Since its founding in 2001, Ronald S. Lauder’s museum Neue Galerie New York has focused on Austrian and German art from 1890 to 1940 and organized exhibitions devoted to painters and designers such as Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Josef Hoffmann, Koloman Moser, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Christian Schad and others.
In addition, in 2023/24, Neue Galerie had dedicated a show to Max Beckmann: The Formative Years, 1915-1925, with a focus on the artist’s move away from his Impressionistic origins to the verist style of the New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit) movement that defined his later work, although he later distanced himself from this term and favored “transcendent objectivity” instead.
A forerunner to the present at the Neue Galerie was Berlin Metropolis, 1918–1933, an exhibition presented in 2015 that explored architecture, fashion, theater, cinema, photo graphy, collage and montage.
The current Neue Galerie New York exhibition, Neue Sachlichkeit/New Objectivity, may be considered a complementary presentation, shedding new light on the diversity of the movement. It opened on February 20 and will close on May 26, 2025. It is organized in conjunction with the centenary of Gustav F. Hartlaub’s 1925 groundbreaking “Neue Sachlichkeit” (New Objectivity) exhibition at the Kunsthalle Mannheim.
It showcased a new artistic movement in Germany, characterized by its critical realism, social commentary and detailed depiction of contemporary life; it marked a significant departure from Expressionism’s emotional intensity.
Neue Sachlichkeit/New Objectivity was divided by two philosophies—the unflinching and socially critical Verists, including Otto Dix, George Grosz, Georg Scholz and others, and the Classicists such as Alexander Kanoldt, Georg Schrimpf and Christian Schad, who focused on harmony and beauty.
The Neue Galerie New York catalogue, edited by the exhibition’s curator Olaf Peters, offers contributions by 10 specialists: Neue Sachlichkeit/New Objectivity, Ronald S. Lauder, Neue Galerie, New York, Prestel Verlag, 2025, 304 pages, 23,5 x 28,5 cm. ISBN: 978-3-7913-7792-6. Accept cookies — we receive a commission; price unchanged — and order the English catalogue from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.fr, Amazon.de.
The catalogue’s front cover features a work by Otto Dix: Dr. Mayer-Hermann, 1926. Oil and tempera on wood, 149.2 x 99.1 cm, The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, gift of Philip Johnson.
Strangely, the otherwise detailed Neue Galerie catalogue offers no other information about the Dr. Mayer-Hermann painting. On the MoMA’s website however, one can read, among many other things, that, when Otto Dix painted this picture of Wilhelm Mayer-Hermann, a prominent Berlin doctor, he was a favorite portraitist of Germany’s cultural bohemia and its patrons. Yet his eye could be coolly unflattering.
Dr. Mayer-Hermann was a renowned throat specialist whose waiting room was filled with the most prominent singers and actresses of his day. Dix was among his patients. While Dix is best known for his unflinching depictions of prostitutes, disabled war veterans, and other traumatized subjects, here he depicts an established professional with wit and satire.
The artist may portray the doctor exactingly, but the pose and the setting seem chosen to stress his rotundity. Everything is round: the face, the bags under the eyes, the double chin, the shoulders, the position of the arms, the tummy. A round lamp is affixed to the doctor’s forehead, and behind him are a round clock-face and a round electrical socket. However precise the depiction, it verges on satire (MoMA publication excerpts from MoMA Highlights, The Museum of Modern Art, revised 2004, originally published 1999, p. 130; and from the MoMA Gallery label from 2012).
Back to the Neue Galerie catalogue: Olaf Peters underlines that, when we think of the Weimar Republic today, we immediately envision the paintings, buildings and design objects of Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), a movement spanning from around 1918 until 1933. The art and architecture of this era has since entered our collective visual memory and become visual representatives and symbols of an age that was ready for change, multifaceted, and fascinating.
Olaf Peters states that the exhibition and catalogue seek to present the breadth of this movement, which was not limited to the visual arts but also included the relatively new media of film and photography, radio and cinema, literature and music, architecture and design (Bauhaus, Neues Frankfurt, Werkbund), economics and philosophy.
In his introduction, Olaf Peters sketches the genesis of the movement, several manifestations and varieties of it, the discourse of art critics and art historians, and its development up to the end of the Weimar Republic using primarily examples from painting and art criticism.
This wide-ranging survey in New York City explores the tension between these two camps and interprets it as a coherent chapter in art history. Essays by leading experts shed new light on the movement through the lens of regionality while considering a wide spectrum of media: architecture, design, drawings, film, paintings, photography as well as philosophy. Essays and other texts by 10 specialists (including 2 historic ones from 1925 by Gustav Friedrich Hartlaub and Franz Roh) accompany the reproductions of works by Otto Dix, George Grosz, Max Beckmann, Rudolf Schlichter, Georg Scholz, Rudolf Wacker, Christian Schad, August Sander, Marcel Breuer and many others. The catalogue captures the ways that the New Objectivity proponents mirrored the Weimar period’s cultural, political and social complexities.
The curator mentions that the roots of Neue Sachlichkeit originate before 1918–19 and hence precede the founding of the Weimar Republic. The movement later had conservative and even reactionary features that could adopt antidemocratic and even National Socialist forms. But both the exhibition and the catalogue do not focus on that. Instead, the attention is directed toward the liberal potential of a pluralistic movement that initiated social change and reflected on it critically.
The catastrophe of Word War One demanded a pitiless and undaunted eye by artists. In 1924, Dresden museum director Paul Ferdinand Schmidt titled a text in the journal Das Kunstblatt: “Die deutschen Veristen” (The German Verists). In one paragraph, he brought together the terms of menace, nudity, ruthless reality, helpless embitterment, pitilessness, godlessness as well as the harsh light of a searchlight to illustrate in urgent language the final break with the prewar world and to characterize the new pictorial aesthetic of Neue Sachlichkeit.
The Neue Galerie New York exhibition and catalogue present 140 items, including paintings, watercolors, drawings, lithographs, sculptures, photographs, design objects such as chairs and more.
Among the catalogue’s essays, let’s mention contributions about the avant-garde and the mentality of the Weimar Democracy, German painting since Expressionism, Verist and Neue Sachlichkeit painting in Dresden, Hannover and the reality of female painters in the Weimar Republic, the sculpture of Neue Sachlichkeit, on the difficulties of furnishing in the modern age, the eroticism of precision and much more.
The catalogue, edited by the exhibition curator Olaf Peters: Neue Sachlichkeit/New Objectivity, Ronald S. Lauder, Neue Galerie, New York, Prestel Verlag, 2025, 304 pages, 23,5 x 28,5 cm. ISBN: 978-3-7913-7792-6. Accept cookies — we receive a commission; price unchanged — and order the English catalogue from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.fr, Amazon.de.
Check also the reviews about the Städel Museum show Beckmann in Frankfurt, the Neue Galerie New Your exhibition Max Beckmann: The Formative Years, 1915-1925 and Splendor and Misery: New Objectivity in Germany at the Leopold Museum in Vienna.
This exhibition and catalogue review is based on the Neue Galerie exhibition catalogue Neue Sachlichkeit/New Objectivity. For a better reading, quotations and partial quotations in this review are not put between quotation marks.
Exhibition and catalogue review added on May 15, 2025 at 07:00 German time.
