The New Objectivity, or Die Neue Sachlichkeit, was an Expressionist movement founded in Germany in the aftermath of World War I. The chief painters of the movement were George Grosz and Otto Dix, who were sometimes called verists. They created style of bitter realism and protest the disillusionment following the war. New Objectivity retained the intense emotionality of earlier movements in German art. Max Beckmann produced works in related, though more vein. Also the impact of the war influenced Kathe Kollwitz.
George Grosz studied art in Dresden and Berlin where he began contributing cartoon to German journals. On the outbreak of the First World War Grosz was conscripted in the German Army. In 1917, Grosz joined with John Heartfield in protesting about the German wartime propaganda campaign against the allies. This included anti-war drawing such as Fit for Active Service (1918). This particular related to Grosz’s personal experience where he was on the verge of a nervous break-down in 1917. He was sent to a sanatorium where doctors examined him and declared him “fit for service.
In this biting and sarcastic drawing, an army doctor proclaims the skeleton before him “fit for service. ” The glasses perched on the skeleton’s face very similar to the gold-rimmed glasses Grosz wore, suggest he based this scene on his experience. In Grosz’s line drawing he sarcastically portrays the German War. Otto Dix, who was closely associated with Neue Sachlihkeit, embraced war imagery. Having served both a machine gunner and an aerial observer, he was well acquainted with war effects. He later began dealing with other social messages, depicting beggars, prostitutes and veterans in his paintings.
Outraged by the Weimar Republic and the Nazis, Dix began to criticize their politics in his work, and was therefore deemed as a degenerate and forced to resign from his teaching position. On an interview, Otto Dix explained: “As a young man you don’t notice at all that you were, after all, body affected. For years afterwards, at least ten years, I kept getting these dreams, in which I had to crawl through ruined houses along passages I could get through. Not that painting would have been a release. The reason for doing it is the desire to create. I’ve got to do it!
I’ve seen that, I can still remember it, I’ve got to paint it. ” In Otto painting Der Krieg (The War) captured the devastation that war inflicts, both on the terrain and on humans. In the left panel, armed and uniformed soldiers march off into the distance. Dix graphically displays the horrific results in the center and right panels, where mangled bodies, are scattered throughout the apocalyptic landscape. It was to emphasize the personal nature of this scene. The artist painted himself into the right panel as the ghostly but determined soldier who drags a comrade to safety.
In the bottom panel, in a coffin like bunker, lie soldier asleep? ‘–or perhaps dead. Dix significantly presents this sequence of images in a triptych format. Dix, like his fellow Neue Scahlichkeit artist, felt compelled to lay the realities of his time, which the war’s violence dominated. Max Beckmann work also emphasized the horrors of war and a society he saw descending into madness. Between 1905 and 1950 he created more than eight hundred painting and produced hundreds of prints and drawings. Night, was a painting that showed a disturbing view of society.
It depicts a cramped room three intruders have forcefully invaded. A bound woman apparently raped, is splayed across the foreground of the painting. Her husband appears to be hanged by an intruder while another one twists his left arm out of its socket. An undefined woman cowers in the background. And the third intruder prepares to flee with the child. Although the image does not depict a war scene, the wrenching brutality and violence comment on society’s condition. Beckmann also injected a personal reference by using himself, his wife, and son. Kathe Kollwitz grandson, Peter, died on the Western Front.
Over the next few years Kollwitz produced a series of a drawing illustrating the impact that war had on women. One of which was called Woman with Dead Child. It was a statement of maternal loss and grief. The grace that pervaded the conventional Christian depiction of the Madonna holding the dead Christ has been replaced with an animalistic passion, as the mother ferociously grips the body of her dead child. The impact of this image is undeniably powerful. That Kollwitz used her son Peter as the model for the dead child no doubt made the image all the more personal to her.
In1920 she helped form International Workers Aid. Soon later she joined with other socialists in signing an appeal of unity against the Nazi Party. After Adolf Hitler gained power, Kollwitz was forced resign from Prussian Academy of Arts because of her beliefs and her art. She is still known today for her imagery of working poor, the suffering and the sick. The way she images sickly women who are barely able to care for or nourish their children. Her work served as an indictment of the social conditions in Germany during the late 19th and early 20th century. New Objectivity executed their works in a realistic style.
These works, which reflected the resignation and cynicism of the post? ‘-World War I period in Germany. George Grosz, Max Beckmann, and Otto Dix are all artist that served in the Germany army. Their military experiences deeply influenced their world views and informed in art. The artists purpose was to display there emotional characteristics expression. In architecture as in painting and literature, New Objectivity describes German work of the transitional years of the early 1920s in the Weimar culture. The end of New Objectivity came at the end of the Weimar Republic as the National Socialists under Adolf Hitler seized power in 1933.
