Beyond Grosz

THE NEW CRITERION, May 2025

Beyond Grosz

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.

1. “Neue Sachlichkeit / New Objectivity” opened at Neue Galerie, New York, on February 20 and remains on view through May 26, 2025. ↩

WSJ: Review of "Jack Whitten - The Messenger"

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, April 14, 2025

Jack Whitten: The Messenger’ Review: A Creator’s Odyssey at MoMA

The American artist moved from the segregated South to the New York art world and beyond as he forged unique processes of painting and sculpting, the textured, totemic results of which are now on view in a staggering retrospective.

Can a painting also be a sculpture? Find out in “Jack Whitten: The Messenger,” the retrospective of the American abstractionist on view through Aug. 2 at the Museum of Modern Art. Following the survey of Jack Whitten’s free-standing work at the Met Breuer in 2018, we now get the full picture of this innovative and resonant artist, one who found freedom in the movement across fixed definitions.

The circuitous journey of Whitten (1939-2018) from segregated Bessemer, Ala., to the top floor of MoMA—by way of the Tuskegee Institute, Cooper Union, Manhattan’s 10th Street, SoHo and Tribeca, and the Greek island of Crete—was as epic as his compositions. The blood and sweat of his personal odyssey infused his methods and materials. At a time when black American artists might have been expected to address the subject of race through direct representation, Whitten abstracted his identity into layered works, both physically and metaphorically, of totemic power….

FULL REVIEW IN TODAY’S WALL STREET JOURNAL

Schiele’s Living Dead

THE NEW CRITERION, January 2025

Schiele’s Living Dead

On “Egon Schiele: Living Landscapes” at the Neue Galerie, New York.

For an artist now best known for his desiccated portraits, “Egon Schiele: Living Landscapes,” on view at New York’s Neue Galerie through mid-January, adds some necessary water to the flower pot.1 With their exposed, contorted flesh, Schiele’s figures even today appear shriveled and deathlike—and unnecessarily brutalized. Those uncompromising bodies seemed to come out of nowhere when Schiele first conjured them up like an act of necromancy in 1910—a mad, mannered departure from whatever figuration had preceded them, even for the artist himself. Writing in 1912, the art critic Adalbert F. Seligmann took note of Schiele’s

gruesome-fantastical caricatures . . . ghostly lemurs with bloody spider fingers, mutilated, half-decomposed corpses, as if caught in a distorting mirror . . . . [T]he painting seems to have been taken from thousand-year-old graves.

Depending on how you take your art, such an assessment could be considered damning or the highest praise.

That same year, far from helping the case, Schiele was arrested for the kidnapping and defilement of an underage girl. The Neue show glosses over this incident, as those interested in this artist’s reputation have long swept questions of Schiele’s character under the Secessionist rug. Although he was acquitted of these particular charges, Schiele was found guilty of public immorality for displaying his nude figures in his studio with minors present and sentenced to twenty-four days in jail. Such early indictments against Schiele might still find a sympathetic jury today—and did, in fact, in 2018. The hundredth anniversary of his death at age twenty-eight came just in time for #MeToo and saw the artist’s posthumous appraisal unfairly brought before the court of social-media opinion.

Egon Schiele, Krumau Townscape, 1912, Oil on panel, Private Collection.

The Neue Galerie’s current exhibition—curated by Christian Bauer, the founding director of the State Gallery of Lower Austria in Krems—introduces some exculpatory evidence to the shock and awe of Schiele’s stark figures while also revealing the “life” and “landscape” that in fact occupied a majority of his output. Compared to the one-hundred-thirty-odd nudes and portraits he created in his lifetime, Schiele composed nearly one hundred seventy landscapes, townscapes, and natural scenes during his intense but brief period of creative work.

