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Throughout the Weimar Republic, the modern realist painters associated with the New Objectivity explored the effects of surface materiality and psychological detachment as they depicted the popular social type of the New Woman looking sachlich—sober, sporty, practical, and functionally dressed. The fashionable surfaces of Lotte Laserstein's New Woman pictures provide an opportunity to reevaluate Neue Sachlichkeit painting, which has historically centered on the male painters Otto Dix, Christian Schad, George Grosz, and Anton Räderscheidt. Laserstein emphasizes the sensuousness of clothing and corporeality to portray the New Woman as an embodied subject who negotiated the conditions of Weimar modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit) in photography, in its narrower sense defining it as the detailed or close description of the surfaces of material objects. The article looks also at the role of the New Objectivity in German art and photography and examines it in relation to pictorialism and the Czech avant-garde (Devětsil). It discusses the work that the pioneer of avant-garde photography Jaromír Funke produced in the years between 1923 and 1929, which originated some of the principles of the New Objectivity. In the 1920s Funke invented also non-figurative shadow play. In the style of New Objectivity he taught his students in the 1930s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent research of modern realisms, including the New Objectivity, rehabilitated or even discovered many artists whose work did not fit into the dominant canon of modernism built on formal experiments, abstraction, and/ or iconoclasm. It is significant that the new realisms of the 1920s and 1930s included many women artists who considered radical avant-garde postulates too separated from life (and who were usually not welcome in avantgarde circles anyway). Analysing both the representation of femininity in inter-war visual culture and the work of several women artists who were either part of the inter-war Czech art scene (Milada Marešová, Vlasta Vostřebalová Fischerová) or were born in Bohemia but spent most of their professional lives in some neighbouring and in most cases German location (Erika Streit, Tina Bauer Pezellen), this text tries to find answers to some key questions connected with gender aspects of new realisms and the New Objectivity in particular: Why did women lean so frequently towards modern realisms? Did these fine art tendencies offer adequate means with which to express the long-suppressed and unreflected bodily and mental experiences of the ‘second’ sex and to find the personal and collective identity of women in modern society? Does a link exist between the New Objectivity and the ideal of a ‘new’ or ‘civilised’ woman that was one of the central icons of the 1920s? Can the gender perspective contribute to the gradual rehabilitation of figurative and realist tendencies in Czech inter-war modernism? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In their writings on Zdenek Rykr, Jindřich Chalupecký and Vojtěch Lahoda use the term New Objectivity in reference to several of his paintings from 1928 and 1929. This article examines Rykr’s writings from that time in an effort to test the hypothesis of whether his paintings are a conscious reflection of the New Objectivity. That he may have been influenced by the New Objectivity has suggested itself given that he took part in a trip a group of journalists made to Germany in 1928 to attend the international Press Exhibition in Cologne. In his report from the exhibition, however, no mention is made of the New Objectivity, nor can any kind of mention be found in his other writings from this period. Rykr at this time related only to the French tradition of art. As regards Rykr’s relationship to the New Objectivity, it is genuinely a matter of only a similarity on the surface and the use of a similar visual language. However, an interesting parallel with his paintings can be found in the work of the Hannover group. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The text maps the areas of influence of the New Objectivity art to the Slovak fine art of the twenties and thirties of the 20th century. It is based on the knowledge that the most striking response to the Slovak art was left by drawing and graphic art of the Verist (“left”) wing of the New Objectivity, particularly by George Grosz and Otto Dix. Georges Grosz’s views were followed by communist-oriented intelligence and reproduced in left-wing cultural periodicals. The text proves that the sharp social criticism of the Groszian and Dixian types left traces in the painting and graphics of many Slovak modernists (Cyprián Majerník, Konstantin Bauer, Koloman Sokol and Štefan Bednár). