rediscovered by Dr Renate Krümmer, a Hamburg-based collector, with a particular interest in German art of the 1920s, after some of Dodo’s Weimar drawings were offered at auction in the UK. The first retrospective of her work, Dodo (1907–1998) – A Life in Pictures, was held at the Kunstbibliothek – Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (March 1 – May 28 2012), curated by Dr Adelheid Rasche before transferring in part to Ben Uri Gallery and Museum later the same year as The Inspiration of Decadence – Dodo Rediscovered: Berlin to London 1907–1998. The work illustrating this article is a self portrait.
Ben Uri Gallery was founded in 1915 in Whitechapel, and has a collection of 440 artists from 44 countries. You can access it at benuri.org