With expressive strokes and an enthusiasm for the eccentricities of life, the Berlin expressionist Georg Tappert dedicated himself to motifs from the world of theater and the cabaret in the pulsating Berlin nightlife during the years of the Weimar Republic. " "Sitzende mit Strumpfband (Bildnis R.)” (Seated Woman with Garter (Portrait of R.)) is an outstanding example of this creative phase. Tappert's paintings - sometimes staged in a glamorous way - always show characters marked by life. Its unmistakable quality lies in the combination of eccentricity and closeness to life. Unlike his contemporaries Otto Dix, Georg Grosz or even Max Beckmann, he rarely exaggerated or alienated the fragility of this nocturnal parallel world and thus did not end up with a socio-critical grotesque. Tappert's figures impress with their enormous human presence and their immediate, realistic expression. Little is known about Ms. Rosenberg, one of Tappert's most important models of the 1920s, who is depicted in this "Portrait of R." in an eccentric pose and half naked. With her bare chest and a negligee so short that it allows a clear view of her garters, she still is not the victim of the male gaze, as she is the one who looks down or at the observer with strength and self-confidence. She is not a young girl but a strong woman in the middle of life who knows how to confidently respond to the viewer's gaze. The sitter’s first name, the mysterious cabaret singer "Fräulein Rosenberg", is not known; what we do know is that she was an acquaintance of Tappert's first wife Kathleen Bargot (1890-1925), whom Tappert often portrayed in different costumes and in a self-confident and casual, sophisticated pose in the early 1920s. In this work alone, however, Tappert portrayed the sitter not only in a self-confident and swanky way, but also half-naked. The special quality of this composition lies precisely in this fragile balance between exposure and self-confidence, weakness and strength, eroticism and maturity. In "In Sitzende mit Strumpfband (Bildnis R.)", Tappert introiduces us to the singer "Fräulein Rosenberg", a mysterious femme fatale, an erotic and strong female figure on whom life has left its marks. A work that shows clear parallels to the famous painting "Bildnis der Tänzerin Anita Berber” (Portrait of the Dancer Anita Berber, 1925) that Otto Dix made a little later. [JS]