-Analysis-
MANNHEIM — The 1920s, they say, were golden — though only sometimes, and mostly late at night. By daylight, they shimmered with a mercury hue made of the tin of soup kitchen pots, the iron of batons swung in street brawls, the metal prosthetics clanking on sidewalks as war veterans limped by, the cold steel of the political assassins’ pistols, and the polished nickel of Berlin’s bar counters.
Yes, Germany’s ’20s were a strange alloy, a blend of elements that refused to fully fuse, rolling like molten lava through an unsettled nation. From 1919 onwards, this fiery current sought a new path daily, only to plummet into the abyss in 1933.
Artists perched on the edge of this chaotic torrent, desperate to trust their eyes. They observed, coolly, without sentiment, and with no intention of narrating anything beyond “things as they really are” (to borrow from German painter Otto Dix). In 1925, Gustav Friedrich Hartlaub, then director of the Mannheim Kunsthalle, christened this new artistic approach “The New Objectivity” in an exhibition of 124 works at the museum of modern and contemporary art.
What foresight, to pinpoint a timeless style amidst the upheaval of one’s own era. Now, 100 years later, this iconic exhibition has been reconstructed on two floors of the Mannheim Kunsthalle.
How sad our world has become
Curator Inge Herold has enriched the once male-dominated 1925 lineup with defining works by female painters including Anita Rée, Lotte Laserstein and Jeanne Mammen, whose contributions now surpass many of their male contemporaries.
More than that, Herold traces the story of New Objectivity from its emergence in 1925 to its unraveling in 1932, when artists like George Grosz, on the brink of exile, could no longer withstand the feverish collapse of the Weimar Republic. The exhibition surprises with lesser-known names such as Ilona Singer, Fritz Burmann, Arno Henschel, Herbert Ploberger, Kate Diehn-Bitt and Carl Walther, reminding us that New Objectivity is far more than the famous quartet of Dix, Max Beckmann, George Grosz and Christian Schad.
This new artistic ethos rejected the prewar Expressionist ideal of authenticity. Painters adopted a detached gaze, wielding their brushes like surgical scalpels. Their motto? “Do not let anyone look into your soul.”
Their models mirrored this attitude: The so-called “new woman” of the 1920s revealed her bobbed hair, her cigarette, her bold stare. Take Carl Walther’s 1926 Lady with a Cigarette: The woman doesn’t just sit for the painter; she looks past him, as if she’s got bigger fish to fry. The observed had become observers.
The timely re-staging of this exhibition feels like a call to arms.
In the works in Mannheim we see countless people of their time, exhausted and disillusioned: Love has become a business, utopia an antique, their eyes are empty, their cheeks pale or covered in excessive makeup, a cactus stands at the edge of the picture as a prickly monument to loneliness.
“How sad our world has become,” wrote one reviewer in 1925. And that’s why the timely re-staging of this exhibition feels like a call to arms, and it resonates with TV dramas like Babylon Berlin and books like Harald Jähner’s Höhenrausch and Jens Bisky’s Die Entscheidung rekindling interest in the Weimar Republic, which was tumbling hectically towards its end between agony and activism.
The artists of that era countered chaos with stoicism, fortifying themselves against the maelstrom. On display in Mannheim are 233 oil paintings and an incisive graphic collection aptly titled hart & direkt (“hard & direct”). Together, they reveal a yearning for rationality amidst an irrational world.
One hundred years later, we feel the same desire for clarity in a world that has become confusing. But can the emotionless view of New Objectivity really help us “in our difficulty to understand the present,” as German President
Frank-Walter Steinmeier writes in his foreword to the catalogue?
The pedagogue Steinmeier hopes so: “Even today, we can learn to see things as they are: objectively.” But should we? Is it wise, or even possible, to meet a turbulent, irrational world with cold detachment? That’s the uncomfortable question the exhibition leaves us with: When does distance turn to apathy? When does observation become a failure to act?
A dangerous in-between
As early as 1925, Hartlaub distinguished between the “left” and “right” wings of New Objectivity. The left, embodied by Grosz, shrank into disillusionment and biting satire. Meanwhile, the right, with its flirtations with idyllic nostalgia, gained ground. By 1933, with the Nazis in power, artists like Franz Radziwill, Georg Schrimpf and Alexander Kanoldt were elevated to professors, continuing their emotionless observations under the new regime. Grosz, by contrast, fled into exile, and in 1937, the Nazis branded the “left” wing’s works as “degenerate art.”
That is why the exhibition, in the life stories of its creators after 1925, also tells something about the depths of a style that, precisely because of its passive relationship to reality, was able to adapt particularly well from 1933 onwards, while Hartlaub was immediately dismissed as director in Mannheim when the National Socialists came to power.
The exhibition is therefore above all an impressive lesson about German history. The new image of humanity forged in the Weimar Republic was one of stark sobriety, stripped of myth and transcendence, “tired and emptied of myths,” as Gottfried Benn once wrote.
It is, for better or for worse, very German; the Italian, American and Swiss pictures in the Mannheim exhibition are the proof of this, nowhere was the operating temperature of these painters as cold as in Germany, nowhere was the awareness so clear that the times they were living through were not at a new beginning, but a dangerous in-between.
German cultural scholar Helmut Lethen captured this perfectly in the subtitle of his retrospective, Behavioral Lessons of Cold: Attempts at Life Between the Wars.
This time around
“We believed that we could escape time,” German journalist Kurt Tucholsky wrote as the 1920s came to an end. “But we can’t do that. It’s coming after us.”
Now, in 2024, we feel like time is catching up with us. And if we try today, following Steinmeier’s advice, to look objectively at New Objectivity, we notice two things: the portraits, self-portraits and still lifes of that time are among the best and most emphatic examples of German art in the 20th century in terms of quality.
An overwhelming present, loss of utopia, emotional control, fear of war, shifting identities.
But at the same time we cannot help but see into those paintings the shadow of the incoming catastrophe of war and the Holocaust, visually tangible for the first time in the dehumanization of the faces, in the tired, almost dead eyes of the children, women and injured war survivors.
An overwhelming present, loss of utopia, emotional control, fear of war, shifting identities: These are the major themes of New Objectivity — and these are the major themes of our current 20s. It is no wonder, then, that the true art of the moment is 100 years old. But perhaps, this time around, couldn’t warmth be the answer to coldness?
