In yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, I wrote in with some thoughts on William F. Buckley Jr., occasioned by Barton Swaim's review of books by Sam Tanenhaus and Lawrence Perelman.
In the New York Times, I offered my view of the president's recent actions at the National Portrait Gallery.
THE NEW CRITERION, May 2025
On “Neue Sachlichkeit / New Objectivity,” at the Neue Galerie, New York.
The end of the First World War shocked the arts, nowhere more so than in Germany. Empire was out. Democracy was in. A thin veil of liberalism shrouded the darker forces of defeatism, instability, and resentment. As architects and designers smoothed over the rough edges, artists focused on the sheen of this new society to identify its rips and tears.
A critic at the time called this confounding and ultimately tragic movement the Neue Sachlichkeit, for the “new objectivity” that looked to salvage Germany with sober realism and brutal honesty. Just what was newly objective about this cultural moment that swept through the Weimar Republic in the interwar years between 1918 and 1933 is now the subject of a broad survey at New York’s Neue Galerie—one that takes into account not only the era’s painting but also its sculpture, architecture, photography, film, and design.1
“Neue Sachlichkeit / New Objectivity” has been curated at Neue Galerie by Olaf Peters, a professor at Martin Luther University in Halle-Wittenberg, who last organized the Neue’s “Max Beckmann: The Formative Years, 1915–1925,” which I reviewed in this space in January 2024. The timing of the exhibition pays tribute to another historian and curator, Gustav Friedrich Hartlaub, who helped coin the term “Neue Sachlichkeit” and organized a historic survey of representative paintings a century ago at the Kunsthalle Mannheim.
Germany’s new objectivity, which might better be understood as a new frankness, reflected a larger, international turn away from what were seen as the excesses of abstraction and expressionism in favor of a renewed commitment to representation. In his “Introduction to ‘New Objectivity’” of 1925, Hartlaub wrote of artists “disillusioned, sobered, often resigned to the point of cynicism having nearly given up on themselves after a moment of unbounded, nearly apocalyptic hope,” ones who “in the midst of the catastrophe have begun to ponder what is most immediate, certain, and durable: truth and craft.”
Oskar Schlemmer, Bauhaus Stairway, 1932, Oil on canvas, Museum of Modern Art, New York.
As presented by Peters, this spirit of objectivity extended beyond the satirical eye of such painters as George Grosz and Otto Dix, the focus of Hartlaub’s original show, to the clean lines of the Bauhaus, which was founded in Weimar in 1919, and to the crisp focus of modern photography and design. “The catastrophe of the war demanded a pitiless and undaunted eye,” Peters writes in the exhibition’s extensive catalogue, an eye that he argues took on a wider range of vision than initially understood. “Neue Sachlichkeit was an artistic movement that seized an entire country.”
An opening room here called “Playground and Object” leads to Oskar Schlemmer’s iconic 1932 Bauhaus Stairway (Museum of Modern Art). This smooth painting of faceless female figures ascending a stripped-down staircase suggests the levitational mobility of this new era, at least as taken step by step. The work is supplemented by a 1929 Schlemmer painting of five nudes and a 1923 lithograph for a Bauhaus exhibition by Fritz Schleifer, both from private collections, all of which reduce the particulars of human expression to robotic forms.
“Playground and Object” suggests the breadth of the new objective style. A suite of unflinching photographs by August Sander, of family, neighbors, and children, is mixed with snapshots and collages by Josef Albers, Aenne Biermann, Kurt Schwitters, and Rudolf Kramer. A remarkable 1930 documentary-like film called People on Sunday by Robert Siodmak, cowritten by none other than Billy Wilder, here presented on a video monitor, deserves a seat for its seventy-three-minute window onto the so-called new man and woman of Weimar.
George Grosz, Eclipse of the Sun, 1926, The Heckscher Museum of Art, Huntington, New York. © 2025 Estate of George Grosz. Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
There is much to take in through this opening presentation, including a vitrine of modern conveniences such as a spread of Bauhaus tableware by Marianne Brandt as well as clinical photographs by Hans Finsler, photographic studies of garbage by Rudolf Kramer, and a curious selection of paintings of children with their colorful toys by Otto Dix, Heribert Fischer-Geising, Wilhelm Heckrott, Hilde Rakebrand, and Wilhelm Lachnit. Taken as a whole, the selection suggests a peacetime dividend merely supporting an artificial normalcy, one in which dolls, mannequins, children, and pets all wear the same mask.
