New Objectivity • Neue Sachlichkeit

The art of New Objectivity aims to provide us with a direct transcription of reality, works that function as the mirror of society and show it in all its ugliness, i.e., hypocrisy, misery, and brutality of fact.

Georg Scholz, Industriebauern | Industrial Farmers, 1920
Oil and collage on wood
Von der Heydt-Museum, Wuppertal

Scholz's collage painting is a grotesquely grim portrayal of a peasant family’s Sunday meal. The parody is dominated by a self-righteous patriarch whose despicable child blows menacingly on a frog through a straw. In the window, a preacher approaches, a roasted turkey in his rotund stomach. As an illustrator for activist periodicals, Scholz gained the skills and perhaps the prescience to convey the bigotry, barbarism, and avarice of an actual family he had encountered in the countryside, probably to "conquer the aesthetic huckster through a new objectivity," as he proclaimed through his colleagues in Der Gegner (The Adversary).

Pamela Kort considers early modern German culture from a new angle: the comic grotesque, suggesting that a penchant for distorted, if not invented, bodies and beings that merge satire, horror and beauty in varying ratios is an essential ingredient in German modernism, especially in the Neue Sachlichkeit, or the New Objectivity, which sprang up in the Weimar Republic in the 1920s (The Grotesque and Its Relatives).

Despite its immense diversity, German modernism in the Weimar Republic remains united by a relentless scrutiny of the world.

Online Resources
Roberta Smith, Those Witty, Mocking Germans, The New York Times, 22.10.2004
MoMA: Georg Scholz, includes the lithographs Profiteering Farmer's Family (Wucherbauernfamilie), 1920; Newspaper Carrier (Zeitungsträger), 1921; and The Lords of the World (Die Herren der Welt), 1922. On the Newspaper Carrier lithograph: "Scholz pilloried Germany’s industrialists and moneyed elites in mordant caricatures such as this, made in the immediate postwar years. Gaunt and dejected, a father and son barely subsist by peddling newspapers, while a self-satisfied fat cat leisurely smokes a cigar in the backseat of his gleaming new automobile."
Head Study

The Roaring Twenties

"Roaring Twenties" is a phrase used to describe a period of sustained economic prosperity in North America and Europe (principally Paris, London, and Berlin). The phrase refers to a period of social, cultural, and artistic dynamism. 'Normalcy' returned to politics in the wake of World War I, jazz music blossomed, the flapper redefined modern womanhood, Art Deco peaked, but the Wall Street Crash of 1929 punctuated the end of the era. As a period, the Roaring Twenties brought several inventions and discoveries of far-reaching importance, unprecedented industrial growth, accelerated consumer demand and aspirations, and significant changes in lifestyle and culture.

Dancing the Charleston
John Held, "Teaching old docs new tricks," Life Magazine, 1928

The Weimar Republic (1918-1933). Proclaimed on November 9, 1918, the Weimar Republic marked the first German experiment in democracy, producing a period of intense and uncensored intellectual and cultural productivity. Yet, filling the brief time slot between World War I and the rise of the Nazis, Weimar Germany was also characterized by social upheaval, crisis and hyperinflation (1919-1923), and general resentment for the losses of the war. The result was a short-lived era of extremes in which the rich lived in excess and the unemployed and poor increased daily.

Raoul Hausmann, ABCD (Self-Portrait), ink and collage, 1923-24
Musée national d'art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris

Retaining the emotional intensity of German Expressionism, while advocating a return to realism and direct social criticism, artists such as Otto Dix and George Grosz captured their time and society with blunt honesty and a cynical insight that was often rooted in horrific personal experiences.

Otto Dix, Cardplayers, drypoint, 1920

Dix persistently depicts Germans as crippled. Resulting from Dix's nihilist vision, the expressionist characters that populate his paintings and prints do not entirely reflect the condition of the German population in the 1920s.

The artists associated with the Neue Sachlichkeit or New Objectivity are identified as "verists" (Hartlaub). They opposed political impotence but without exemplifying any "return to order." Their form of realism distorted appearances to emphasize the ugly. They wanted to expose what they considered the ugliness of reality, so their art was raw, provocative, and harshly satirical.

