Inside the Cult of Equinox

THE SPECTATOR, September 15, 2025

Inside the Cult of Equinox

Fueled by a mysterious marketing campaign, the gym now has more than 100 outposts

Scratch the surface of Silver Age Rome and what do you find? Most likely, a tight subterranean vault built as a meeting room for the followers of Mithras. This Persian mystery cult was everywhere in the early Anni Domini, coming to prominence between the decline of Hellenism and the rise of Christianity, filling that gap between the gods of Olympus and the God of Moses. The cult’s dark temples, the Mithraea, squeezed devotees into opposing benches designed to make them uncomfortable, all while in communion with their fellow initiates. Today, sociologists might call a Mithraeum a “third place.” Here was the kind of space where Roman men who had become disillusioned with Jupiter Stator could go between work and home to be purified together in a shower of bull’s blood.

The modern gym is one of our own ubiquitous third places, but only the urban fitness chain known as Equinox has positioned itself as an upscale mystery cult. “COMMIT TO SOMETHING,” beckons the gnostic advertising campaign of this self-described “high-performance lifestyle leader.” When presented with the accompanying outsize images obstructing the gym’s windows, we might well wonder: commit to what?

Launched in 1991, the gym now has more than 100 outposts spread across New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Miami, Chicago, Boston, Dallas, Houston and Washington, DC, as well as London, Toronto and Vancouver. The Equinox campaign started by the ad agency Wieden+Kennedy in 2016, diverged notably from the standard gym appeal of “improving lives through fitness” or “member-friendly memberships that won’t break the bank,” as the bargain-basement New York Sports Club might say. First shot by Steven Klein – whom the New Yorker described as creating “fashion photography with a pistol and a pulse” for his images that “teetered between the seductive and the sadistic” – the Equinox campaign was far from mens sana in corpore sano. It wasn’t even about going to the gym at all.

Instead, we saw a model etching a tattoo over what remained of her preemptive double mastectomy. “Scars aren’t ugly,” she said in the video component. “Scars are really just beautiful badges reminding you what you chose to go against; not just the size of your opponent but the size of your commitment.” Other materials presented a young man with a paralyzing stutter. “Your commitment tells your story better than you ever could,” he eked out. In another, three deaf cheerleaders signed in unison. In another, a model cut her hands practicing the harp as blood ran down her instrument. In another, a naked man received a haircut and manicure-pedicure as a small mirror covered his pudendum. In another, a woman breastfed two babies at her table at a restaurant. In yet another, a shirtless man was soon covered in bees.

At the time, Equinox promoted its campaign as an “intimate, provocative and deeply moving exploration of personal identity” that “confronts current cultural issues and asserts that commitment has the power to define who we are in the deepest sense.”

This year, Equinox updated the approach with a shoot by the British fashion photographer Charlotte Wales that extended these themes: a model licks a leather boot; a woman lies on a bed of nails as a robotic arm sticks her with a hypodermic needle; another model (this time transsexual) walks side by side with an AI version of their likeness covered in metallic parts. “Commitment is obsessed,” reads Equinox’s latest ad copy. “It’s now. It’s relentless. Always one step ahead. Abandon half-measures. Surrender to your urges. Sacrifice for obsession. Commitment isn’t a choice. It’s an awakening. Let desire drive you. Commit to something.”

Abandon all hope, ye who enter here? To hammer home the infernal message, Equinox throws extra shade on those who make that naive New Year’s resolution to get in shape. “If you waited for the ball to drop, you dropped the ball,” advises the gym. “On January 1, we blocked new membership sign-ups. Because commitment doesn’t start when the calendar resets. It’s for those who are all in. Not when the ball drops, the clock strikes, or the calendar flips – but always.”

So what if you can’t commit to the gym, the message goes. You should really be committed to an intensive-care unit. Or a mental asylum. Or you should receive a felony charge. But in truth, the “something” to which one mainly commits at Equinox is a mid-four-figure annual fee.

The real mystery of Equinox is what you get for the expense. In June, New York attorney general Letitia James won a $600,000 judgment against the company by arguing that its contractual agreements were too hard to break. The award of a mere $250 to each of the plaintiffs – which equaled less than a month of dues, to say nothing of the initiation fee – left members less than impressed. “Tish gets ripped!” ran the New York Post headline. “New Yorkers not impressed with AG Letitia James’s crackdown on gyms.”

