The Center Pompidou in Paris presents the first exhibition in France devoted to the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), an artistic movement that developed in Germany in the 1920s. On view until September 5, 2022.
Nearly 900 works and documents – paintings, films, photographs, writings, furniture – have been brought together at the Center Pompidou in Paris in order to draw up an unequaled panorama of the Neue Sachlichkeit – New objectivity, in French –, an artistic movement born in Germany just following the end of the First World War.
A complex period which saw successive difficulties and gloom for the German people who suffered the consequences of their defeat, before the economy recovered thanks to American aid from 1924. Then followed a few euphoric years where the mores are freed and where celebration and misery rub shoulders.
More than an art movement
But it is also the era of industrialization and an attraction for modernity and factories that cause a form of dehumanization. The gap between rich and poor is widening further. And then it is the stock market crash of 1929 and the return of the crisis and mass unemployment, all once morest a backdrop of political tensions and the rise of fascism. The Weimar Republic fell in 1933 and Hitler took power.
So many fascinating upheavals for the artists who will capture them and sometimes denounce them. This is the Neue Sachlichkeit. More than an artistic movement, this term invented by an art critic in 1925 makes it possible to group together what he perceives as common traits between artists who come from painting, theater, cinema… Artists who represent the unvarnished reality, breaking with previous currents, and in particular German expressionism.
Stop thinking regarding the inside
After the horrors experienced during the First World War, the question arises of how to continue following having touched the bottom of humanity. In this current, it goes through a sort of simplified form. “You lose psychology, interiority and individuality. Instead comes a game of masks, a role-playing [qui permet de] to fall back on the external and social role and no longer reflect on interiority”, explains Angela Lampe, curator of the modern art collections at the Center Pompidou.
Among the artists presented, we find Otto Dix and his blood-red portrait of the dancer Anita Berber which serves as a poster for the exhibition, Christian Schad or George Grosz and his grotesque caricatural characters. We also discover the progressive artists of Cologne who represent the world and the human being through increasingly simplified forms.
Pictures of August Sander
“Germany / 1920s / New Objectivity / August Sander” is divided into two parts: a thematic exhibition on a historical art movement on the one hand and a monographic project around August Sander, a kind of exhibition within the ‘exposure.
This German photographer born in 1876 had the desire to immortalize all types of Germans from the 1920s to the 1930s, from the merchant to the artist through the bourgeois. A project between art and documentary entitled “Menschen des 20. Jahrhunderts” (“Men of the 20th century”) which will remain unfinished.
Two parallel routes, therefore, which mingle and respond to each other within this exhibition presented chronologically and which allows the public to feel a disturbing strangeness and a dull anguish dawning over the visit. The artists did not yet know that we were heading towards a Second World War, and that some of them would be taxed as degenerate artists by the Nazis. But who better than them to sniff out the “zeitgeist”, the spirit of the times?
Radio subject: Ariane Hasler
Adaptation web: aq
Exposition “Germany/ 1920s/ New Objectivity/ August Sander”, Center Pompidou, Paris, until September 5, 2022.