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article looks for links between the Italian movement Valori Plastici and the German New Objectivity in the first half of the 1920s. The Valori Plastici movement was centred on a journal of the same name that was published in Rome in 1918-1922 and was a platform for metaphysical paintings and later a wider circle of classicist techniques. Members include painters Giorgio de Chirico, Carlo Carrà, and Alberto Savinio, who in the periodical’s first issues advanced a concept of metaphysical painting. German artists had the opportunity to get acquainted with the periodical at the art gallery and bookstore of Hans Goltz in Munich, and metaphysical painting was also often reported on in German journals such as Das Kunstblatt, Der Ararat, Der Cicerone and others. Confirmation of the interest in Italian art was the exhibition Das junge Italien, which was held in 1921 in Berlin, before it continued on to Hannover. These impulses did not fail to prompt a response in German art and we can find motifs inspired by metaphysical painting in the work of a number of artists (Ernst, Schlemmer, Grosz, Schrimpf, Darvinghausen, Mense, Kanoldt). The role of the Valori Plastici movement was assessed by Franz Roh in his book Nach-Expressionismus - Magischer Realismus - Probleme der neuesten europäischen Malerei from 1925. Not only did he acknowledge the importance of the Valori Plastici movement, but in his description of the new art of the 1920s he delineated principles similar to those set forth also by the authors of metaphysical painting. It appears that the relatedness or similarity of views between Valori Plastici and the New Objectivity, alternatively magical realism, should not be sought in the work itself, where it was more obvious, but in the theoretical reflections that characterised the new approaches to art in the early 1920s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Modern realist work in interwar Czechoslovakia has not yet been thoroughly analysed, in contrast to current research on the German and American scenes. In those countries there has been a recent revival of interest in not just the New Objectivity but also modern realism in its wider sense. A project titled New Realisms in the Czechoslovak Art Scene 1918-1945 seeks to fill this gap. This article tries to understand what has led to the current state of affairs and to formulate the boundaries and premises a complex analysis of this subject would be based on. It is conceived as a summary of the starting points from which to proceed to gain insight into the new realisms, one particular example of which is represented by the New Objectivity. It also focuses on the response to the New Objectivity in Czech art history and questions of defining the new realisms in the specific circumstances of interwar Czechoslovakia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While Franz Roh's Nach-Expressionismus is widely cited as a foundational definition of Neue Sachlichkeit in painting, the book's theoretical assumptions have received scant attention. In this article I show that Roh belongs to a wider art historical tendency in applying Dilthey's conception of Weltanschauung to interpret artistic styles. But in defining the Weltanschauung of the present Roh inevitably entered the domain of politics. His defense of the latest art as embodying values of stability, order, and enlightenment spoke unequivocally for political centrism. This was both a conscious ideal and one that corresponded with the limitations of the Diltheyan method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although a milestone in the history of Latin American photography, the work of Horacio Coppola is little known outside Argentina. His unorthodox angles and tilting frames, his attention to industrial and urban themes, and his experimentation with different lenses in the period between 1927 and 1931 were in absolute synchrony with the precepts of European New Vision and New Objectivity photography, and with American straight photography. That Coppola’s visual idiom was in tune with the latest photographic developments in interwar Europe is obvious. What remains unclear is how exactly he achieved that synchrony. Several scholars have wrestled with this question, which nevertheless remains elusive due to lack of evidence of direct contact with European photography prior to his studies at the Berlin Bauhaus in 1932 and his repeated attempts to downplay the influence contemporary photographers had on his work. The article provides a systematic study of Coppola’s aesthetic genealogy and his photographic borrowings through a critical examination of his early pictures and theoretical writings. It teases out possible direct and indirect channels of dialogue with the New Vision, New Objectivity, and straight photography in the second half of the 1920s, and probes the reasons behind Coppola’s reluctance to admit a connection with contemporary European photography in particular. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Until 1933, highly renowned theatre critics of Jewish descent were dominant in the feuilletons of Berlin's leading regional papers. In 1919, Ernst Toller, also of Jewish descent and, a year earlier, a member of the short-lived revolutionary regime in Munich, established his fame as a playwright. While serving a five year prison sentence, and until 1927, he contributed five plays to the German expressionist and post-expressionist drama, with four out of five first-night performances at the prominent Berlin stages of Max Reinhardt and Leopold Jessner. The article addresses reviews of these performances by critics such as Emil Faktor, Siegfried Jacobsohn and Alfred Kerr, asking among other questions, whether and how these critics present a viewpoint that can be seen as »Jewish« in terms of how intellectuals belonging to the Jewish minority were viewed in the Weimar Republic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article critically examines the landscape and cityscape photography of E. O. Hoppé. In Picturesque Great Britain(1926), Hoppé presented a vision of the nation refracted through the prism of an older Pictorialist aesthetic, whereas his later works, Romantic America (1927) and Deutsche Arbeit (1930), offered a more enthusiastic interpretation of the urban industrial world. Indeed, the latter volume is very much in the style of Die Neue