Wednesday 14 June 2023

neue sachlichkeit (10. 806)

Coined by the director of the Kunsthalle Gustav Friedrich Hartlaub, art critic and curator, as a counter-movement to expressionism and introduced to the public on this day in 1925 as an exhibition hosted in his gallery, “New Objectivity”—which can also be translated as the New Resignation, Dispassion or Matter-of-Factness—is seen as rejection of romantic idealism and the promotion of pragmatic cooperation and a return to order, post World War I. Featured artist included Otto Dix, Carl Grossberg, Max Beckmann and Jeanne Mammen. Its influence is also found in the gritty realism of films of those years just prior to the rise of Nazism and in the architecture of Hans Poelzig, Bruno Taut and others. The movement ended in 1933 with the ascent of the Nazi dictatorship and was condemned as degenerate art.