art as voyeurism
by
Douglas Messerli
Stephanie
Barron (curator) New Objectivity: Modern
German Art in the Weimar Republic, 1919-1933 / Los Angeles County Museum of
Art, October 4, 2015-January 18, 2016 / I saw the show at the press preview on
September 30, 2015
Beginning after
World War I with the rise the Weimar Republic, the first democratic German
government, artists of many mediums began to refocus on the world around them
in a way that reacted against the spiritual and personal values of
Expressionism. The new art—which took its name from a commentary by German art
historian Gustav Friedrich Hartlaub, responding to a 1925 exhibition of
Mannheim—came to be called Neue
Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), although it has also been described as
Post-Expressionism, neo-naturalism, Verism, and Magic Realism. With a new show
at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (a portion of which was previously
exhibited at the Museo Correr in Venice, Italy), museum curator Stephanie Barron
(with a catalogue co-edited by Sabine Eckmann) has brought together almost 200
works by more than 50 German artists of the period, including well known
figures such as Otto Dix, George Grosz, Christian Schad, August Sander, and Max
Beckmann, as well as numerous lesser known figures, to explore the Weimar art.
Before I even begin, let me clarify that
the “objectivism” hinted at in the show’s title can only be understood in that
word’s dictionary definition if it is proceeded by the word “new.” For, in
fact, the works in this show might all be described as being the most
“nonobjective” images possible. As Barron herself writes:
While they were not unified by
manifesto, political tendency, or
geography, these artists did
share a skepticism regarding German
society in the years following
World War I and an awareness of
the human isolation brought
about by social change. They chose
themes from contemporary life,
using realism to negotiate rapidly
changing social and political
conditions. By closely scrutinizing
everyday objects, modern machinery, and
new technologies, these
artists rendered them
unnatural—as uneasy as individuals alienated
from each other and their
surroundings. As if to correct the chaos
of wartime, they became productive voyeurs,
dissecting their sub-
jects with laser focus, even
when overemphasis on detail came at
the expense of the composition
as a whole.
Time and again in the numerous portraits,
single and group, of German types portrayed in these paintings and photographs,
all traces of humanity seem to be whiped away, as their characters become
involved in almost orgiastic celebrations that reveal their grotesque natures,
their bestial temperaments, and their dance with death.
In a painting central to the show, Otto
Dix’s To Beauty (An die Schönheit) of 1922, the dancing couples, despite the
frenzied playing of the black American percussionist (himself a caricature of a
US negro of the day), seem dazed and isolated in their activities, the woman on
the right seemingly dancing alone. The artist, presenting himself as a
well-dressed businessman (while in real life Dix was apparently a good dancer),
seems transfixed not by a real woman but the bust of what may be a prostitute.
The beauty which the painting’s title toasts is not even a real woman.
Max Beckmann’s crowded canvas of Paris Society (Gesellschaft Paris) of 1931, confronts us with a seemingly boxed-in
group of well-dressed Parisians, nearly all of whom are looking in different
directions from one another, as if trapped in their own worlds, despite the
tight frame of their gathering.
Another of his works, the 1923 Dance in Baden-Baden, shows two dancing couples with men leering at
women who seem to be so distracted from their partners that they might be
described in be in an entirely different space.
Many other artists in their show present
table mates as death heads, bizarrely deformed lovers (as in Christian Schad’s Agosta, “The Pigeon Chested Man,” and Rasha,
“The Black Dove”) of 1929, or creatures in advanced levels of decay.
Just as in the period fictions such as
Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz,
obscenely poised prostitutes dominate some rooms of the show, along with
several works by Otto Dix and Rudolf Schlichter, devoted to “Lustmord” or
“Sexual Murder,” events that became more and more common during the Weimar era,
and were documented even in films such as Pabst’s Lulu.
Sexual perversion, indeed, becomes a
dominant theme throughout these artworks, documented in George Grosz’s horrific
1927 work, Circe (above). In Berlin,
particularly, as I have observed earlier in this volume, gay and lesbian
sexuality became more and more openly accepted. And some of the artists, such
as Christian Shad in his drawings Boys in
Love seemingly celebrate the new openness. New Objectivity includes both gay and lesbian magazines and
newspapers such as Die Intel and
August Brand’s boy-love literary journal Die
Eigene that were sold in local newsstands throughout the 1920s 
and early 1930s.
Other artists such as photograph Friedrich Seidenstücker’s untitled portrait of
two young women lying together upon a couch
also seem to accept the new sexualities, while Dix satirizes them is his
painting of 1923, The Jeweller Karl Krall
(De Juwelier Karl Krall), wherein
the jeweler is caricatured not only as a Jew but as a gay man, showing off his
outrageously corseted figure while staring out at the viewer with darkly lined
eyebrows and heavily roughed cheeks. This work makes no pretense in its outright
disgust of its subject, refusing to devote any objective sympathy to the figure
it depicts.
Even in less obviously biased depictions
of German citizens of the era, such as the photographs of August Sander, the
emphasis is not so much on living, breathing human being as it is on a series
of typologies. Sander is less interested in the inner lives of his numerous
subjects as he is in how their very physiognomies clue us into their personal
behaviors and their roles or jobs in life. And, in that sense, they are frozen
in time and space, never to be released into the world outside of his
definitions of them: The Architect, Coal
Carrier, or Cook. Even when he
provides us with their names, as in the case of Helen Abelen, his photograph is
far more interested in her societally based position, Painter’s Wife, which presumably allows her unconventional
“mannish” look.
Even children were perceived as subjects
who are revealed, as Baron writes, to be “something sinister or disturbed.”
“These are children coming of age, in the eyes of the artists who painted them,
in a time characterized not by joy, play, and innocence, but by alienation and
objectification.” Karl Gümter’s Portrait
of a Boy (Knabenbildnis), for
example, is an already determined young man, who, with his handsome Nordic
looks and demeanor, promises to be a perfect young scout—or even a future Nazi.
Although dominated by the portrait, the
New Objectivists also took paint and canvas into the surrounding landscape and
focused on the rising industrialism around them. Despite the later Nazi
adulation of nature, presumably, since many of these Berliners and others
painters were city dwellers, the natural world was often seen as an alienating
and slightly sinister space having to do more with the past than the present.
Nature is presented only in brief glimpses, from balconies or from strange
vistas. The exoticism of nature is expressed through several of these artist’s fascination
with indoor cacti, as in Geroge Scholz’s Cacti
and Semaphore (Kakteen und Sempahore)
of 1923. Even in this indoor “natural” scene there is the stench of perversity.
When
people actually enter into nature, as in Georg Schrimpf’s Reclining Girls in the Countryside of 1930, the influence comes not
from the great German tradition of landscapes, but rather from the Italian
Futurist artist Carlo Carrà.
While numerous portraits concern
themselves with industrialist leaders, often mocking their boorish and brutal
behavior, artists such as Hans Finsler, Carl Grossberg, and others also
seemingly celebrate the machine and the new commercial productions they
created. Yet, how different, for example, is Grossberg’s The Yellow Boiler, with its oddly colored yellow, orange and
blue-green tentacles, from the loving testaments to industry painted in the
same decade by US artists such as Charles Sheeler, Arthur Dove, and Stuart Davis.
Although Grossberg’s images may be somewhat sleek and beautiful, they are also
preposterously constructed and hued in a way that seems to immediately put them
under suspicion, just as these artists questioned even the innocence of their
own offspring.