Soon after, Schad painted his Self-Portrait. It was premiered in a group exhibition of Neue Sachlichkeit artists at the Neues Haus des Vereins Berliner Künstler, although we know that Heike was not invited. Schad sent her a letter, dated Monday 3 October 1927, quoted in Heike’s diary two days later. 

Heike, 

The exhibition opened at the Neues Haus tonight – sorry you weren’t there, and about the Adlon, but nobody can know that you were the woman in the portrait – I hope you understand. Marcella and I are finished – perhaps I will see you at the El Dorado. 

Christian. 

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The Self-Portrait immediately caught the attention of critics, who cited it as one of Schad’s most arresting works. In one of his first pieces for influential politics and arts periodical Die Weltbühne, journalist and psychologist Rudolf Arnheim drew a comparison with another of Schad’s works, which has assumed a new dimension since the discovery of Heike’s diaries.

The Self-Portrait with Model is outstanding, with Christian Schad including himself amongst the dilettantes, bohemians, degenerates and freaks who populate his world. With the decadent city as a backdrop, Schad is in the foreground, wearing just a transparent shirt which serves only to highlight his nakedness. The artist stares at the viewer, as if he has personally intruded on Schad’s clandestine moment of intimacy, his face filled with revulsion, heightened by the narcissus that points towards him, coming from the near-naked woman behind him. He blocks her midriff, perhaps protecting her modesty, or maybe hiding something from the intruder. Unwomanly despite her round breasts, she wears nothing but a black ribbon around her wrist and a red stocking, looking away from the artist, stunned if not scared. They both look alone: there are just a few inches, yet the distance is huge, and it is impossible not to wonder if Schad’s self-disgust and the scar on her cheek are connected. 

The ‘model’ is unnamed, but she bears a striking resemblance to the transvestite in Count St. Genois d’Anneaucourt, which depicts an aristocrat caught between his public image and his desires, and between virtue and vice. The Count stands in the centre, ambivalent, seemingly hoping that the viewer will help solve his dilemma: the demure, respectable woman to his right, or the tall invert to his left, his cheeks plastered in rouge, his huge frame barely covered by the transparent red dress that exposes his backside? Either way, the transvestite’s resemblance to the ‘woman’ in the Self-Portrait is noticeable, although Schad claims that the model was chosen through a chance encounter in Vienna. 

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