NEW YORK, NY.- Neue Galerie New York presents “Neue Sachlichkeit / New Objectivity,” a special exhibition opening on February 20, 2025. On view through May 26, 2025, the show debuts in conjunction with the centenary of Gustav F. Hartlaub’s 1925 groundbreaking survey of the same name held at the Kunsthalle Mannheim. The New Objectivity movement is considered one of the most significant artistic developments of the twentieth century. Hartlaub’s presentation showcased a new style of art that had emerged in the aftermath of World War I, characterized by its critical realism, social commentary, and detailed depiction of contemporary life, and marking a significant departure from Expressionism’s emotional intensity.

The Neue Sachlichkeit movement was divided by two philosophies—the unflinching and socially critical Verists (represented by Otto Dix, George Grosz, and Georg Scholz, for example), and the Classicists (such as Alexander Kanoldt, Georg Schrimpf, and Christian Schad), who focused on harmony and beauty. The show will offer a wide-ranging perspective, exploring the tension between the Verists and the Classicists, which will be illustrated through a multidisciplinary installation, featuring paintings, sculpture, photography, decorative arts, works on paper, and film. The artists represented include Max Beckmann, Marianne Brandt, Marcel Breuer, Otto Dix, Carl Grossberg, George Grosz, Karl Hubbuch, August Sander, Christian Schad, Oskar Schlemmer, and Georg Scholz, among others. The presentation interprets these two camps as a coherent chapter in art history, focusing on the ways that the New Objectivity proponents mirrored the Weimar Republic’s cultural, political, and social complexities.

The Weimar Republic is inextricably linked with 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 entered our collective visual memory symbolizes an age that was eager for change.

“Neue Sachlichkeit” may be seen as a term of reconciliation that subsumes numerous phenomena. The terms “Post-Expressionism,” “realism,” “objectivity,” “representationalism,” and “naturalism,” which were often used as synonyms, sought to emphasize a common trend. It was a reaction to the tendencies toward abstraction of avant-garde movements, to the experience of war and defeat, and to the challenges painting faced from photography and film, which resulted in new pictorial concepts.

For Hartlaub, the painting of Neue Sachlichkeit was never a naturalistic copying of reality but always a considered pictorial construction and reflection. Terms such as “technical execution,” “craft,” and “truth” were very important for Hartlaub, and they led in two directions: first, to the fact that the painters of Neue Sachlichkeit often had an academic background and in some cases had perfectly mastered their craft and, second, their desire to compensate for or reflect on the current crisis of reality and values through their art. With the two wings (Verism and Classicism) in mind, Hartlaub wrote in his Introduction to the 1925 exhibition: “Just now—ourselves wholly under the influence of extremely dramatic transformations and variations in our lives and values—we see the distinctions more clearly: the timely, coldly verificational bent of a few, and the emphasis on that which is objective and the technical attention to detail on the part of all of them.”