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In 1923, Gustav Hartlaub, the newly appointed director of the Mannheim museum, planned an exhibition to chart the realistic trend in postwar painting. The exhibition, titled New Objectivity: German Painting Since Expressionism, however, did not take place until 1925. Hartlaub used the term Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) to differentiate this style from the subjective and abstract tendencies of expressionism. His aim was to exhibit the works of “those artists who have remained—or who have once more become—avowedly faithful to positive, tangible reality.” Among the artists most fully represented in the 1925 Mannheim show were Otto Dix, George Grosz, Max Beckmann, Alexander Kanoldt, Georg Scholz, and Georg Schrimpf. The art historian Franz Roh also noted the return to representational painting in his influential book Nach-Expressionismus, magischer Realismus: Probleme der neuesten Europäischen Malerei (1925; postexpressionism, magic realism: problems of the newest European painting). Roh used the term “magic realism” to distinguish the new realism from the earlier, nineteenth century style of realism exhibited by the artists Hans Thoma and Wilhelm Leibl. For Roh, magic realism also suggested a connection with French Surrealism and with the work of the Italian artist Giorgio De Chirico, whose precisely rendered paintings of vacuous mannequins in ambiguous spatial settings evoked a sense of mystery.

Education: Academy of Applied Arts, Dresden, Germany

The New Objectivity, also known as Die Neue Sachlichkeit, was an arts movement in Weimar Germany (1919–1935) that arose as a countermovement to German expressionism and as a reaction to the horrors and aftermath of war. The movement offered a vision of unsentimental reality and an objective focus on the world, as opposed to other expressionist tendencies that branched into abstract, ideal, positive, and romantic representations. The movement showed a preference for portraiture, self-portraiture, urban landscapes and detailed depictions of the marginal, the quotidian, the common, and the overlooked. It was spearheaded by Otto Dix and Georg Grosz, who infused it with a critical and satiric attitude. The merciless realistic renderings, according to some scholars, often followed the detailed technique of the Old Masters. Other art scholars question the formation of New Objectivity as an art current or movement, labeling it as a "pseudo" or false German expressionist movement.