photo story
”BRUTALITY!
CLARITY THAT HURTS […]
BRUSH AS FAST AS YOU CAN –
TRY TO CAPTURE RACING TIME“
—–George Grosz
Nearly a century after the Weimar Republic’s brief, chaotic existence, curator Hans-Peter Wipplinger presents Splendor and Misery: New Objectivity in Germany at Vienna’s Leopold Museum. This comprehensive exhibition, the first of its kind in Austria, brings together around 150 works—100 paintings, 40 works on paper, photographs, and archival materials—from international museums and private collections. Born from the ashes of World War I, Neue Sachlichkeit offered a stark, unsentimental portrayal of reality, capturing both the hardships and the hopes of the “Golden Twenties.” The show features a lineup of key figures of modernism, such as Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, George Grosz, and Christian Schad, alongside lesser-known artists such as Heinrich Maria Davringhausen, Karl Hubbuch, Grethe Jürgens, Lotte Laserstein, Felix Nussbaum, Gerta Overbeck, Rudolf Schlichter, and others, who each captured the era’s spirit with an unflinching eye.
By the summer of 1919, Germany, defeated and traumatized, faced the harsh terms of the Treaty of Versailles, which drew a new map of Europe, while mourning its 2 million dead and over 4 million wounded soldiers (throughout Europe, the conflict claimed 9 million lives, of which over 4 million were civilians, and left 20 million wounded and impaired). The world, as people had known it, ended. Then came the ‘dancing on a volcano’ years—the brief Golden Twenties from 1924 to 1928—when a hedonistic society masked its fears with indulgence. Cabarets and dance halls became refuges from war’s lingering trauma as people sought solace in excess. Nightclubs pulsed with the rhythms of the Charleston, the jazzy Foxtrot, and the daring Shimmy. The party crashed with the 1929 economic collapse, plunging the world into the Great Depression. Yet the nightlife throughout German cities didn’t disappear; it grew desperate. Dance competitions turned ruthless, and the streets filled with prostitutes and impoverished war veterans—grim realities brought to life in the addictive German noir TV series Babylon Berlin and the iconic musical Cabaret. German artists attempted to capture the relentless change in this volatile atmosphere—its splendor and misery.
Unlike movements like Futurism, Dada, Surrealism, and Constructivism, which announced themselves with manifestos and fanfare, New Objectivity came without grand proclamations. The term was coined in 1925 by the young Mannheim Kunsthalle director Gustav F. Hartlaub, who brought the movement into the spotlight with the legendary group exhibition New Objectivity: German Painting since Expressionism. While Expressionism aimed to create a new reality from the artist’s emotions and inner life, often underplaying the political landscape, New Objectivity turned to caustic polemics to confront the harsh realities of the war and its aftermath. They drew on the elements that defined the glamor and darkness of their society—the streets of the metropolis, its brothels and underground nightlife, its factories and backyards. They tackled the emerging lifestyles of modern, self-assured women and the sweeping changes brought by rapid technological progress. Across Germany, artists turned to this sober, realistic approach, becoming chroniclers of their time.
The New Objectivity blended modern influences like Dadaism, Cubism, and Expressionism and included a range of styles, from Christian Schad’s sharp realism to George Grosz’s grotesque figures. Many were dealing with the horrors of the war, its injured soldiers, as in Otto Dix’s etchings, and the miserable conditions of the poor, as visible in George Grosz’s work. Many were also drawn to the pulsating cabaret culture and its fringes. Their paintings reveal a mix of stylish pleasure-seekers, pedantic bureaucrats, scantily clad dancers, and prostitutes—parallel worlds where bourgeois order unraveled.
Change permeated every aspect of life after the war. The Weimar era disrupted politics, culture, and daily routines. Women, newly enfranchised in 1918, were no longer bystanders but aspired to gain active societal roles. The war had decimated the male workforce, pushing many women into jobs out of both necessity and a newfound sense of agency. The independent woman emerged, liberated from her suffocating corset, with short, bobbed hair, practical dresses, and pantsuits—symbols of a shift in traditional gender roles. Artists like Lotte Laserstein, Kate Diehn-Bitt, Jeanne Mammen, and Gerta Overbeck captured this transition, exploring themes of sexual freedom and modern identity. The seated figure in Laserstein’s Tennis Player epitomizes the ‘New Woman’ of the 1920s—tanned, androgynous, and sporty. Yet, all that said, not a single woman artist was represented in Hartalub’s 1925 exhibition.