Figure and Space,” the title of the following room, brings together compressed landscapes with scenes of more direct social commentary. George Grosz’s Eclipse of the Sun (1926, Heckscher Museum of Art) is a well-known example of the latter. A bombastic assembly of military, industrial, and bureaucratic figures conspire around a donkey with blinders on, all the while stepping on a child caged below their feet. The symbol of a dollar sign flashes across the horizon. A top-hatted industrialist loaded down with munitions whispers in the ear of a uniformed figure resembling Paul von Hindenburg.
As he turned against the expressive surface treatments of modernism, Grosz’s satirical extremes mixed acidic criticism with traditional paint handling. Writing in 1931, Grosz likened the precision of his work to that of Pieter Bruegel and Hieronymus Bosch: “Do not fear looking back to your ancestors. . . . Why then the usual pilgrimage to the philistine French Mecca? Why not return to our ancestors and set forth a German tradition?”
Georg Scholz’s Of Things to Come (1922, Neue Galerie) may be more restrained than Grosz’s work but no less direct. Three frowning men survey open ground in front of a backdrop of factories. Their cigars, cigarettes, and pipes join the smoking stacks behind them. Similarly, the three frog-faced figures in Franz M. Jansen’s Masks (1925, lvr-Landesmuseum, Bonn) might suggest Weimar’s croaking relationship between military and business or between man and woman.
Franz M. Jansen, Masks, 1925, Oil on canvas, LVR-Landesmuseum, Bonn.
Remove such figures and we come to the pendant side to representation in the Neue Sachlichkeit. Educated at the Bauhaus, where he studied with Lyonel Feininger, Carl Grossberg produced deadpan reflections of town and industry. Marktbreit (Marktbreit am Main, Bavaria) (1931) is an assembly of red roofs. Jacquard Weaving Mill (1934) captures textile machines mid-production. Both of these paintings and the five other works by Grossberg, all on loan from the Merrill C. Berman Collection, find compositional order in the chaos of their busy depictions, here stripped of people and arranged in deep perspective.
Writing in 1926, the art historian Justus Bier, who later became the director of the North Carolina Museum of Art, took note of Grossberg’s
factories, machine halls, monstrosities of dynamos, rolling mills, furnaces, hammers—presented without false enthusiasm, full of a hard and mental sobriety of observation that can wrest clarity, coherence, distinctness of function from the heap, the chaos of forms.
Similar examples are Volker Böhringer’s High Pressure Steam (1923, Merrill C. Berman Collection) and Karl Hanusch’s Airport Observation Tower (1927, Städtische Sammlungen Freital). Architectural materials such as a brick wall, a wooden post, and a metal tread plate appear to be stamped right into the surfaces of the compositions. Compared to these works, two relatively benign still-lifes by Eberhard Viegener, of bananas, jugs, and cacti from 1927 and 1928, might seem out of place, but they reveal the echoes of Henri Rousseau in much of this new objectivity.
A large gallery called “Character and Representation” then presents the portraiture and artists we most associate with the Neue Sachlichkeit. Dr. Mayer-Hermann (1926, Museum of Modern Art), by Otto Dix, faces the entryway and suggests that we too are here for our exam. Dix rendered Mayer-Hermann, a prominent physician of the ear, nose, and throat, as a rotund guru, heavier than he was in life. A head mirror and metallic instruments all reflect the examination room around him—even as we, the viewer, appear to be absent in the reflection. The painting is joined by Dix’s equally unflattering Portrait of the Lawyer Dr. Fritz Glaser (1921, private collection), in which Glaser’s gray skin, inflated abdomen, and swollen hands suggest necrosis. Even more revealing is Dix’s Half-Nude (1926, private collection), in which a woman attempts to conceal her nakedness by crossing her arms.
Carl Grossberg, Jacquard Weaving Mill, 1934, Oil on plywood, Merrill C. Berman Collection.
While revolutionary in presentation, Dix looked to the traditions of the past for his painting style. “In recent years, one catchphrase has motivated the present generation of creative artists. It urges them to ‘Find new forms of expression!’” he wrote in 1927.
I very much doubt, however, whether such a thing is possible. Anyone who looks at the paintings of the Old Masters, or immerses himself in the study of their works, will surely agree with me. . . . For me, the object is primary and determines the form.
