An exhibition gives the name
Mannheim, 14 June 1925. At the Kunsthalle, its director Gustav Friedrich Hartlaub opened an exhibition titled New Objectivity: German Painting since Expressionism. He showed painters who, as he wrote, had turned to “positive, tangible reality”. Hartlaub had already used the term in 1923 in a circular to artists and museums. Not a single woman artist was included in 1925.
Hartlaub distinguished two tendencies: a “left wing”, the Verists, who criticised society sharply and often viciously, and a “right wing”, the Classicists, who painted calm, timeless pictures of landscapes, objects and people. In the same year the art historian Franz Roh spoke of “Magic Realism”.
The wounds of war
Otto Dix had fought as a soldier for four years. In 1924 he published the etching cycle The War, 50 sheets on trenches, the wounded and the dead. In his big-city pictures, war cripples stand beside dancers and men about town. His triptych Metropolis shows the Weimar Republic as a garish stage between glamour and misery.
From 1922 to 1925 Dix lived in Düsseldorf. He studied at the art academy and moved in the circle of the gallerist Johanna Ey, known as “Mother Ey”, who supported young artists and whose portrait he painted.
In Berlin, George Grosz drew and painted the powerful of the Republic: officers, judges, clergymen, industrialists and journalists. In Pillars of Society the journalist wears a chamber pot on his head, steaming excrement rises from the politician’s open skull, and a cavalryman rides out of the head of the old duelling student. Grosz was taken to court several times, among other things for insulting the army and for blasphemy.
Cool portraits
Many pictures of the New Objectivity are portraits. In 1926 Dix painted the journalist Sylvia von Harden with monocle, cigarette and bobbed hair, an image of the self-assured “new woman”. Christian Schad became known for portraits whose smooth, almost porcelain-like surface seems at once seductive and remote.
The Berlin painters Jeanne Mammen and Lotte Laserstein depicted women’s lives in the big city from their own experience. Laserstein’s Evening over Potsdam of 1930, a quiet, melancholy gathering at a table on a roof terrace, was acquired by the Nationalgalerie in Berlin in 2010. Laserstein emigrated to Sweden in 1937; her work was rediscovered only decades later.
Things themselves
The Classicists around Georg Schrimpf and Alexander Kanoldt painted Italianate landscapes and austere still lifes with jugs and cacti. A similar attitude appeared in photography: in his 1928 book The World Is Beautiful, Albert Renger-Patzsch showed plants, machines and everyday objects in clear close-up. August Sander portrayed people of every profession and class for his great project People of the 20th Century.
The end in 1933
The Nazi seizure of power brought the New Objectivity to an abrupt end. In 1933 Dix lost his professorship at the Dresden Academy, and Grosz had already emigrated to the United States in January 1933. In 1937 the propaganda exhibition Degenerate Art in Munich displayed numerous works by Dix and Grosz for ridicule. Some of the Classicists, by contrast, came to terms with the regime.
Why it still matters
The New Objectivity is a precise, often oppressive portrait of a democracy in crisis. Its images of glamour and poverty, speculation and violence seem surprisingly topical today. For its centenary in 2024/25, the Kunsthalle Mannheim devoted a major exhibition to it, which brought around 30 of the works shown in 1925 together again and also featured women artists of the period.
Further reading
- Sergiusz Michalski: New Objectivity: Painting, Graphic Art and Photography in Weimar Germany 1919–1933 (1994).
- Inge Herold, Johan Holten (eds.): The New Objectivity: A Centennial (2024). Kunsthalle Mannheim catalogue.