Rather than the prurient cosmopolitan that his ill-formed nudes might suggest, at least according to this exhibition and its rather impenetrable catalogue of essays in translation, Schiele was a spiritually driven provincial who sought the divine in nature. Born in the hinterlands outside Vienna in a stationmaster’s apartment on the line to the imperial city, Schiele as a boy filled his sketchbooks with drawings of the local countryside. One of his early interests was the life of Saint Francis of Assisi. His first exhibition took place at the Augustinian monastery in Klosterneuburg, where for a time he studied and lived. In 1906, at the age of sixteen, he arrived at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna as its youngest student, where he burned to reveal a pastoral religiosity through his work.

This is not all to suggest that Schiele was a prime candidate to join his local Rotary Club. In his 1979 book Symbolism, Robert Goldwater identified the late nineteenth-century fervor to “make emotion meaningful, by connecting it with humanity at large and by seeing nature as its reflection.” For Vincent van Gogh, for example, that meant making “each object such a microcosm of an animized universe vibrating with his own feelings, that it is, in this new sense, a symbol—of himself and of a pantheistic spirit.” For Schiele (who was most likely exposed to Van Gogh through exhibitions in Vienna in 1906 and 1909), a Romantic sense of place combined with an ardent Symbolist faith in the power of depicting the cycles of life and death—which in turn flowed through the godlike self-conception of this headstrong, wunderkind artist. “A divine human being always leads the crowd!” Schiele proclaimed. “So let it be said: that the artist is the only one who is the ruler, the dominator, of 100, 1,000, and 10,000, that he creates only for himself, because it is the same as breathing.” Never one for understatement, he continued, “An artist above all is the one of great spiritual gifts.”

Egon Schiele, Town Among the Greenery (The Old City III), 1917, Oil on canvas, Neue Galerie, New York.

Schiele’s gift, at least as he understood it, was for revealing the spirits of life and making them manifest in oil. “I can speak with all living creatures, even with plants and stones; speak, speak directly into their face, into their essence,” he said.

Every tree has its face; I recognize its kind of eyes, its kind of arms, its components, its organism. I want to be addressed by everything!—My act is the answer.

For Schiele, God “breathes much more clearly in a field.” As the Viennese art collector Rudolf Leopold said of Schiele, he approached “landscape envisioned as a cathedral.”

In his interests in animism and pantheism, Schiele found ready affinity with the lingering pre-Christian sentiments that took quick root in Austria through such social scientists as Erwin Hanslik, a now largely forgotten figure who was the founder of the Institut für Kulturforschung (Institute of Cultural Research) in Vienna, one who gathered the artistic elite around his belief in a Weltkulturgesellschaft (world-cultural society). Working directly with Schiele on the supposed connections between landscape and skull shape, Hanslik saw in Austria, in particular, a “humanity as it truly is, as an earth person, as a powerful, earth-bound spiritual being.”

When not dabbling in phrenology (Schiele even provided the phenotypic head illustrations for Hanslik’s book Wesen der Menschheit—“the essence of humanity”—which is now about as démodé as it gets), the artist worked through several fine but indistinct watercolors and gouaches in Klosterneuburg. Silhouette of Klosterneuburg (ca. 1906, Landessammlungen Niederösterreich, St. Pölten) and The Blacksmith’s Courtyard in Klosterneuburg (1906, Stiftsmuseum, Kosterneururg) speak to Schiele’s interest in local topographies but give little hint of the compositional innovations he developed over the next few years.

Egon Schiele, City on the Blue River I (Dead City I), 1910, Gouache with glue & black crayon on paper, Private Collection.

In 1907, as a student in Vienna, Schiele met Gustav Klimt, his elder by nearly thirty years, who became a mentor and influence—and who happened to be the subject of a revelatory landscape show at the Neue Galerie less than a year ago (see “Summer lights” in The New Criterion of June 2024). For the next few years, Schiele worked though Klimt-like modes of composition that interwove figure and ground into a dappled whole. Summer Night (1907, private collection, courtesy Kallir Research Institute, New York) and Drying Laundry (1908, Kallir Family Foundation) are two of these small highlights of oil on cardboard—or rather “lowlights,” as their indistinct forms and fading illumination convey a haunting presence. Current of Youth (Danaë) (1909, the Lewis Collection), an astonishing concatenation of figure and ground in which a nude melts into the sinuous vines of a dark stream, reveals Schiele’s full debt to Klimt and announced the young artist’s arrival when shown in his first group exhibition in Vienna that year. (If only this nuanced work had been hung lower down at the Neue and not in the glare of gallery lights above a mantelpiece.)