The 1920s also brought rapid industrial and technological advances that reshaped daily life. The telephone and airplanes introduced new speed and efficiency, while mass production transformed industries. Artists like Rudolf Schlichter and Gustav Wunderwald depicted a world increasingly dominated by factories and machines. Otto Griebel’s The Ship’s Stoker highlights the rise of the class-conscious worker, while Anton Räderscheidt’s Self-Portrait in Industrial Landscape reveals the dehumanizing effects of industrialization.
By 1930, Germany had become a battleground of ideologies, with violent clashes between communists, socialists, and National Socialists becoming routine. The freedoms of assembly, press, and demonstration were systematically stripped away after Hitler’s appointment as Reich Chancellor in January 1933, marking the end of the Weimar Republic and the beginning of widespread terror. New Objectivity was deemed as “degenerate art and came to an abrupt end.” With the Nazi rise, the fates of New Objectivity artists diverged quite drastically. Felix Nussbaum, a Jewish painter, was banned, deported, and ultimately murdered in Auschwitz in 1944.
Lotte Laserstein, who was declared a “three-quarter Jew” by the Nuremberg Laws, was lucky to be invited in 1937 to show her work at the Galerie Moderne in Stockholm, where she would spend most of her life. Unfortunately, her career there never reached the same level of prominence as it had in Germany, and she was somewhat forgotten until the rediscovery of her work in recent years. But she survived.
George Grosz, known for his scathing anti-Nazi work, also escaped just in time—fleeing to New York with his family in 1933, days before Hitler fully consolidated his power as Chancellor. That year, the prodigious Max Beckmann lost his teaching post in Frankfurt and, later in 1937, fled to the Netherlands—the day after his work was prominently featured in Hitler’s notorious “Degenerate Art” exhibition. After struggling under Nazi occupation during the war, Beckmann finally secured a U.S. visa in 1947, just three years before his death. He ended up teaching at Washington University, where he was on the faculty for a brief period simultaneously with no other than Philip Guston.
Max Beckman’s Double Portrait, from 1923, and Nocturnal Encounter, from 1928, stand out in stark contrast, symbolically embodying the dual characteristic of 1920s Weimar. In retrospect, one can surmise how the undercurrent tensions of the earlier painting may lead to the nightmare of the latter. In Double Portrait, two elegant women with rosy cheeks—the one on the right austere and the one on the left, with a softer expression—sit in intimate proximity, elbows practically touching. However, beneath this apparent intimacy, we perceive a strong sense of alienation within the pastel domestic space.
The later painting depicts a shockingly ominous scene rendered primarily in black and white, punctuated by piercing glimpses of yellow light. If the two women in Double Portrait are seated in a claustrophobic interior, the Nocturnal Encounter is airless, on the verge of suffocation. Here, a half-naked figure of a woman hangs upside down, legs splayed and chained to the ceiling. The figure’s buttocks are exposed, the shirt slipping down, evoking associations with torture, slaughter, and sacrifice. The suspended figure is positioned between an abstract, shadowy male figure in a dark suit on the left and a cartoony character on the right, who seems to either silence or caress the chained figure. Whether Beckman aimed for a psychoanalytical allegory is questionable; what is clear in this enigmatic scene is that fear and violence underscore a strong sense of psychological turmoil.
This exhibition brilliantly captures a moment when art, confronted by socio-political chaos, grappled with a world on the brink. The works of New Objectivity, with their brutal realism, stand as raw evidence of a world violently remade. The saying often attributed to Mark Twain—that ‘history doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes’—rings with ominous truth here. As we navigate the volatility of our era, these works challenge us; they demand we confront the question: where will today’s upheaval drag us next, and how do artists respond?
Splendor and Misery at the Leopold Museum, Vienna, Austria. From May 24th to September 29th, 2024,