Neue Sachlichkeit

For more information on Neue Sachlichkeit, visit Britannica.com.

Term coined in 1923 to describe the ‘so-called ‘New Objectivity’’ in art and architecture, especially in the Weimar Republic in Germany. A reaction to Expressionism, it was associated with the development of Rationalism and the International Modernist style.

Bibliography

• Chilvers Osborne & Farr (eds.) (1988)
• Lampugnani (ed.) (1988)
• Jane Turner (1988)

The full bibliography for this book is available to download as a pdf file.
Download the bibliography for A Dictionary of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (PDF: 1.2MB)

In 1925, Carl Gustav Hartlaub mounted an exhibition of paintings at the Mannheim Kunsthalle with the title Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), and the subtitle ‘German Painting since Expressionism’. These pictures by a number of post-Dada artists—among them Christian Schad, who had executed a series of photograms in 1918-included portraits and interiors painted in a meticulously realistic manner without drama or expressionist distortion. Both the style and the label rapidly caught on as shorthand for unemotional precisionism in representing people and things. (However, the term has also been defined more broadly as a stance of cool detachment towards society generally, hence the alternative translation ‘New Sobriety’.) One of the earliest writers to apply it to a photographer was Kurt Tucholsky, in a 1927 ‘Letter from Paris’, about Albert Renger-Patszch. A year or two later, practically every show of sharp and detailed photographs used the phrase, and it obviously fitted much contemporary advertising, architectural, and industrial work.

The term can be seen as practically synonymous with the American straight photography of the late 1910s-early 1920s espoused by Paul Strand, Charles Sheeler, and Alfred Stieglitz. Common to both was the reaction against pictorialism (in Germany, Kunstphotographie (art photography)) and the insistence that photographs should not masquerade as graphic works or paintings. There were parallels in France, Belgium, and Czechoslovakia. Other German neu-sachlich photographers included Aenne Biermann, Karl Blossfeldt, Hein Gorny (1904-67), Adolf Lazi (1884-1955), and Willy Zielke (1902-89), architectural specialists like Arthur Koester, Werner Mantz (1901-83), Erich Meinholz, Ernst Scheel, Hugo Schmoelz (1879-1938), and Julius Soehn, and industrial photographers like Erich Angenendt (1894-1962), Ruth Hallensleben, Erna Wagner-Hehmke, and Paul Wolff.

Paradoxically, although in the 1920s Neue Sachlichkeit was viewed as an antidote to reactionary anti-modernism, it was exploited by the Nazis after 1933 as a form of modern-looking functionalism, sometimes labelled ‘German Objectivity’, that met some of the regime's propaganda needs.

— Rolf Sachsse

Bibliography

• Ahrens, A., ‘Meinungsaustausch: Kunstphotographie und neue Sachlichkeit’, Camera, 11 (1932-3).
• Mellor, D. (ed.), Germany: The New Photography 1927-33 (1978).
• Lugon, O. (ed.), La Photographie en Allemagne: anthologie de textes 1919-39 (1997)

Neue Sachlichkeit, a term brought into use c.1925 in reaction against the ecstatic, exclamatory tone of the Expressionists (see Expressionismus), and applied to cover a wide variety of sober, earthy, or realistic writing. Among authors who have been included in this category are F. Bruckner, H. Carossa, A. Döblin, Marie Luise Fleißer, O. von Horváth, Erich Kästner, C. Zuckmayer, A. Zweig, J. Roth, H. Broch, R. Musil, Brecht, and H. Kesten. The term signified no close-knit group and was little more than a convenient description of works whose principal concern was the exposure of reality as perceived by the writer. In the visual arts the style has become associated with Max Beckmann, George Grosz, and Christian Schad.