Schiele’s true compositional breakthrough occurred the following year, when he stripped away this integration of figure and ground and placed his subjects—animal, vegetable, and mineral—in free-floating white relief. Sunflower I (1908, Landessammlungen Niederösterreich, St. Pölten), of falling petals and wilted leaves, set off by a scumbled white ground, hints at how this process began in his natural still lifes before influencing the progression of his portraiture.

A central gallery in this exhibition is titled “My Transformations” (with Schiele, it’s always me, me, me). Here we are presented with a suite of gnarled figures alongside his depictions of peasant jugs and chestnut trees. A gouache and pencil on paper titled Wilted Sunflower from 1912 (private collection, courtesy Kallir Research Institute) speaks most directly to the portraits here assembled in both composition and tonality. In Schiele’s monistic imagination, figures such as those in his Portrait of Dr. Erwin von Graff (1910, private collection) and Portrait of the Painter Karl Zakovšek) (1910, private collection) are merely the dry leaves and branches of plants in another form. By floating them in fields of dingy white, Schiele further conveys the provisional sketchiness of life—man as little more than stick figure, here revealed by a numinous artist–god as depicted in Self-Portrait in Peacock Waistcoat, Standing (1911, Ernst Ploil, Vienna).

Through such mortifications of the flesh, Schiele connected his art with the melancholy light of a particular central-European sensibility. “My essence—my putrescence,” is how this artist once summed things up. In his stick-bug portraits, squashed as though stepped on by society’s shoe, Schiele presents a vision of human metamorphosis that is Kafkaesque—or perhaps it is more accurate to suggest that Franz Kafka was Schielesque. For the painter, the Fall of Man and the season of fall came together in an imagination that fixated on the cycles of decay and rebirth in the Crucifixion. In his native Austria, Schiele saw his own Calvary Hill (with the tortured artist, of course, on that cross).

Egon Schiele, Sunflower I, 1908, Oil on cardboard, Landessammlungen Niederösterreich, St. Pölten.

Rather than some Futurism, Schiele most strongly identified with the Gothic. In his punk appearance, he was himself the original goth. In the Neue’s largest gallery, titled “My Places,” we can see how his treatment of geometric forms and mottled color, set off by thick black lines, calls to mind nothing less than ecclesiastical stained glass. Houses by the River II (The Old City II) (1914, Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid) is a tour de force of translucent rectangles. Several of the works here are little more than sketches, a continuation of the artist’s interest in the local typologies of house, river, and street—Group of Houses on a Mountain (1912, Albertina, Vienna), Old Houses in Krumau (1914, Landessammlungen Niederösterreich, St. Pölten), and Supply Depot, Trento Branch: Exterior View with Notice Board (1917, private collection). The highlight in the mix is the Neue Galerie’s own Town among Greenery (The Old City III) (1917). Here the triangular rooflines of a gemütlich village, surrounded by greenery, grow up through Schiele’s picture plane like the bark of an ancient tree.

It was Schiele’s fate never to take such root himself but rather to wither on the vine of youth. Itinerant as a boy even before his father’s attempted suicide and death, which sent him into the guardianship of his Bohemian uncle, Schiele was further uprooted by the First World War. In 1918, just days after his wife Edith Harms, six months pregnant, died of influenza, Schiele himself succumbed to the ravages of the Spanish Flu. A final, funereal gallery titled “My Self-Portraits” ends with the plaster Death Mask of Egon Schiele (1918), a gift to the Neue Galerie from the scholar Alessandra Comini, who curated the museum’s blockbuster exhibition of Schiele portraits in 2014. Obsessed with depicting the cycle of life, Schiele was far from wrong in his early premonitions of death.

1. “Egon Schiele: Living Landscapes” opened at Neue Galerie, New York, on October 17, 2024, and remains on view through January 13, 2025. ↩