Four: A New Objectivity

George Grosz was a leading artist of Germany’s early 20th-century expressionist, Dada, and New Objectivity movements. His works from this period remain celebrated examples of the modernist avant-garde. Grosz began his career as a student at the Dresden Academy of Art in 1909. In 1912, he moved to Berlin, abandoned the academic rigor of his earlier work, and became part of the Expressionist avant-garde. His paintings and drawings soon adopted the fractured planes, vivid color, and psychologically troubled content of Expressionist art. Grosz became politically radicalized by the outbreak of World War I in 1914. He helped to found Berlin Dada during the war years. His irreverent cut and paste Dada collages of this period assailed not only the concept of ‘‘art,’’ but also the vaunted notions of culture, militarism, and national pride that were part of a German social order Grosz had come to despise. At the end of World War I, Grosz joined the German Communist Party and became its leading artist. He fled to the United States in order to escape persecution after Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor in 1933. Grosz settled in New York, where he pursued his art under the utterly changed circumstances of exile.

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Neue Sachlichkeit in Visual Arts [New Objectivity in Visual Arts]

Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism ◽

10.4324/9781135000356-rem1596-1 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Michael Mackenzie

Keyword(s):

Visual Arts ◽

Right Wing ◽

Left Wing ◽

Still Life ◽

Social Commentary ◽

Local Color ◽

New Objectivity ◽

Neue Sachlichkeit ◽

Contour Lines ◽

The Right

Neue Sachlichkeit, which can be translated as "New Objectivity," was the name given to a tendency in painting which, from about 1921 on, returned to something like traditional compositional and representational codes, eschewed vehemence of any kind, "Primitivism," and even painterliness, while emphasizing unbroken contour lines and unbroken local color. Painters depicted conventional subject matter such as still life, landscapes, and portraits with the pictorial means of sculptural volume, perspectival space, natural proportions, and unbroken, evenly modulated tonal values which had dominated painting since the Renaissance but which had been systematically dismantled by Modernism. The tendency received its name with an exhibition at the Mannheim Kunsthalle in 1925, organized by Gustav Friedrich Hartlaub, although art critics had sought to name and define it since 1920, and explicitly in opposition to an Expressionism widely perceived as moribund. Hartlaub described what he saw as a split in the overall tendency, with an inclination toward traditionalism and classicism on the "right" wing, and toward aggressively critical social commentary and a propensity to exaggeration and caricature on the "left" (although Hartlaub denied that there was any political significance to his terminology of "left" and "right," the artists assigned to the "left" wing were either active in or openly sympathetic to the left wing of German politics).

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Ilse Bing: A Frankfurt School Photographer in Paris and New York

October ◽

10.1162/octo_a_00407 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 173 ◽

pp. 176-206

Author(s):

Benjamin H. D. Buchloh

Keyword(s):

United States ◽

New York ◽

Frankfurt School ◽

The United States ◽

New Objectivity ◽

Political Analysis ◽

New Vision

Ilse Bing was one of those Weimar photographers whose work was recognized or rediscovered later than that of many of her more famous female peers. Her photographic project sprang largely from her persistent subversion of the stylistic oppositions of New Vision photography and New Objectivity. Just as complex was the work she produced after moving to Paris, defined as it was by her cross-cutting of Weimar socialist and French Surrealist photographic mentalities. Comparable in her precise socio-political analysis to the Frankfurt School's critiques of emerging mass-cultural and political formations, Bing's work in the United States, where, barred from publishing in magazines, she was able to pay witness to photography's functioning as a new ideological- and cultural-industrial medium—acquired the melancholic features of a mordant critique of traditional photographic genres such as the portrait.

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Guide to Contemporary Hungarian Composers

Tempo ◽

10.1017/s004029820004417x ◽

1957 ◽

pp. 27-31

Author(s):

John S. Weissmann

Keyword(s):

String Quartet ◽

Folk Music ◽

Strong Influence ◽

First World War ◽

German Version ◽

World War ◽

Nineteen Twenties ◽

New Objectivity ◽

Hungarian Folk Music ◽

First World

PÁL KADOSA (1905) represents the German tradition among his contemporaries, and in this regard he might be said to continue the course indicated by Weiner and Jemnitz. But whereas Weiner's music is anchored in the romantics and Jemnitz's in the expressionist school of Reger and Schoenberg, Kadosa's model was the music of the young German post-First-World-War school, of which Hindemith was the leading figure. Another factor contributing a great deal to the formation of his idiom was his being a practical musician, a pianist of considerable gifts. These two considerations, viz. Hindemith and the piano, inevitably dominate the instrumental character of his music as a whole. What distinguishes his work from that of the German father-figure is the strong influence of Hungarian folk-music in the rhythmic element of his music. It came via Bartók, since Kadosa did not take active part in folk-music-collecting. His mature personal style is predominantly contrapuntal, terse and detached to the point of austerity; and since he thinks in patterns of motivic figurations, it possesses marked rhythmic and dynamic power. The baroque revival of the nineteen-twenties and 'thirties—whose German version was associated with an impersonal “New Objectivity”—is reflected in his series of concertos—including four for the piano, two for the violin, one for the viola, and one for string-quartet and orchestra—precise, often epigrammatic in utterance, showing a kind of restrained and diffident lyricism that is so typical of Kadosa, and conceived in terms of brilliantly effective instrumental writing.

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The Other Legacy of Vienna 1900: The Ars Combinatoria of Friedl Dicker-Brandeis

Austrian History Yearbook ◽

10.1017/s006723782000017x ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 51 ◽

pp. 243-268

Author(s):

Julie M. Johnson

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

Subject Matter ◽

Fine Art ◽

The Other ◽

Found Objects ◽

New Objectivity ◽

The Subject ◽

Critical Responses

AbstractThis article positions multidisciplinary artist Friedl Dicker-Brandeis at the center of a web that spans Vienna 1900, the Weimar Bauhaus, and interwar Vienna. Using a network metaphor to read her work, she is understood here as specialist of the ars combinatoria, in which she recombines genre and media in unexpected ways. She translates the language of photograms into painting, ecclesiastical subject matter into a machine aesthetic, adds found objects to abstract paintings, and paints allegories and scenes of distortion in the idiom of New Objectivity, all the while designing stage sets, costumes, modular furniture, toys, and interiors. While she has been the subject of renewed attention, particularly in the design world, much of her fine art has yet to be assessed. She used the idioms of twentieth-century art movements in unusual contexts, some of these very brave: in interwar Vienna, where she created Dadaistic posters to warn of fascism, she was imprisoned and interrogated. Always politically engaged, her interdisciplinary and multimedia approach to art bridged the conceptual divide between the utopian and critical responses to war during the interwar years. Such engagement with both political strains of twentieth-century modernism is rare. After integrating the interdisciplinary lessons of Vienna and the Weimar Bauhaus into her life's work, she shared these lessons with children at Terezín.

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