Race Relations

We Nordics

by Adolf Dehn

Based on drawings and studies Dehn completed while in Berlin during the 1920s, We Nordics is a criticism of the German elite. 

With their pasty, soft skin and balding heads, the four white figures look with disapproval, yet also with fascination, at the exotic black dancers. 

Dehn’s depiction of the black performers, however, is also racist: he gives them the exaggerated features and jerky, ungraceful gestures that were the common black stereotypes in art of the time.