The funky cultural ferment of Weimar has been filtered, in the century that followed, through film and television. Cabaret (1972) and, more recently, Babylon Berlin (2017-) luxuriate in decadent glamour, painting a picture of interwar Germany that’s at once seductive and repellent.
That image of Berlin in the 1920s relies in turn on the work of a small number of artists — Otto Dix, Max Beckmann, George Grosz — who fixed their hardened gaze on sex murderers, puckered prostitutes, and the legless torsos of combat veterans. Dipping into a venerable tradition of gross-out realism (traceable to the suppurating flesh of Matthias Grünewald’s dying Jesus in the early 16th-century “Isenheim Altarpiece”), they took perverse joy in dissipation, putting their acid-tinged brushes to work on the corruption and debauchery that bloomed all around. Their paintings seethe.
New York’s Neue Galerie returns to that orgy of disgust with a survey that’s both enlightening and infuriating. Curator Olaf Peters nudges obscure yet worthy artists into the spotlight, then strands them there without telling us much about them. He aspires to dissect the movement called Neue Sachlichkeit, or New Objectivity, into its component camps but doesn’t account for its overlaps and contradictions. The show embraces such a profusion of styles that its subject grows hazy.
The term Neue Sachlichkeit was coined by Gustav Friedrich Hartlaub, the director of the Kunsthalle Manheim who, in 1925, organised a travelling exhibition of art that veered away from prewar expressionism. The painters he chose rejected extremes of feeling and distortions of perception, dwelling instead on external reality. To Hartlaub, the war had made irrationality obsolete; the broken world could only be repaired through cool, verifiable observation.
That straightforward theory fragmented almost immediately, defying later curators to come up with an orderly organisation. At the Neue Galerie, confusion rages. For starters, even the movement’s core artists charged their works with distinctly un-sachlich emotion. In a savagely misanthropic 1926 portrait, Dix pins Dr Wilhelm Mayer-Hermann to the trappings of his office, a round lamp looming above his head like a giant bug-eye. The precisely rendered instruments, the doctor’s impassive face, and the bulge of his white-coated belly all give the portrait the feel of an entomological study.
Caricature might be described as the point at which factualism tips into bitterness. Grosz’s 1926 masterpiece the “Eclipse of the Sun” (which, at the Neue Galerie, hangs on a too-small wall) grandly skewers the German military-industrial-political complex as a smorgasbord of greed. Grosz stirs realism, symbolism and avant-garde formalism into a brilliantly poisonous brew.
Peters accepts without comment that tension between ostensible objectivity and frank passion. More frustrating still is the allusion to a range of political subgroups that prove too slippery to be useful. An introductory text explains that objectivity appealed to both ends of the ideological spectrum and that Hartlaub distinguished between “verism” on the left and “classicism” on the right. The Neue Galerie show expands the range to include “proletarian-realists” and “Cologne progressives” — but never clarifies what traits characterise which of these shadings.
From our perspective, the divide between fascists and communists during that era of tragic polarisation appears deceptively stark. And yet it’s surprisingly difficult to divine artists’ affiliations just by looking at their work. August Sander’s luminous photographs of children emerge from his desire to present what he called “a physiognomic image of an age”, designed to capture “all the characteristics of the universally human”. His head-on portraits should in theory have aligned perfectly with the right-wing penchant for phrenological catalogues. Actually, though, the Nazis objected to Sander’s inclusion of marginalised groups — the Roma, the blind, the homeless, the disreputably employed (as circus workers, say) — so they banned his work and confiscated his plates.
Then there’s Christian Schad, who emulated the masters of the Italian Renaissance — a classicist if ever there was one. He joined the Nazi party in 1933, and the party returned his embrace, including his work in the official Great German Art Exhibition of 1937 as a model for patriotic painters. Yet the Reich’s prudish tastemakers must have missed his 1928 “Two Girls”, a brazen double portrait of a nude and a near-nude touching themselves for an audience of . . . you. Maybe Schad was a louche leftie after all.
Artists often stymie categorisation, not just by being stubbornly individual, but also by changing sides. Hartlaub classified Rudolf Schlichter among the verists, and in 1923, the painter, then a card-carrying communist, asserted his progressive credentials in “Woman with Tie”. Her cross-dressing would have excited traditionalist hackles (and might again today), but her slick black bob, rouged lips and cheeks and carefully pencilled eyebrows make her ringingly female. She is a New Woman, a warrior for progress, armoured for the battle with the forces of reaction.
Which, a few years later, would have included Schlichter. By the early 1930s, he was drifting back into the arms of the Catholic Church and flirting with National Socialism. When Hitler seized power, he reacted with delight, writing to his friend, the artist Franz Radziwill, how pleased he was that he’d no longer have to vie for attention in “any all-Jewish artist junk shop”. He so bewildered the Nazis that they included his work in both the Degenerate Art show and the Great German Art Exhibition.
I don’t hold the museum or the curator responsible for untangling such an unruly mess of allegiances, but I wish they wouldn’t impose distinctions that refuse to lie still. This exhibition might have done more to educate viewers on German art between the wars, especially since provincial museums and private collections unearthed an abundance of rarely seen works, enfolding the Neue Galerie’s standbys of Dix and Grosz in a context that’s rich and fresh. We could use some guidance through this unfamiliar terrain. Instead, the show parachutes us in with a pat on the shoulder and a glib message: You figure it out.
To May 26, neuegalerie.org