Sachlichkeit. Hoppé’s photography is, therefore, characterised by a high level of visual mutability as he shifted styles to suit publication needs, and he appears a particularly adept commercial opportunist. Elsewhere, Hoppé’s work appeared simultaneously in contexts that rejected the technological utopianism of the New Objectivity and Amerikanismus. In Germany, American Zivilisation was often understood to be a threat to a more traditional Kultur, and Hoppé’s work was also published in contexts characterised by a reactionary modernism that aimed at a reconciliation of the old with the new. This article analyses the cultural, commercial and ideological forces that helped shape Hoppé’s work in Britain, Germany and the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This essay argues that the photographic style known as Neue Sachlichkeit was in part a product of the educational ambitions of photographic archives in early twentieth-century Germany. While these archives first developed this approach to photography as a tool for visual investigation and analysis, Neue Sachlichkeit photography has since been separated from its pragmatic origins. The essay connects the dramatic close-ups and uncommon viewing angles found in these archives to Neue Sachlichkeit photography, thus contributing to recent reconsiderations of the boundaries between photographic document and artistic style. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines ways in which the question of image profusion occupied photography circles in interwar Germany, analysing in particular decisions to reject, glorify, or tame photography's evident abundance. While art photography around 1900 sought to legitimate its standing through rarity, during the late 1920s the New Objectivity and New Vision movements instead trumpeted quantity as the basis of their aesthetic claims. Their success quickly prompted a wave of criticism summed up by the term 'photo-inflation': a deregulated 'wastefulness' in imagery that threatened in the longer run man's very critical and perceptual faculties. In the wake of this articulation of threat, work in series became one possible way to domesticate image profusion, to accept its inevitability while giving it a framework. Pushing further, the creation of archives, especially in collective undertakings, seemed to regulate the problem. Defended first by the left as a means to overcome capitalist structures of competition, this discourse of collective effort was soon co-opted by the National Socialists. In the process, a rhetoric of common effort became reconciled with an emphasis on elites and hierarchical formations - for example, in juried competitions or expert advice columns - in which 'great photographers' were made into 'guides' for the limitless mass of amateurs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Umbo, one of the most stylistically influential photographers in Europe during the 1920s, followed a singular path that went beyond New Objectivity and Constructivism. In his photography he merged the stylistic elements of the 'New Vision' with the expressive aesthetic of Johannes Itten, his teacher at the Weimar Bauhaus. Unlike Albert Renger-Patzsch and László Moholy-Nagy, Umbo adhered to a romantic, poetic understanding of art. He took from Itten the idea that artistic perception of the world exists not in seeing alone but in three 'movements': seeing, feeling and recognising. Umbo therefore acknowledged in his work above all emotional need, a subject banned by 'New Photography' on the grounds of inconsistency with scientific accuracy and objectivity. In contrast to much 'New Vision' photography, optical means of expression do not become independent in Umbo's images, but serve in the formation of ideas, feelings or daydreams. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the depiction of the physician in artworks before, during and after the Holocaust. Celebration of the doctor as a hero before the Holocaust; Emphasis on the ontological conception of disease and the ability of medicine to cure pathology; New Objectivity artists' questioning of the conceptualization by pushing it to the extreme of realistic representations; Depiction of medicine as an alien Faustian craft.

The article presents a series of photographs and photograms titled "Sanctuary," taken by Gavin Hipkins. It emphasizes that Hipkins has explored abstraction, new objectivity drawing, and constructivist photography in his artworks. It also describes the treatment of Hipkins on landscape, ornamental, and artificial nature on his photographs.

The article offers information on the conference of The New Objectivity in Czechoslovakia? held on May 25, 2017 at the department of art history, faculty of arts, Msaryk University, Czech Republic. It mentions the conference focuses project titled The New Realisms in the Czechoslovak Art Scene 1918–1945, supported by the Czech Science Foundation; modern realisms research in Czechoslovakia's interwar art scene; and methods developed in international research on the New Objectivity.

The article focuses on a painting called Maria en den Ruinen, which was painted by a captured German soldier Arthur Braun. Arthur painted the work at the prisoner of war camp in Castleford, Yorkshire in 1946. Braun had learnt 'new objectivity' or neue Sachlichkeit before the war. The painting depicts the phase of a tragic period in the artist's life. Materials used by Arthur for making the painting included bitumen, powder paints made with linseed oil and bed sheet as a canvas. In the painting, mental imagery is related to both post-traumatic shock and grief.