Whichever style the artist practiced, there is usually a tension in the portrait between the individual being represented and the type, or role, that person plays in society. Portraiture, and self-portraiture, was common among the Neue Sachlichkeit artists.Despite the stylistic differences, many of the artists preferred more static compositions rather than dynamic ones, rendered their subjects with great precision, and eradicated the traces of the painting process and all gestural elements. While all of the artists were committed to depicting current affairs, their styles ranged from a satirical Verism to a nostalgic Classicism to an uncanny Magical Realism.For the most part, their realism was not a traditional mimeticism but a distorted and dark realism that aimed to expose the moral degradation they witnessed in German society. They instead combined their realism with a healthy dose of the biting protests of the Dada movement. The Neue Sachlichkeit artists embraced realism in defiance of trends towards abstraction but renounced the idiosyncratic subjectivities espoused by early German Expressionists.While their version of realism was initially regarded by some art historians as retrograde, Neue Sachlichkeit's variants would go on to later influence Magic Realism and German art of the 1960s as well as contemporary photography as propagated by Bernd and Hilla Becher. They explored the rise of the metropolis with its freedoms and sexual liberation, but noted the increasing alienation from nature and rural life. The artists highlighted the social and political turmoil of life emphasized through war-profiteers, beggars, and prostitutes. Employing caricature, satire, Neoclassicism, and even Surrealism, artists such as Max Beckmann, George Grosz, Otto Dix, and August Sander portrayed leaders, bureaucrats, bohemians, laborers, and themselves unflinchingly, each complicit in the society they inhabited.
Disgusted with the corruption apparent throughout the Weimar Republic but also entranced by new freedoms, this diverse group of artists did not necessarily share a style but rather a commitment to expose the objective truth underlying contemporary ills. Summary of Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity)Įschewing the idealism and utopianism that marked the first decade of the 20 th century and disillusioned by a World War that wreaked havoc on bodies and society, the artists associated with Neue Sachlichkeit, or New Objectivity as it is translated in English, presented an unsentimental realism to address contemporary culture.
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