Closely aligned with the Neue Sachlichkeit, Max Beckmann is represented here by only one work, The Old Actress (1926, Metropolitan Museum of Art). A critic of expressionism and Fauvism, Beckmann railed against the “feeble and overly aesthetic” interests of “so-called new painting” for “its failure to distinguish between the idea of a wallpaper or poster and that of a ‘picture.’ ” For his Portrait of John Förste, Man with Glass Eye (1926, private collection), George Grosz departed from histrionics while still focusing on the wounded and strange. Meanwhile, in Two Girls (1928, private collection), Christian Schad employed the precision of Northern Renaissance portraiture for meretricious ends. Mixed in among these highlights are portraits by Karl Hubbuch, Hans Grundig, Gerd Arntz, Rudolf Schlichter, Heinrich Maria Davringhausen, Kurt Querner, and others who were part of the broader movement.
Reviewing Scholz in 1923, the historian Hans Curjel wrote how
unrelenting war is declared against all complacency, all stubbornness, all heartfelt, philistine sentimentality, all jampacked sexuality, all capitalist rawness, all patriotic stupidity, and they will be fought with brutal openness.
A selection of drawings and prints by Hanna Nagel, Scholz, and Schad deserves an extra look for the draftsmanship that went into such polemics. Further examples of works on paper by Alexander Kanoldt, Ernst Thoms, Schlemmer, Schad, Grosz, and Dix continue in a side gallery. Here they are paired with a range of portrait busts, from Paul Berger’s realistic Eugen Hoffmann (1925, Albertinum) and Hoffmann’s Otto Dix (ca. 1925, Kunstsammlungen Zwickau) to Rudolf Belling’s deco-robotic Sculpture 23 (1923, cast 1960s, Neue Galerie) and Schlemmer’s stylized Grotesque (1964, Neue Galerie). The exhibition concludes in a hallway with posters by Willi Baumeister, Max and Binia Bill, Hans Leistikow, and Karl Peter Röhl, along with portrait photography by Suse Byk and Yva on loan from Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin—fashionable pictures that are highlights of the show.
Yva (Else Ernestine Neuländer), Woman Modeling Jewelry from the Völkerkundemuseum (Ethnological Museum), 1933, Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.
The range of styles and materials in this exhibition suggests a revisionist take on the Neue Sachlichkeit that may indeed be more representative of that broader movement. Nevertheless, the presentation—tied to Hartlaub’s 1925 painting exhibition and engaged with his taxonomies of “verism” and “classicism”—can come across as overdetermined, aimed at an academic rather than museum audience.
The historian Alfred Neumeyer regarded “Neue Sachlichkeit” as a “promotional word” and a “fictive name for a style.” Like a handful of other observers of this new objectivity, he was eventually able to immigrate to the United States, but not everyone in this exhibition was as fortunate. In 1930s Germany, the permanence of the “new objectivity” proved to be far too fictive. There may be lingering uncertainty over just what was the Neue Sachlichkeit. Still, it is impossible not to see in each work here a ticking alarm clock set to 1933.
“Neue Sachlichkeit / New Objectivity” opened at Neue Galerie, New York, on February 20 and remains on view through May 26, 2025. ↩
THE NEW CRITERION, April 2025
On “Caspar David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature,” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
For those of us who prefer our art soft-baked, Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840) can seem irredeemably hard-boiled. This painter of crucified peaks and mystified valleys, of gnarled trees and ruined churches, all underlit in a raking gloam, looked out to the infinite and wanted to perceive even more.
Pairing pictorial ambition with technical restraint, Friedrich filled his canvases with an emptiness that made him the paragon of German Romanticism—and the bane of critics from his time to our own. “It is true presumption,” wrote his contemporary Friedrich von Ramdohr, “when landscape painting wants to slink into the church and creep up on the altars.” Nearly two centuries on, Hilton Kramer called the artist a “second-rate talent” whose claim to first-rate status is nothing less than a “libel on the art of the great Romantic painters.”
Supersized, vacuous, and unabashedly over-the-top, Friedrich’s paintings no doubt planted the seeds for an invasive spiritualism in art. Turning to the “unknowable hereafter,” he proclaimed, he aimed for that “darkness of the future! Which is only ever sacred intuition, to be seen and recognized only in belief.” From German nationalism to National Socialism to radical environmentalism, his compositions became the ready vessels for a brimful of bad ideas. At the least, it is safe to say, a little bit of Friedrich goes a very long way.
For this reason, in the United States, Friedrich up until now has been the beneficiary of his own limited exposure. The first Friedrich oil to enter an American museum came only in 1984, when the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth acquired the diminutive Mountain Peak with Drifting Clouds (ca. 1835). Since then, fewer than a half dozen other U.S. institutions have acquired works by the artist, whose paintings are largely concentrated in German collections.
