Exodus & Exile: Migration themes in Biblical images

Verkündigung (Annunciation)

Artist Dodo

Accession number 2012-40

Dodo emigrated to Great Britain in 1936, but this image derives from her earlier career in Berlin. After studying design at the Reimann Schule (1923–26), she began a successful commercial career working for Berlin fashion houses; however, in an early change of direction, between 1927 and 1930, she created more than 60 caustic genre scenes of Weimar's glamorous high society for the left-leaning weekly satirical magazine ULK. In these, she narrated the sophisticated life of the modern urbanite and her own take on the 'battle of the sexes'. After her marriage to Hans Bürgner in 1929 (divorced 1938) was complicated by an affair with psychoanalyst Gerhard Adler (whom she later married), Dodo underwent Jungian analysis in Zurich in 1933. During this time, she produced a group of intense, intimate, and sometimes brutal, 'unconscious' drawings. These hallucinatory images explore troubled states of mind, including guilt, alienation and separation as in this self-portrait.

Here, a tearful woman in a grey claustrophobic confined space is pictured within a stream of light emanating from a blue globe. Is she spotlit in order to reveal and revel in her anguish or illuminated by a light that may transform or transfigure her anguish? Whatever is revealed, as in Dodo’s own experiences, appears ambiguous in effect. 

As a result, this image highlights the tensions and stresses implicit in the revelation made to a young Jewish girl that she would carry a child for which there was no natural human father, have to travel to the home of the child’s foster father to give birth, before leaving urgently to go into exile for the early part of her child’s life. An announcement promising change and offering hope also contains challenge and trauma, including the experience of future migration, for the one who bears the bringer of that change and hope for others.