Contorted, Distorted,
and Exaggerated....

"The New Objectivity painters included Max Beckmann, Otto Dix and Georg Grosz, artists who contorted, distorted and exaggerated appearances well beyond the constraints of objectivity," Michèle C. Cone, critic and historian, wrote in a review of the exhibit Christian Schad and the Neue Sachlichkeit, showing at the Neue Galeria at 1048 Fifth Avenue in New York City from March 14 to June 9, 2003. "The movement also included Christian Schad, whose style, though not classical, was rarely caricatural.

"What the group shared besides Old Master finish, an eerily airless deep space, and graphic attention to figurative details, was unheimlichkeit," Ms. Cone continued. "Analyzed by Freud in 1919, unheimlichkeit applies to situations wherein the familiar and the ominously strange are represented by the same form. All of these traits were dangerously close to those found in the style of painting that was later to appeal to Adolph Hitler."

[EDITOR'S NOTE: The article quoted above was published by artnet on the world wide web, link http://www.artnet.com/Magazine/features/cone/cone4-17-03.asp. The link was accessed on August 8, 2003.]

Art as Instrument
of the Society.

Speaking In Tongues, Guided by Voices: The New Objectivity.
By Anna Glazova

Anna Glazova writes: "In the Neue Sachlichkeit the art movements of the Weimar Republic seem to have found a logical conclusion: In a peculiar way, the Neue Sachlichkeit summarizes the Bauhaus aspiration to the applied art, the Expressionists' woodcut experiments toward the mass production, the Constructivists' fascination with the structure, the Dadaist obsession with the machine. The art, once elitist and far from being socially engaged, became an instrument of the society...."

To continue the read of Ms. Glazova's article, just follow the link above. Planet Deutsch recommends it.

The Abandonment of Expressionism.

Alexandra Richie in Faust's Metropolis: A History of Berlin (Carroll & Graff, 1998) contends that "by 1924 virtually all Expressionists had abandoned the movement in favor of the Neue Sachlichkeit."

So, we note a shift to other forms: Constructivism, Cubism, the transformation of novels into films, the positioning of photography as art, the use of the typewriter as an instrument of poetic inspiration.

"In Germany, the impulse behind Dadaism and Expressionism had flagged into the Neue Sachlichkeit by the middle twenties, and the whole modern movement was swallowed up in the intellectual quicksands of the Nazi period in the Thirties," Martin Esslin wrote in The Theatre of the Absurd (Anchor Books, 1961). "The destructiveness of Dadaism had cleared the air."

*This is the first step toward THE One World Language.
Step Zero: Your linking verb tangled in the mane of a hobbyhorse!