Dix, Newborn Baby on Hands (Portrait of Ursus Dix), 1927
Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart

Goldene Zwanziger (Golden Twenties), 1924-1929. Gustav Stresemann was Reichskanzler for 100 days in 1923, and served as foreign minister from 1923 to 1929, a period of relative stability for the Weimar Republic which is known in Germany as Goldene Zwanziger, "Golden Twenties". Prominent features of this period were a growing economy and a consequent decrease in civil unrest.
Once civil stability had been restored, Stresemann began stabilising the German currency, which promoted confidence in the German economy and helped the recovery that was so ardently needed for the German nation to keep up with their reparation repayments, while at the same time feeding and supplying the nation. Once the economic situation had stabilised, Stresemann could begin putting a permanent currency in place, called the Rentenmark (1924) which again contributed to the growing level of international confidence in the German economy.

Martin Wagner, Planned remodelling of Potsdamer and Leipziger Platz, Berlin, 1929

In order to help Germany meet her reparation obligations, the Dawes Plan was created in 1924. This was an agreement between American banks and the German government in which the American banks lent money to German banks with German assets as collateral to help it pay reparations. The German railways, the National Bank and many industries were therefore mortgaged as securities for the stable currency and the loans. Shortly after, the French and Germans agreed that the borders between their countries would not be changed by force, which meant that the Treaty of Versailles was being diluted by the signing countries. Other foreign achievements were the evacuation of the Ruhr in 1925 and the 1925 Treaty of Berlin, which reinforced the Treaty of Rapallo in 1922 and improved relations between the Soviet Union and Germany. In 1926, Germany was admitted to the League of Nations as a permanent member, improving her international standing and giving her the ability to veto League of Nations legislation. However, this progress was funded by overseas loans, increasing the nation's debts, while overall trade increased and unemployment fell. Stresemann's reforms did not relieve the underlying weaknesses of Weimar but contributed to a stable democracy. The major weakness in constitutional terms was the inherent instability of the coalitions. The growing dependence on American finance was to prove dangerous and Germany was one of the worst hit nations in the Wall Street Crash of 1929.

Dancing and Jazz, Esplanade Hotel, Berlin 1926
Deutsches Bundesarchiv Bild 183-K0623-0502-001

There was an extraordinary cultural renaissance in Germany in the 1920s. During the worst phase of hyperinflation in 1923, clubs and bars were full of speculators spending their profits daily. The response of the intellectuals in Berlin was to condemn the excesses of capitalism and demand revolutionary changes on the cultural scenery. Influenced by the brief cultural explosion in the Soviet Union, German literature, music, theatre and cinema entered a phase of remarkable creativity. Innovative street theatre brought plays to the public, the cabaret scene and jazz bands became very popular. Modern young women were Americanised, wearing makeup, short hair, smoking and breaking with traditional mores. Euphoria surrounded the figure of Josephine Baker in Berlin, where she was considered an "erotic goddess" and in many ways admired and respected for providing the German public with "ultramodern sensations." New Objectivity found expression in the visual arts. The Bauhaus school new industrial prototypes, which led to functional design and modern architecture.

Walter Gropius, Bauhaus, Dessau, 1925
MHDE

Weimar Culture. It was the flourishing of the arts and sciences that happened during the Weimar Republic, 1919-1933, and this period is frequently cited as one of those with the highest level of intellectual production in human history. Germany was the country with the most advanced science, technology, literature, philosophy and art.
"Remarkable for the way it emerged from a catastrophe, more remarkable for the way it vanished into a still greater catastrophe, the world of Weimar represents modernism in its most vivid manifestation" (Marcus Bullock).

