New Objectives: Possibilities for Painting in 1920s Germany

Abstract

New Objectives frames the figurative painting produced in 1920s Germany as a form of work and as a dialectical social intervention that was both protective and experimental. The artists under discussion, affiliated with the tendency known as Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), produced paintings in view of the demands that greeted labor in various contemporary industries and, at the same time, demonstrated how art evaded the other fields’ expectations. Beholden to exclusive Western artistic traditions through its maintenance of figuration, oil paint, and genre, the painting invoked, too, its period’s disaggregated makeup: through content that displayed diverse strata of workers and products, through formal strategies that suggested new ways of seeing, and through the extra-artistic activities of the artists themselves, propelled by material and creative concerns. In sum, the artists (and their critics) wondered if the specification of art’s unique possibilities and of artists’ consciousness could facilitate a social, artistic, and historical reorganization based on the transferability of skills across vocations and vocations across classes. Each chapter centers an emblematic painter whose practice as a whole forced them to reckon with non- or para-artistic social milieux and technical imperatives, and who also mobilized artistic strategies dating from the Middle Ages to modernism. Chapter 1 focuses on Wilhelm Schnarrenberger, whose narrative opens on to four dynamics central to the next two chapters, focused respectively on Anton Räderscheidt and Carl Grossberg: art’s relationship to professionalization, the role of the artist in a diversified material environment, the fraught affiliation of painting with mental and manual (and public and domestic) labor, and of these forms of labor with imputed class consciousness or ideology. A conclusion prods the Neue Sachlichkeit’s apparent aesthetic and political contradictions; in doing so, it historicizes the tendency’s reception and the modernist critique of so-called “returns” in art history. Here the painting appears less reactionary than reactive: part of a wider inquiry into the complex rhythms of (art) history itself. Throughout, New Objectives situates the question of Neue Sachlichkeit’s adequacy to, or stability within, a historical position defined as much by modernism, modernity, capitalism, and liberalism as by contemporaneous revisions thereof.