2044
Zille, Heinrich
1858 Radeburg - 1929 Berlin.
Portrait of the young Marga Behrends.
Around 1925. Charcoal on ribbed, chamois paper. Signed lower middle. Verso on the backboard inscribed by a different hand «Marga (Behrens [sic] ‹Tiller-Girls›) Berlin 1925».
H 28, W 21 cm (sheet). Framed.
«Marga Behrends (b. 1907). ‹As soon as I see the audience, I feel like a young girl›. A picture by Heinrich Zille from the twenties: a very young woman leaning against a car in the Friedrichstraße. Around her other women, revue dancers and prostitutes. During their break, they eat potato pancakes and talk. Someone photographs the young woman as she is being painted by Zille, and soon she graces the advertising pillars of Berlin as a model for cosmetics.
Her father is a vice squad officer, nicknamed ‹Bulle Emil›; of course, he would have objected to this nonsense. So, she took dance lessons in secret. Just as secretly, she applied to the Admiralspalast, the newly opened revue theatre, as a ‹Tillergirl›. ‹I really forced myself on them›, she later recalls, and apparently the pretty brat's loud charm fitted into the concept. Even without her parents' permission, she was hired as a revue dancer. [...]
In 2006, she appears as the last Tillergirl at the reopening of the Admiralspalast, her ‹Admi›. She sings a song she wrote herself: ‹Women have no soul, don't get involved with them, all men are camels and always fall in!›» from: Candida Splett, Berliner Tagesspiegel, 24.06.2010.
Provenance: private possession Wiesbaden.

Condition report