Gestalt and Theory of Perceptual Organization

Notable cultural figures in the Weimar Republic
Science. Albert Einstein, Max Born, Werner Heisenberg
Philosophy and Theory. Martin Heidegger, Martin Buber, Max Weber, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno
Gestalt Psychology. Max Wertheimer, Wolfgang Köhler, Kurt Koffka
Literature. Bertolt Brecht, Hermann Hesse, Thomas Mann
Theater and Film. Max Reinhardt, Marlene Dietrich, Fritz Lang, Robert Wiene
Visual Arts. Otto Dix, George Gross, Max Beckmann, August Sander, John Heartfield, Paul Klee, Kurt Schwitters, Max Ernst
Architecture. Erich Mendelsohn, Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe

Online resources
Roaring Twenties
Economy
Einstein
Flapper
Art Deco
Weimar Republic
Post-Expressionism
New Objectivity
Hyperinflation
Einfühlung
Gestalt
Machine Aesthetic
Bauhaus
Additional resources

Jean Piaget

(1896–1980), Swiss developmental psychologist and philosopher known for his epistemological studies with children.

"The principal goal of education is to create men who are capable of doing new things, not simply of repeating what other generations have done—men who are creative, inventive, and discoverers. The second goal of education is to form minds which can be critical, can verify, and not accept everything they are offered."

Illustrating Piaget's Ideas

Intelligence is what you use when you don't know what to do.

Play is the answer to how anything new comes about.

What we see changes what we know. What we know changes what we see.

To understand is to invent.

Related post

The Gestalt Program

The Gestalt and Its Researchers

Gestalt Psychology: Central Premises
1. Holistic thinking. Übersummativität, i.e., "the whole is more than the sum of its parts" and transposability
2. The primacy of unitary analysis of phenomena, rather than analysis of stimuli
3. Experimental methodology, which had to be congruent with the type of event under investigation
4. Psychophysical isomorphism or psychological processes are clearly assigned to physical processes

Max Wertheimer (1880–1943), Kurt Koffka (1886-1941), and Wolfgang Köhler (1887–1967) contributed to the creation of Gestalt psychology.

"I stand at the window and see a house, trees, sky. Theoretically I might say there were 327 brightnesses and nuances of colour. Do I have 327? No. I have sky, house, and trees." Max Wertheimer

Paul Klee. "Creative Credo," 1920, VII. Art is a simile of the Creation. Each work of art is an example, just as the terrestrial is an example of the cosmic.
The release of elements, their grouping into complex subdivisions, the dismemberment of the object and its reconstruction into a whole, the pictorial polyphony, the achievement of stability through an equilibrium of movement, all these are difficult questions of form, crucial for formal wisdom, but not yet art in the highest circle. In the highest circle an ultimate mystery lurks behind the mystery, and the wretched light of the intellect is of no avail. One may still speak reasonably of the salutary effects of art. We may say that fantasy, inspired by instinctual stimuli, creates illusory states which somehow encourage or stimulate us more than the familiar natural known supernatural states, that its symbols bring comfort to the mind, by making it realize that it is not confined to earthly potentialities, however great they may become in the future; that ethical gravity holds sway side by side with impish laughter at doctors and parsons.
But, in the long run, even enhanced reality proves inadequate.
Art plays an unknowing game with ultimate things, and yet achieves them!
Cheer up! Value such country outings, which let you have a new point of view for once as well as a change of air, and transport you to a world which, by diverting you, strengthens you for the inevitable returns to the greyness of the working day. More than that, they help you to slough off your earthly skin, to fancy for a moment thta you are God; to look forward to new holidays, when the soul goes to a banquet in order to nourish its starved nerves, and to fill its languishing blood vessels with new sap.
Let yourself be carried on the invigorating sea, on a broad river or an enchanting brook, such as that of the richly diversified, aphoristic graphic art.

Rudolf Arnheim (1904-2007) was a path-breaking psychologist of visual experience in the arts. He conducted some of the earliest experiments in the application of Gestalt theory in the perception of a work of art. Arnheim was born in an age when many remembered life without telephones and during his long and prodigiously productive scholarly life, he would witness the emergence of cinema, radio, and television. Arnheim was among the first theorists to write in significant ways about these new media of the twentieth century. A towering figure in the field of visual studies, he was a pioneer in the psychology of art and wrote seminal books on visual perception and artistic creativity. Arnheim has published more than a dozen books on art, architecture and film.

