CategoriesStyles and Movements
Neue Sachlichkeit
New Objectivity: the cool, sharp-focus realism of painting and photography in Weimar Germany in the 1920s.
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About
Gustav Friedrich Hartlaub, director of the Kunsthalle Mannheim, used the phrase as the title of a 1925 exhibition of painters who had turned from the ecstatic distortions of Expressionism back to the visible world. It spanned the “verists” Otto Dix and George Grosz, who anatomised profiteers, prostitutes and maimed veterans, and a quieter classicising wing, including Alexander Kanoldt and Georg Schrimpf, who painted still lifes and landscapes of glassy calm.
Look for hard contours, smooth, almost enamelled paint and a gaze that refuses sentiment, as in Dix's Portrait of the Journalist Sylvia von Harden (1926) or Christian Schad's Self-Portrait with Model (1927). Photographers pursued the same precision: Albert Renger-Patzsch's book The World Is Beautiful (1928) found form in machines and plants, Karl Blossfeldt magnified plant specimens, and August Sander classified Germans by trade and class. After 1933 the Nazis condemned Dix, Grosz and many of their peers as degenerate.
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