Equinox positions its membership as fast-track admission to the cosmopolitan faith. At the root of such modern urbanism, of course, is masochism. High taxes, crowded subways and filthy streets appeal to the broken-window theory in reverse: that our souls will only get better if our city lives get worse. Professional sadists such as New York’s Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani therefore thrive in the same way as that Equinox spin instructor who comes around to crank up your bike’s resistance. It’s all about abnegating the flesh and globalizing the intifada to a techno beat. In one early Equinox advertisement, a screaming, shirtless woman holds up her fist in front of a classical building surrounded by a night-time security detail. Just what she is protesting does not matter so much as the appearance of her consequence-free LARPing. (She is portrayed by the fitness model Bianca Van Damme, daughter of the “muscles from Brussels” Jean-Claude Van Damme.)

Equinox members may not be true basement-dwelling “Brooklynites for Gaza,” but they are content to go along with the latest thing as long as the towels are stocked and the steam room stays open. We all signed up to be in this Paul Verhoeven-movie of a place, and that’s life in the big city.

“A manic attempt to make the posthuman sexy,” is how one agnostic member explained it to me. “I have the distressing sense that I am beholding another stripe – or, heaven forbid, chevron – on the ghastly and vexillologically metastasizing ‘progress flag.’ The clientele strikes me as being finance and finance-adjacent bros plus gay men for whom human growth hormone, rather than Ozempic, is still the lifestyle supplement of choice. As for the women, I’d have no idea. I don’t notice.”

Not noticing is a big part of the Equinox culture. Members don’t converse. Most employ monastic silence as they move from station to station, carrying their water bottles and iPhones upon which a small dog must be featured on the lock screen. No grunts. Little sweat. The chilled eucalyptus towels see to that. After reports a decade ago of problems in the steam room, the facility posted signs of a “zero-tolerance policy regarding inappropriate, sexual or lewd behavior. Our staff is on notice.” The closest most come to catching a sexually transmitted disease at today’s Equinox is when a form of athlete’s foot requires an oral course of fungicide (I now wear shower shoes).

And yet, past the many cult symbols that line its entry, Equinox tends to be well-maintained and almost always uncrowded. Bottles of four different soaps and lotions line each shower stall: a shampoo and conditioner of rose, pepper and sage; a facial cleanser of aloe, geranium and rose; a body cleanser of chamomile, bergamot and rose. Additional bottles of face and body cream are available in the locker rooms. So too are Q-Tips, deodorant, mouthwash, razors, even a container of black hair ties to maintain one’s man bun. The only recent controversy here occurred a year ago, when Equinox switched out its Kiehl’s line of products for Grown Alchemist, a brand that can also be purchased at (gasp) Target.

My Equinox membership grants me access to all the spin classes and boxing sessions my heart desires. There is a mobile media library showing the proper use of every exercise machine – something I found particularly useful as I recovered from a suite of orthopedic setbacks. With my level of membership, I can visit the Flatiron location across from my office, the Upper West Side location next to my apartment, the Columbus Circle location with the saltwater pool and just about every other location save for the nirvana that is the new Equinox Hudson Yards, which would cost me another $50 a month. Perhaps one day I too will join this “most spacious, thoughtful, and connected Equinox ever… the purest expression of high-performance living yet. The 60,000-square-foot luxury destination spans two floors and includes a 15,000-square-foot pool and sundeck.”

Even Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been spotted in his Make America Healthy Again jeans and hiking boots, lifting at Equinox. At some point we all reach that moment in life when we realize our aging frames must be committed to a daily routine of physical therapy.

By spending more than $300 a month with a company that advertises personal destruction, many urban professionals may feel they have purchased some progressive blessing on their self-care. For others such as myself, Equinox is simply a very nice gym.

Preference for the Primitive

THE NEW CRITERION, September 2025

Preference for the primitive

On the newly renovated Michael C. Rockefeller Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

What to make of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s renovated Michael C. Rockefeller Wing, dedicated to the arts of Africa, Oceania, and ancient America? Astonishing, frightening, and baffling are three words that come to mind—and that’s more a reflection of the curatorial and architectural decisions that have been made here than of the tribal art on display.

Some 1,800 works from five different continents are newly jumbled together across 40,000 square feet in the rebooted galleries, which reopened on May 31 after a four-year closure and $70 million redo. New “diagonal trajector[ies]” have been “designed to foreground ancestral connections and Indigenous temporalities,” according to the Met’s opening announcement. “[N]ew perspectives on Indigenous concepts of the natural world as well as nuanced perceptions of gender roles” have been “newly framed by Indigenous perspectives.” Meanwhile, new cacophonies of “wall text and digital narratives placed throughout the galleries elevate Indigenous voices, foregrounding the latest developments in interdisciplinary scholarship.” Good luck just keeping track of what region a work is from or even what continent you think you are looking at. Devised by the appropriately named WHY Architecture, in collaboration with Beyer, Blinder, Belle and the Met’s design department, these galleries have been positioned to keep you guessing.