"All perceiving is also thinking" (Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception, 1954). For thirty-five years his book Visual Thinking (1969) has been the standard for art educators and psychologists alike. In this groundbreaking work, Arnheim asserts that all thinking (not just thinking related to art) is basically perceptual in nature—and that the ancient dichotomy between seeing and thinking, between perceiving and reasoning, is false and misleading. Far from being a "lower" function, our perceptual response to the world is the basic means by which we structure events, and from which we derive ideas and therefore language. Although intended for the general reader, Visual Thinking is of immediate interest to the educator because of its practical consequences for the function of art in education and more broadly, in all fields of learning.

"Order is a necessary condition for anything the human mind is to understand. Arrangements such as the layout of a city or building, a set of tools, a display of merchandise, the verbal exposition of facts or ideas, or a painting or piece of music are called orderly when an observer or listener can grasp their overall structure and the ramification of the structure in some detail. Order makes it possible to focus on what is alike and what is different, what belongs together and what is segregated. When nothing superfluous is included and nothing indispensable left out, one can understand the interrelation of the whole and its parts, as well as the hierarchic scale of importance and power by which some structural features are dominant, other subordinate" (Arnheim, Entropy and Art: An Essay on Disorder and Order, 1971).

Einstein on Crisis and Change

Let's not pretend that things will change if we keep on doing the same things. A crisis can be a real blessing to any person, and to any nation.

For all crises bring progress. Creativity is born from anguish, just like day is born form night. It's in crisis that invention is born, as well as discoveries, and strategies. Whoever overcomes a crisis, overcomes himself, without being overcome. Whoever blames his failure on a crisis neglects his own talent, and is more respectful to problems than to solutions.

Incompetence is the true crisis. The greatest problem with people and nations is the laziness with which they attempt to find the solutions to their problems.

There is no challenge without a crisis. Without challenges, life becomes a routine, a slow agony. There is no merit without a crisis. It is in the crisis where we can show the very best in us. To speak about a crisis may promote it. Not to speak about it perpetuates conformism. Let us work hard instead.

Albert Einstein

„Einfühlung” • Empathy • Empatía

What Is Empathy? A Definition: "The ability to understand another person’s circumstances, point of view, thoughts, and feelings. When experiencing empathy, you are able to understand someone else’s internal experiences" (Kristalyn Salters-Pedneault).

« How do I know that I know what I know – about you? This is clearly a question about epistemology, about knowledge. But it’s a special kind of knowledge, about others.
The ability to understand what another human being is thinking or feeling is most commonly known as empathy. The word empathy comes from the German [E]infühlung, which literally translates as “feeling into.” For thousands of years, empathy has attracted the attention of great thinkers in many fields of study » (Richard Lopez).

For isn't man is a tree of the field?
Cf. Deuteronomy 20:19 ; The Human Tree
Kim Graham, Man-Tree (Jotuntre), 2007

EMPATHY is the capacity of entering into, and so fully understanding (as if losing one's identity in) the spirit of a person, a work of art, etc. —Mariano Akerman

Mariano Akerman, Shape and Meaning: German Art, montage, 2010

“Not everything that can be counted counts and not everything that counts can be counted. [...] Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning. [...] Two things awe me the most: the starry heavens above and the moral universe within.” —Albert Einstein.

Something in common

Awareness is not necessarily empathy: I was complaining because I had no shoes, until I saw somebody that had no feet. —Persian proverb

I am a man, nothing human is alien to me. —Terence
Kevin Christy, "You Remind Me of Me," NYT, 2008

"Most people are [...] strongly sensitive to rapport, to charm, to the social music in the person making the pitch" (Benedict Carey, You Remind Me of Me, The New York Times, 12.2.2008).


