‘Mrs Piscator at her dressing table’, photo: Sasha Stone (1895–1940), Germany, 1928
This photograph depicts the actress Hildegard (née Jurezyss) Piscator, wife of Germany’s most famous left-wing theatre director, Erwin Piscator (1893–1966). Published as an illustration to an article written for a leading women’s magazine by Mrs Piscator on the subject of the Piscators’ new Modernist flat in Berlin, designed by Marcel Breuer, it depicts Mrs Piscator as a stylish, cosmopolitan ‘New Woman’, fashionably dressed and sporting the up-to-date short hairstyle of the time. Like most of her Berlin peers, she would have regarded make-up and perfume as essential to the presentation of herself in public, and was at ease being portrayed sitting at her dressing table buffing her nails. During the 1920s make-up was increasingly consumed by women, who also took the lead in its sale and manufacture, and indeed in creating the beauty culture and industry in the period. Read more