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Lecture:Thrown Upon the World and No Place to Stay: Reconsidering the Neue Sachlichkeit at Wesleyan
Sabine Kriebel, Senior Lecturer, History of Art, University College Cork, Ireland
The year 2025 marks the centenary of the “Die Neue Sachlichkeit” exhibition curated by Gustav Hartlaub, which gave the signature aesthetic movement of Weimar Germany its name. Variously translated as “The New Objectivity” or “The New Sobriety,” it swiftly became a buzzword of mid- to late- Weimar cultural production, from painterly mimesis to architectural austerity. Cold, detached, alienated, capitalist, cynical, retrograde, protofascist. These are among the descriptors associated with this broadly realist tendency in German painting that characterized the “stable” Weimar Republic of the mid-1920s. This lecture revisits the New Objectivity, or “Magical Realism,” as co-curator Franz Roh called it, to offer new directions of interpretation, using the work of Christian Schad, Otto Dix, Aenne Biermann, Florence Henri, among others, to revive our understandings of this often maligned avant-garde.
Sabine Kriebel has published extensively on the art and visual culture of the Weimar Republic, including Dada, Bauhaus, and photography. Her monograph Revolutionary Beauty: The Radical Photomontages of John Heartfield, 1929-1938 appeared with the University of California Press in 2014. Her current book project, Objectivity, Viewed Obliquely: The Neue Sachlichkeit Reframed, rethinks this moment of dubious modernism through the lens of psychoanalysis and phenomenology.
(Image: Otto Dix, The Journalist Sylvia von Harden, 1926. Oil and tempera on panel, 121 x 89 cm. Musée National d’Art
Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France)
Boger Hall Rm. 112
