In the years following a painful World War I defeat, Germany entered a period of unrelenting contradiction: the Weimar Republic. Amidst democratic experiments, economic ruin, jazz-fueled decadence, and rising authoritarianism, a new artistic vision emerged: Neue Sachlichkeit, or New Objectivity. A movement born from disillusionment, it presented art as a mirror: not to inspire, but instead to reveal cold truths.
A century after its birth, the Neue Galerie’s 2025 exhibition which is on view through May 26th, 2025, resurrects the movement’s message. Through over 140 works across media, a variety of artists are joined or who, despite ideological and stylistic divisions, were united by one conviction: portraying the world with piercing clarity.
Neue Sachlichkeit was first defined in 1925 by curator Gustav Hartlaub, who sought to chart a shift in post-expressionist German painting. Where Expressionism had distorted and internalized reality, New Objectivity was committed not to avoid meaning, but to demand transparency. The emotional anguish of Kirchner or Nolde gave way to the surgical precision of Otto Dix, George Grosz, Christian Schad, and others.
But this “objectivity” was not apolitical or neutral. It was often laced with satire, sharp opinions and despair as these artists saw the world they knew fracturing beneath their feet amidst large-scale social upheaval.
Nue Sachlichkeitis is often thought of as the brainchild of the Bauhaus school, which was formed as an interdisciplinary art school in 1919. Producing famed artists like Wassily Kandinsky, Oskar Schlemmer, and Lyonel Feininger, both images from the school and its disciples are peppered through the exhibition, and serve as an explanation and an early record of the movement’s emergence.
Neue Sachlichkeit is often divided into two opposing camps: the Verists and the Classicists, and the exhibit makes sure to highlight this contrast. The Verists delved into modern life with caustic realism, dissecting the war’s trauma, bourgeois hypocrisy, and the grotesque social stratification of Weimar Berlin. Meanwhile, the Classicists sought to shine a spotlight on more clean-cut scenes. They turned to cool, orderly compositions, often tinged with eerie detachment. These weren’t only aesthetic camps, however, as they mirrored the nation’s internal struggle between confronting chaos and escaping into idealized order.
Yet while the paintings were utilitarian, I did not view them as entirely devoid of emotion. Instead, this emotion was merely masked underneath sleek materials and stiff children, miscellaneous items and blank expressions. In “Neue Sachlichkeit” the subtext was in fact the art itself.
One such example is Verist artist Grosz’s ‘Eclipse of the Sun.’ In it, a headless industrialist, his chest emblazoned with a dollar sign, feeds facts to a blindfolded president while death lurks nearby. The sun is literally obscured by a golden coin, blotting out both light and reason.
It is grotesque, cartoonish, and brilliant. Grosz makes no attempt at subtlety; in fact, the potent rage expressed through the headless bodies and the fuming general is strangely surgical. He dissects postwar German governance as a puppet show run by capitalist vultures and military relic—the piece still seethes a century later.
A similar demeanor is reflected in Otto Dix’s ‘Reclining Woman on a Leopard Skin.’ Dix, himself a war veteran, never stopped metaphorically painting the wounds. His ‘Reclining Woman’ is lush at first glance—sensual, decorative—but upon closer inspection, the painting is a bitter commentary on commodified female bodies in the postwar boom of cabaret culture.
In the painting, the woman’s face is vacant, and her flesh is deathly pale. She’s not a subject but a symptom—of exploitation, of the male gaze, of Weimar’s vaunted “sexual liberation” that often left working women behind. Like much of Dix’s work, beauty and revulsion tangle, challenging viewers to hold both at once and depict the world transparently.
Hans Grundig offers a quieter, but no less haunting view of urban despair. In his 1925 painting ‘Unemployed Cigarette Worker,’ a young woman sits slumped, drained by the efforts of a day’s work. Her form is rendered with photographic detail, but there is no narrative arc, no path to redemption—just the exhaustion of systemic neglect.
What’s striking is the painting’s intimacy. This isn’t protest art in the traditional sense; it’s exposure. Grundig refuses to aestheticize poverty, but he also refuses to look away.
While such Verists wielded outrage, the Classicists wielded control in order to portray their subjects. Less known in today’s artistic landscape, the Classisict paintings are in fact the more surprising, creating imagery that feels a world away from the Verist despair.
For example, in Christian Schad’s 1929 ‘Count St. Genois d’Anneaucourt,’ we see neither satire nor reverence—only a crystalline stasis. The Count’s expression is unreadable, almost inhuman. Everything, his gaze, his gloves, his immaculate attire, is locked in suspended perfection.
Schad employed a technique called Verisimilitude, which was inspired by Italian Renaissance portraiture, but built upon it. His paintings are lifelike but feel almost lifeless. That absence speaks volumes in postwar Germany, where identity was often a fragile performance.
Other Classicist artists took a different route, attempting to interweave elements of both Classisics and Veritism. For example, in Carl Grossberg’s 1934 painting ‘Jacquard Weaving Mill,’ made at the tail end of the Weimar Republic, mechanics appear literally lifelike, looming like altars against a background completely void of humans. Grossberg was obsessively detailed— ‘shadows, wires, piping executed with careful reverence. Yet there’s a coldness buried underneath the sleek execution.
Though not always labeled a central figure, Oskar Schlemmer bridges New Objectivity and Bauhaus abstraction, as seen in ‘Bauhaus Stairway.’ He reduces the human figure to an elegant, geometric form, almost alien-like. Meanwhile, the stairwell becomes a metaphor for ascension; intellectual, architectural, even spiritual.
Yet even here, amid clarity and idealism, there’s tension. Unlike many movements, Neue Sachlichkeit wasn’t unified by manifesto. Instead, the artists turned their gaze outward, not inward, and reflected a society unraveling at its seams. Whether through caustic satire, frozen elegance, or mechanical obsession, they showed the psychic wounds of modernity, including unemployment, trauma, commodification, and spiritual vacancy.
The Neue Galerie 2025 exhibition captures this range, staging a conversation between the Verists’ urgency and the Classicists’ stillness. More than an aesthetic revival, it’s a political one.
With Donald Trump back as president, and the rise of right wing fascism across the globe, it constantly feels like we’re again living in a time of fractured truths, rising authoritarianism, and social collapse. Neue Sachlichkeit reminds us that in such times, realism isn’t always comfortable, but it is definitively always necessary.
In the years following a painful World War I defeat, Germany entered a period of unrelenting contradiction: the Weimar Republic. Amidst democratic experiments, economic ruin, jazz-fueled decadence, and rising authoritarianism, a new artistic vision emerged: Neue Sachlichkeit, or New Objectivity. A movement born from disillusionment, it presented art as a mirror: not to inspire, but instead to reveal cold truths.