This is Renée Sintenis with her fox terrier in 1926. Renée was a sculptor, medallist and graphic artist who worked in Berlin in the 1920s, was a lesbian and married (married to a man, I mean), and during the 1930s and the war, was heavily restricted by the Nazis (partly because her maternal grandmother had been Jewish). The Nazis included one of her pieces in their Degenerate Art exhibition. She survived the war, though all of her papers and most of her work was lost in an Allied bombing raid. Before the war she had embodied the type of 'new woman' of the 1920s, slim and charismatic with an androgynous beauty, and she was often the subject for other artists, including her husband (Emil Rudolf Weiß) and Georg Kolbe, and by photographers such as the one who took this photo, Hugo Erfurth, as well as Fritz Eschen and Frieda Riess. The reason I'm telling you all this is that she is one of the women, one of Berlin’s 1920’s artists, that I'm using to help me create a character in my new play, set in 1932. My character is a female Jewish theatre director who confronts Weimar and then NSDAP censorship on her journey to get the play she’s directing onto the stage. Early days, I'm only just starting to write, but I wanted to let you know that something is happening!
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