Word: sachlichkeit
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...some art training, he was basically self-taught. Freud's German origins have suggested to some critics that early works like Girl with Roses, 1947-48, a portrait of his first wife, Kitty Garman, daughter of the sculptor Jacob Epstein, were done under the spell of the German Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) portraiture of the 1920s -- painters like Otto Dix or Christian Schad. Actually the basis was much earlier: Albrecht Durer, whose fixedly staring, ultradetailed watercolors set Freud's first standards about the inspection of faces and bodies...
...painting that obsessed the German avant-garde before 1914: fervent, ejaculatory, based on the human figure and full of pretensions toward expressive plangency and "primitive" directness. There has been a like revival of the kind of acrid satire and political chronicling that occupied the German Dadaists and Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) painters in the '20s. The image stream of German expressionism went underground, but not even Nazism could dry it up. It is the deep, continuous current of German modernism; it picks up different names, en route through the century; and here it is again, manifested in the work...
Kitaj's works from the '60s, like The Ohio Gang, set forth dramatic melanges, Bertolt Brecht plus Constructivism plus Al Capone-irresistibly nasty stuff, Neue Sachlichkeit run through a fragmented lens...
...hardheaded: an art of the street, the cafe, the factory line, the docks and brothels. Some of its collective character might be gleaned from the title Bertolt Brecht gave one of his poems: "700 Intellectuals Pray to an Oil Tank." It was a pessimistic movement. Nobody involved with Neue Sachlichkeit believed in the machine-utopias that were an article of faith among the romantics at the Bauhaus. When an artist like Carl Grossberg (1894-1940) painted factory installations, he gave them a deserted, haunting quality, as though some German De Chirico had been set loose in the Ruhr. De Chirico...
Such paintings suggest the strength of the Neue Sachlichkeit tendency to paint a world beyond the spectator's control - not Leger's confidence in technology, but glimpses of an airless place, always the city, with looming buildings, threatening, gray and crystalline, where the exact divisions between things seem to mirror the divisions and conflicts of class that concerned many of the painters. In particular, they obsessed Grosz. One of his friends called him "a Bolshevik in painting, nauseated by painting." This was not quite true, for although Grosz once declared that compared with the practical tasks of political...