The Twenties' Bleak New World

By ROBERT HUGHES

In Minneapolis, a show of the German "new objectivity "

The show entitled "German Realism of the Twenties: The Artist as Social Critic," which opened earlier this fall at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, and moves to Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art on Nov. 22, deals with an aspect of modernism that 15 years ago was thought hardly worth discussing. What could be further from the concerns of Matisse or Braque than the images to which German intellectuals gave the name Neue Sachlichkeit -- "new objectivity"? There, in contrast to the French tradition of measure, delectation and ordered feeling, of art "above" politics, was a cold, laconic, even squalid-looking art that wanted to contribute its voice to the tormented political theater of the Weimar Republic. It was antiexpressionist too; painters like Otto Dix, George Grosz or Christian Schad, having survived the 1914 war, and being immersed in the suffering, inflation and political instability of their defeated country, had no time for the cloudy redemptive ecstasies of German expressionism: its inwardness was, so to speak, an insult to the collective. "My aim is to be understood by everyone," Grosz wrote in 1925. "I reject the 'depth' that people demand nowadays, into which you can never descend without a veritable diving bell crammed with cabalistic crap and intellectual metaphysics. This expressionist anarchy has got to stop."

Instead, the "new realists" proposed something more detached, skeptical and hardheaded: an art of the street, the cafe, the factory line, the docks and brothels. Some of its collective character might be gleaned from the title Bertolt Brecht gave one of his poems: "700 Intellectuals Pray to an Oil Tank." It was a pessimistic movement. Nobody involved with Neue Sachlichkeit believed in the machine-utopias that were an article of faith among the romantics at the Bauhaus. When an artist like Carl Grossberg (1894-1940) painted factory installations, he gave them a deserted, haunting quality, as though some German De Chirico had been set loose in the Ruhr. De Chirico was the main prototype for the fantastic images of this wing of the German avantgarde; there was, for instance, a ready connection to be made between the tailor's dummies he had painted and the cripples depicted by Grosz or Dix, prosthetic men displaying the body re-formed by politics. Grossberg combined suggestions of both in The Diver, 1931, an exceedingly odd image of an empty diving suit, virginally white, standing pathetically within the rushing perspective of a glass-walled Gropius-type factory.

Such paintings suggest the strength of the Neue Sachlichkeit tendency to paint a world beyond the spectator's control -- not Leger's confidence in technology, but glimpses of an airless place, always the city, with looming buildings, threatening, gray and crystalline, where the exact divisions between things seem to mirror the divisions and conflicts of class that concerned many of the painters. In particular, they obsessed Grosz. One of his friends called him "a Bolshevik in painting, nauseated by painting." This was not quite true, for although Grosz once declared that compared with the practical tasks of political revolution, art was "an utterly secondary affair," it was the only weapon he had, and he used it diligently. Grosz's theater of capitalism is as clear and simple as the plot of an old morality play. Everything and everyone, except the victims, is for sale; all social transactions, except the class solidarity of workers, are poisoned at the root; the world is run by four breeds of pig: capitalist, officer, priest and whore. Such are the ingredients of caricature, but Grosz, especially in his early postwar work like Gray Day (State Functionary for the War Wounded), 1921, extracted a mean, indignant poetry from them.

In every way, the ferocity of the Weimar artists echoed the instability of the society itself, its institutions continually atotter from the assaults of left and right, of which the final result was the triumph of Hitler. But to classify them all (as the catalogue sloppily does) as "realist" is sim ply to abolish the meaning of the word.

Art that commits itself to the application of virulent stereotypes, as Grosz's did, is not realist at all, and this problem be comes still worse with a painter like Georg Scholz. Scholz's Industrialized Farmers, 1920, is all rant and bile directed against the country folk whose profiteering helped cause the postwar shortages of food in German cities. Sly, pig-stupid and stuffed with moral rectitude, this rural trio looks like a brutal parody of Grant Wood's American Gothic (in fact, it was painted ten years earlier). Scholz took care to spread his political insult as far as pos sible; Weimar inflation is symbolized by the cretinous child, snot-nosed and snaggletoothed, blowing up a live frog by means of a straw stuck in its anus. In the end, one would need to be half a thug to be politically swayed by such an image.

The best Neue Sachlichkeit painting was of another order of sensibility, and the true discovery of the show -- at least for an American audience -- is the work of Christian Schad. Done in a meticulous, balanced and tightly focused style, the paint as "inexpressive" as enamel, Schad's portraits were among the most brilliant inventions of the 1920s. They scan their subjects with a proud, icy detachment. Far from presenting all society as a freak show, Schad could extract a precise and measured beauty from "otherness"; hence the toughness and dignity of his painting of two Berlin circus per formers, Agoston the Pigeon-Chested Man and Rasha the Black Dove, 1929, and the epigrammatic quality of his portrait of a Viennese wastrel named the Count St. Genois, flanked by a prostitute and a tough old transvestite who looks like a vulture with buttocks. Schad's distaste for moralizing and grotesquerie seems to have issued from the belief that social truth is, in and for itself, more interesting than judgment. In their scrupulous "objectivity," his portraits of fellow artists, intellectuals, writers like Egon Kisch (the inventor of the "new journalism" of the '20s) and the tense flotsam of the Berlin demimonde are spiritually akin to the photographs of his great contemporary August Sander, also represented in this show, who set out to make a no-comment record of all walks of life in the Weimar Republic. Schad's paintings, like much other Neue Sachlichkeit realism, are part of a worldwide context -- the recoil toward precise and sober form that one can see in America in Charles Sheeler's grain elevators or Gerald Murphy's giant watch face. But they are also visibly and determinedly part of a social whole. The ambition to function as exemplary public speech, to interpret, comment on and shape the fabric of the time instead of just decorating it, is what makes the culture of Weimar Germany so interesting today.

-- By Robert Hughes

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