A cluster of illuminating definitions
• Daniel Batson: "A motivation oriented towards the other."
• D.M. Berger: "The capacity to put one's self in another's shoes."
• Jean Decety: "A sense of similarity in feelings experienced by the self and the other, without confusion between the two individuals."
• Nancy Eisenberg: "An affective response that stems from the apprehension or comprehension of another's emotional state or condition, and that is similar to what the other person is feeling or would be expected to feel."
• William Ickes: "A complex form of psychological inference in which observation, memory, knowledge, and reasoning are combined to yield insights into the thoughts and feelings of others."
• Heinz Kohut: "Empathy is the capacity to think and feel oneself into the inner life of another person."
• Carl Rogers: "To perceive the internal frame of reference of another with accuracy and with the emotional components and meanings which pertain thereto as if one were the person, but without ever losing the 'as if' condition. Thus, it means to sense the hurt or the pleasure of another as he senses it and to perceive the causes thereof as he perceives them, but without ever losing the recognition that it is as if I were hurt or pleased and so forth."
• Roy Schafer: "Empathy involves the inner experience of sharing in and comprehending the momentary psychological state of another person."
• Simon Baron-Cohen: "Empathy is about spontaneously and naturally tuning into the other person's thoughts and feelings, whatever these might be" (+).

Don Quijote y Sancho Panza sobre Clavileño el Alígero
Pintura de Manuel Monedero

La empatía (del griego antiguo εμπαθεια, formado εν, 'en el interior de', y πάθoς, 'sufrimiento, lo que se sufre'), también llamada inteligencia interpersonal (Howard Gardner: Teoría de las inteligencias múltiples) es la capacidad cognitiva de percibir la condición de otro individuo a partir de un sentimiento de participación emocional en la realidad que afecta a esa persona.

Anselm Kiefer, Shulamit, detalle, 1983

• "Siempre que alivies el dolor de otro ser humano, tu vida no será en vano"—Helen Keller.

• "El gran don de los seres humanos es el poder de la empatía"—Meryl Streep.

• "La empatía es la capacidad de pensar y sentir la vida interior de otra persona como si fuera la propia"—Heinz Kohut.

Mariano Akerman, Forma y Significado del Arte de Alemania, montaje, 2010

En otras palabras, empatía es ponerse en el lugar del otro pero teniendo presentes sus deseos, prejuicios, valores, motivaciones, recursos, habilidades, etc. Empatía implica comprender qué y cómo otra persona puede estar sintiendo en un momento dado, al considerar lo que ella tiene dentro de sí misma, e intentar sentirlo como propio. Para ello es necesario ser conscientes de todo lo que ha podido vivir una persona para llegar a sentir como siente, a actuar como actua, y a pensar como piensa (adaptado a partir de esta nota).

¿En su lugar no haría usted lo mismo?

Empatía es la capacidad de compenetrarse, de entender plenamente la naturaleza y condición de una persona (tal como si se fuese esa persona, pero sin llegar a perderse en ella). Lo mismo es aplicable a la obra de arte, cuando se la contempla y se comprende su razón de ser, colcándose el espectador en el lugar del autor, considerando el punto de vista del mismo y el contexto en el que la obra en cuestión ha sido realizada. Es entonces cuando se da la empatía. —Mariano Akerman

Vincent van Gogh, Casas en Auvers-sur-Oise, 1890

Käthe Kollwitz, Madre con mellizos, bronce, 1927-37

Wassily Kandinsky, Composición IV, 1911

René Magritte, El sabor de las lágrimas, 1948

Barbra Kruger, Pensando en ti, c. 1980

Francis Bacon, Autorretrato, 1973

Max Baur, Querubín, Stadtschloß de Potsdam, 1928-44
Deutches Bundesarchiv Bild 170-272

Paul Klee, Insula dulcamara | Isla agridulce, 1938

Mariano Akerman, L'essentiel est invisible, 2006

Akerman, De la importancia de lo auténtico, 1988

Akerman, Templo de Inclusión, 1987-88

¿No es acaso el hombre un árbol del campo?
Kim Graham, Árbol-Hombre (Jotuntre), 2007

Links
• Empathie
• The Swiss-German Project
• Creadores suizos y alemanes modernos