The cultural muddle, now arranged in a labyrinth of gleaming white walls and glass screens, is made all the more confusing in a blinding resplendence, illuminated by reglazed windows onto Central Park, that is visually appealing but programmatically suspect. Aztec, Asmat, Asante: sightlines bleed from one culture into the next. Under the curation of Alisa LaGamma (African art), Joanne Pillsbury (ancient Americas), and Maia Nuku (Oceania), what were once separate sections dedicated to distinct regions are now demarcated with barely a line on the floor.

Installation view of the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo: Bridgit Beyer.

This new open-plan design has been proposed to “suggest the unique spatial and relational dynamics of Oceania: horizon lines, the arching dome of the sky, and islands tethered in a vast ocean.” Elsewhere, it’s meant to take “inspiration from ancient American architectural traditions.” Along the ceiling, there are now “horizontal baffles that suggest ribbing to pay homage to one of Africa’s most celebrated structures: the Great Mosque of Jenne in Mali.” Such tossed-off, facile references are the window dressing of an Apple Store aesthetic selling Global South 2.0, with often brutal cultures that were oceans apart from one another—cultures that might as soon have killed, sacrificed, and devoured each other if they could.

With some exceptions, many of these works have been on display at the Met since this wing first opened in 1982. What’s different now are the hundreds of wall labels that surround them, justify them, and defend their continued display. Such justification is not for nothing. Across the park, at the American Museum of Natural History, entire galleries are being boarded up and turned into halls of shame. Generations of schoolchildren may wonder why the AMNH’s models of Eastern Woodland longhouses are suddenly treated as entartete Kunst. As the American Museum of Natural History “embraces new regulations,” reads one explanation plastered onto a hastily erected plywood screen, “these Halls displayed artifacts that may be objects of cultural significance, and the Museum does not have consent to display them.” If a museum can no longer display “objects of cultural significance,” one should wonder what remains beyond the gift shop.

Installation view of the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo: Bridgit Beyer.

Free of the baggage of consensual anthropology, the Metropolitan has faced the opposite conundrum: how to add ethnographic context to its otherwise disconnected displays, often collected merely for their aesthetic attributes (especially as they relate to modern Western art). The resulting pronouncements in the renovated wing make a number of contortions to please contemporary sensibilities, even promoting the violence informing the hall’s artistic expression. Just consider the wall label titled “Generating Vitality in the Asmat World”:

Unlike women who can support life within their own bodies, Asmat men wishing to capture nature’s generative capacities once did so through the act of headhunting. This practice—an important aspect of male ritual prestige before its prohibition in the twentieth century by Dutch colonial authorities—involved pursuing a rival and taking his life. Since the human head contains the most concentrated source of vitality, its capture (and the preservation of the skull in particular) catalyzed future cycles of growth and rebirth for humans, ancestors, and the natural world.

Like the sweetmeats of a carved-up head, there is much to extract from such a statement. In short, before the prohibition of cannibalism in New Guinea by colonial authorities and the arrival of Catholic missionaries, for peoples such as the Asmat, the depth of their creative expression was a direct testament to the ferocity of their bloodlust. Headhunting may indeed have been an “important aspect of male ritual prestige,” but one is left wondering if the victims of the Asmat regret the Dutch arrival in the East Indies. Try justifying anti-colonialism to a shrunken head.

The radical relativism of the ethno-aesthetics on display in the Met’s confounding galleries is the capstone to a long-range project, one that has less to do with prehistoric third-world cultures and more with the obsessions of modern Western taste. Beyond the story of the family of man, these particular galleries are ultimately about the family of Rockefeller.

“Primitive” is a word that has been so thoroughly expunged from any mention in this wing that its absence belies a lingering presence. That’s part of the untold story here, scrubbed from the countless wall labels and disclosures of “provenance”: there would be no Met wing dedicated to the arts of Africa, ancient America, and Oceania without the Rockefellers’ primitivist passions and the tragic intergenerational dynamics that came as a consequence of their zeal.