Caspar David Friedrich, Self-Portrait, 1800, Black chalk on wove paper, Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen.
At the same time, loan exhibitions of his major oils, mostly held in the Alte Nationalgalerie of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, and the Hamburger Kunsthalle, have been notably circumscribed. The first large stateside Friedrich exhibition took place in 1990 with “The Romantic Vision of Caspar David Friedrich: Paintings and Drawings from the U.S.S.R.” In 2001, after its acquisition of Two Men Contemplating the Moon (ca. 1825–30), the Metropolitan organized what was only the second Friedrich show in America, with just seven of his paintings and two drawings.
So “Caspar David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature,” the exhibition with over seventy-five of his works now on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, tied to the 250th anniversary of his birth and a blockbuster year of shows in Germany, is not only a major event.1 Drawing from the three significant holdings of Friedrich’s art in Germany and over thirty other lenders, it is also the first true retrospective of his work in the United States. But is this all too much Friedrich for his (and our) own good?
Organized by Alison Hokanson, a curator in the Metropolitan’s Department of European Paintings, and Joanna Sheers Seidenstein, an assistant curator in the Department of Drawings and Prints, “The Soul of Nature” makes every effort to bring Romanticism’s high striver back down to sea level. A winding path through a selection of mostly smaller works, arranged in the Met’s most compressed special-exhibition hall, here painted in muted tones, forces us into close proximity with Friedrich’s art while metering out his greatest hits. As a few cut-out walls offer glimpses of the larger paintings that follow, the slow approach keeps the presentation gratefully scaled down and anti-monumental.
No doubt informed by Seidenstein’s specialization in works on paper, the exhibition also begins and ends with Friedrich’s drawings and prints. This intelligent framing encourages us to focus on Friedrich as draftsman first and ideas-man second. The approach rightly illuminates the formal innovations that Friedrich brought to his canvases after first working them out on paper. There can be no argument that Friedrich was an astonishing illustrator. His drawings remain among his most accomplished works and certainly his most compelling. As presented here, the virtuosity that Friedrich displayed on paper might just be his greatest achievement.
Caspar David Friedrich, View of Arkona with Rising Moon, 1805–06, Brown ink & wash over pencil on paper, Albertina Museum, Vienna.
We can already see these accomplishments in his self-portrait of 1800 (Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen)—an assured, penetrating work of black chalk on wove paper. Selections of his plant and tree studies from June 1799, on loan from the Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, reveal an artist using pencil, ink, and particularly wash to render an assembly of leaves to remarkable visual effect. Testing out his washes on the edges of the paper, Friedrich could already deploy layers of shading to create a deep dimensionality.
These exacting studies and close observations led to his first major breakthrough: View of Arkona with Rising Moon (1805–6, Albertina Museum, Vienna). This large work on paper, two feet high and over three feet wide, one of a series of iterations of the composition, employs several pictorial strategies that Friedrich revisited throughout his career. Drawing upon his studies of the island of Rügen in 1801, looking north and east from Vitt Beach towards Cape Arkona and the Baltic Sea, Friedrich lights his scene as though from behind the frame. A rising moon on the horizon fluoresces the ocean mist and rippling waves. At the same time, an imposing foreground of rocks, hulls, masts, fences, and walls—partially obscuring our more distant view and nearly rendered in silhouette—is seemingly cast into an ever greater obscurity.
With our footing uncertain, Friedrich pulls us into the feeling of the image, deliberately making our perspective unstable. He knows how raking light can dazzle and disorient more than it reveals, with the glowing horizon merely blinding us to the nearby shadows. Like most observers, my first response to this image of studied obscurantism, of tiny details and near illegibility, was to blink.
View of Arkona with Rising Moon was a sensation when first exhibited in Dresden in 1806. In 1822, it entered the possession of Prince Albert Casimir of Saxony, through which it formed part of the founding collection of the Albertina. The work’s greatest mystery is the question of just how an artist could have created an image of such precision. One answer was the traditional education in draftsmanship that Friedrich received in Greifswald and Copenhagen. The other was the adoption of new media—for example, sepia wash used on smooth wove paper as opposed to bister (from burned wood) on textured laid paper—that had been introduced to Dresden by the academician Jakob Crescentius Seydelmann.
Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, ca. 1817, Oil on canvas, Hamburger Kunsthalle.