The Gestalt Program

Slideshare : Mariano Akerman

Hans Hartung

Born in Leipzig, into an artistic family. He studied the work of painters such as Corinth and Nolde, and also learned the basis of French modern art. He studied in the Fine Arts Academies of Dresden and Munich. To prevent succumbing to provincialism, he left in 1927 his native country, and after a bicycle trip through Europe, he moved to Paris.
He lived with Anna-Eva Bergmann and established himself in the French town of Leucate and then in the Balearic Island of Minorca. His first exhibition was held in 1931 in Dresden and his last bonds with Germany were broken as he was rejected from Nazi Germany on account of being a "degenerate" whose work was influenced by that of Wassily Kandinsky. In 1935 when Hartung attempted to sell paintings while visiting Berlin, the police tried to arrest him. He was able to flee the country with the help of his friend Christian Zervos.
After returning to Paris in 1935 as a refugee his wife left him, causing him to become depressive. His friends tried to help him with his financial difficulties, but his paintings were becoming more abstract and did not sell well.
In December 1939, he became a member of the French Foreign Legion. He was closely followed by the Gestapo and arrested for seven months by the French police. After they learned he was a painter, he was put in a red cell in order to wear off his vision. After being released, Hartung rejoined the Legion to fight in North Africa. He earned French citizenship in 1945 and was also awarded the Croix de Guerre.
His work during this period is characterised by suspended areas of colour superimposed by calligraphic bunches of lines. Involving swirling and energetic linear motifs, Hartung’s mature style found an eager public after the war. A successful showing of his work in Paris (1947) was followed by exhibits elsewhere in Europe and in the United States, Japan, and Latin America. In 1960 he was awarded the Grand Prix of the Venice Biennale and an entire room of the French Pavilion was devoted to his work. Hartung had a decisive influence on the postwar generation of abstract painters in Europe. His later works became progressively calmer and more stable. Many of his works are titled by letters and numbers.

1951

1956

Hartung: "In my opinion the painting which is called abstract is none of the "isms" of which there have been so many lately, it is neither a "style" nor an "epoch" in art history, but merely a new means of expression, a different human language - one which is more direct than that of earlier painting" (Art Directory).

Hartung: "Before the blank canvas I feel the need to make a certain spot, a certain color, or a mark. The first marks lead to others. Colors lead to signs which in turn suggest marks whose roles might be to support or to contradict what already exists as much as to stabilize the painting. In any case, I act at first with complete liberty. It is the work, as it goes along, that limits my choices."

L158, 1968

Pintor alemán nacionalizado francés, conocido por sus obras abstractas de trazos caligráficos negros sobre fondo de colores. Nació en Leipzig en el seno de una familia de físicos. Su abuelo era también pintor autodidacta y compositor. Entre 1915 y 1926 estudió lenguas clásicas en el Dresden Gymnasium y filosofía e historia del arte en la universidad y en la Escuela de Bellas Artes de Leipzig. Más adelante ingresó en la Academia de Bellas Artes de Dresde. Durante el verano de 1926 viajó en bicicleta por Francia, Italia y España. En 1931 expuso por primera vez en Dresde. En 1937, en una exposición colectiva en el Jeu de Paume, París, conoció al gran escultor español Julio González, que habría de ejercer una profunda influencia en él. González le brindó todo tipo de ayuda y le animó a emprender su propio camino artístico. Durante el periodo prebélico Hartung se instaló en París para evitar el régimen nazi, y expuso en varias galerías. En 1938 participó en una exposición anti-nazi en la Galería New Burlington de Londres. En 1939, fue encarcelado en España y posteriormente se alistó en la Legión extranjera en el norte de África. En 1944 fue gravemente herido durante el sitio de Belfort y perdió una pierna. Después de la guerra se nacionalizó francés y en 1947 hizo una exposición individual importante en París. Desde el principio se mantuvo alejado del movimiento de la Bauhaus, al que consideraba como una mera moda pasajera. Sus pinturas, puramente abstractas, reflejan su opinión sobre la representación de la realidad: la expresión libre y pura debe trascender la realidad. La pincelada rápida constituyó una característica básica de su método de trabajo. La velocidad en el proceso creativo era, según sus propias palabras, "una necesidad espiritual". Recibió varios premios, entre los que se incluyen el Premio Guggenheim en 1956 y en 1960 el Gran Premio Internacional de la Bienal de Venecia (M.E.).

Pintores de Alemania
Creadores suizos y alemanes modernos