“The more you prefer the primitive,” wrote the art historian E. H. Gombrich, “the less you can become primitive.” In the modern world, simplicity, subjectivity, even crudity can appeal to sophisticated taste as elite culture looks for deeper truths beneath the polish of refinement. The Rockefellers have certainly taken this view to heart. Over successive generations, the family has shown a distinct preference for the primitive in their cultural philanthropy, from their support for American folk art to the primitivist turn of international modernism. Abby Aldrich Rockfeller, the wife of John D. Rockefeller Jr., helped establish both Colonial Williamsburg and New York’s Museum of Modern Art. In 1957, her son, Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller, founded the Museum of Primitive Art in a townhouse on the same block as MOMA as well as their former city residence. Headed up by the wide-ranging art historian Robert Goldwater, inspired by modernism’s primitivist influences and Paris’s Musée du Trocadéro, the Museum of Primitive Art as its name implied sought to elevate the traditional sculpture and textiles of Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe, and Oceania from artifact to the level of high art.

Beginning in the 1960s, through the intermediation of René d’Harnoncourt, then the director of MOMA, Nelson Rockefeller began transferring these primitive works to the Metropolitan. He not only seeded a collection where none existed but also underwrote the construction of the wing to house it. Even today, some one-third of the works in the Met’s primitive collection passed through Rockefeller hands, including many of its most notable pieces, such as a Dogon blacksmith’s Priest with Raised Arms (1300s–1600s), the Eyema byeri (reliquary guardian figure) (1800s–early 1900s) of an Okak-Fang artist, and the Gwandansu figure (1400s–1600s) by a Bamana numuw (blacksmith). Since the term “primitive” has now become outmoded and even deeply regretted, the Met’s wall labels and provenancial literature identify all of these works as merely having passed through “MPA,” never once explaining that the acronym is short for Museum of Primitive Art.

This is but one of the many sleights of hand in the renovated Michael C. Rockefeller Wing—originally known as the Michael C. Rockefeller Memorial Wing. Far more significant is the disappearance (then and now) of Michael Clark Rockefeller, Nelson’s son, for whom the wing is named. A “memorial” would suggest a death, but the Met has whitewashed the tragedy of his involvement in these galleries, now merely stating that he was

greatly inspired by the cultures and art of the Pacific and pursued new avenues of inquiry into artistic practice during his travels there. Among the wing’s signature works are the striking Asmat sculptures he researched and collected in southwest New Guinea.

What gets left unsaid is that Michael, a year out of college, disappeared while collecting those very sculptures—trading sachets of tobacco for totemic bis poles, adorned with references to shrunken heads, that now dominate the wing named in his honor. As an added tragedy, Michael may have become the victim of the same cannibalistic culture he was intent on discovering and collecting. Departing from the official Harvard-Peabody Expedition that first brought him to study the Ndani people in the Baliem Valley in the Central Highlands of Western New Guinea in early 1961, he pursued the works of the Asmat in a two-man mission, floating along the coast of New Guinea aboard a catamaran jury-rigged from two canoes. On November 18 of that year, his catamaran capsized in the swift crosscurrents of the mouth of the Eilanden, or Betsj, River. He gathered together a knife and compass and tethered up the boat’s gas tanks as a personal flotation device, determined to make for shore. He was last seen swimming away by his crewmate, the Dutch anthropologist René Wassing, who held onto the wreckage and was recovered the following day, along with Michael’s journals.

Michael C. Rockefeller with Papuan natives in New Guinea, 1961.

Published six years later, the journals speak of Michael’s harrowing infatuation with these cannibals. Facing the specter of his parents’ impending divorce, wishing to please his father, then the governor of New York, by contributing to his Museum of Primitive Art, Michael pursued the Asmat at his own peril. As he wrote in his journal:

What we saw were some imposing remnants of a marvelous past. I suppose not so marvelous from a Christian point of view, for the Asmats were a ferocious headhunting people constantly engaged in inter-village war and raids of varying degrees of deadliness. However, the sculpture that has been and (in some areas) is being produced by Asmat artists is unquestionably some of the greatest to come from a primitive culture . . . .

And equally as remarkable as the art is the fact that the culture which produces it is still intact; some remote areas are still headhunting; and only five years ago almost the whole area was headhunting.

Afinal Rockefeller in this tragedy is Mary Rockefeller Morgan, Michael’s fraternal twin sister. Now eighty-seven years old, she has been a vocal donor to the renovation. Her brother is now absent from the public side of the wing that bears his name—and most likely that’s the point. With new sightlines that connect Nelson’s Priest with Raised Arms with Michael’s bis poles beyond, this wing feels like a private family shrine as never before. While publicly drawing us into its purely expressive wonders, this primitive collection has a private side that tells a very different story.

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. ↩