In her catalogue essay, Seidenstein expands on the importance of sepia wash to Friedrich’s developing tonalities. The pigment was only recently developed into a shelf-stable medium in Italy (sepia from seppia, the Italian word for cuttlefish, from which the ink is derived). Applied in layers of slow-drying glazes, sepia gave Friedrich a means of nuanced illumination that at the same time concealed the hand of the artist almost entirely from view.
In his studied and detailed unfolding of landscape—placing the viewer in an uncertain foreground, obscuring the background, and effacing the reference points of middle ground—Friedrich locates us in places where we would never otherwise go and that he would not necessarily visit himself. Most of his finished landscapes in fact were confections. He painted the peaks of the Watzmann, as in the assured canvas of 1824–25 from the Alte Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, but he never traveled south to see the actual alpine summit.
Friedrich was not shy in using animistic anthropomorphism and religious imagery together for their sentimental effects. Nor did he refrain from squeezing every moonrise and sunset of their last lumen. As developed by the philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Friedrich’s sense for Naturphilosophie, for a “world soul,” turned every tree into a figure and every branch into a grasping hand. His interest in landscape was also nationalistic. Often depicting himself in traditional (and for a time illicit) German garb, he aimed to capture “our German sun, moon, and stars, our rocks, trees, and vegetation, our plains, seas, and rivers.” Surveying their abundance at the Metropolitan, as Friedrich turned from drawing to painting after 1807, I would have been fine if some of these suns, moons, and stars had remained in Germany. The same goes for Friedrich’s series of hilltop crucifixes, all illuminated in a sunset glow, to which we can only ascribe another German notion, that of pure kitsch.
There are nevertheless several highlights here, some of them on view in the United States for the first time. Monk by the Sea (1808–10, Alte Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin) is one such example. A small, solitary figure looks out at the empty, wine-dark sea. The open, unmoored atmosphere of this large work is its most notable feature, ever more so after studies of its underpainting reveal that Friedrich removed several ships from view, untying us from any anchoring in its middle ground. It is just a shame that the condition of this work is now marred by several brown streaks down its surface, perhaps due to the discoloration of Friedrich’s use of smalt—a semi-transparent blue pigment made from crushed glass that extended to canvas those nuanced glazing practices he first developed in sepia, but one that is notoriously unstable.
Caspar David Friedrich, Cave in the Harz, ca. 1837, Brown ink & wash with pencil on paper, The Royal Danish Collection, Copenhagen.
Other attractions here are works that stand apart in subject matter from the rest, in particular the domestic Woman at the Window (1822, Alte Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin). A selection of works by Johan Christian Dahl, Carl Gustav Carus, and August Heinrich—all contemporary to Friedrich and drawn mostly from the Met’s collection—helps to place the subject’s pictorial achievements in his time. So too does Caspar David Friedrich in His Studio (1811, Hamburger Kunsthalle), a portrait by Georg Friedrich Kersting that shows the supreme draftsman balancing his hand on a mahl stick next to his triangles and T-squares. It is regrettable that Friedrich’s magisterial Sea of Ice of 1823–24 has not traveled here from Hamburger Kunsthalle, but the tiny Rocky Reef off the Seacoast (ca. 1824, Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe) conveys some of that same Fortress of Solitude crystallization.
The big get of this exhibition is without a doubt Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (ca. 1817), here on loan for the first time from Hamburger Kunsthalle. This work, now an icon of Western painting, illustrates the cover of the exhibition catalogue, not to mention dorm-room posters the world over. The image of a solitary windswept climber, surmounting a craggy peak and surveying the misty mountains below, deploys all of Friedrich’s tropes, in particular that of the Rückenfigur, or back figure, depicted in a vertiginous silhouette. Like many ubiquitous images, the painting is smaller in person than you might expect. The foreground and background also interact in more subtle ways than you can observe in reproduction, with the symmetry of fog and ridgeline coming together at the center of the floating figure like two wings.
Friedrich’s reputation waned shortly after he painted this image, as taste for his speculative school of landscape, based in Dresden, moved on to the more clinical eye of the Düsseldorf Academy. As his health deteriorated, he turned again to paper and the precise sepia washes that first made his career. In its inchoate abstraction, tempered only by tiny tufts of grass, Cave in the Harz (ca. 1837) is a gravitational tour de force. The same must be said of Dolmen near Gützkow (ca. 1837), also from the Royal Danish Collection. In this neolithic burial site, of boulders pressing on stone, Friedrich envisions a prehistoric cemetery. The desolate hilltop also anticipates the death, just three years later, of this most modern of German artists.
“Caspar David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature” opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, on February 8 and remains on view through May 11, 2025.
