If you missed the exhibition of Glitter and Doom which ended last month at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, this handsome hardback catalogue is a good armchair substitute. It contains three very readable essays — by no means typical of exhibition catalogues — and a wealth of colour illustrations. Sabine Rewald, the show’s curator, sets the art historical scene in her introduction, followed by an excellent piece by the cultural critic Ian Buruma, entitled ‘Faces of the Weimar Republic’. The third contribution is again art historical: a brief history of the Neue Sachlichkeit movement in Germany by Matthias Eberle. Neue Sachlichkeit translates as ‘New Objectivity’, and it is the portraits of this tendency which form the subject of the book.
There were two aspects of Neue Sachlichkeit painting, one which veered towards classicism, and the other which favoured a biting realism and was dubbed ‘Verism’, and it is the ferocious vision of the Verists which claims our attention here. The avant-garde painters of 1920s Berlin, Dusseldorf and Dresden had mostly fought in the war (though the elegant mannerist Christian Schad sat out the hostilities in Switzerland), and they came home sickened by their experiences. Abstraction did not seem humanly involved enough to deal with their disillusion, but then neither was a still-life or landscape painting the proper vehicle for such anger. The portrait was more suitable, for all that passion could be chanelled through visual affronts to the human appearance. The Verists produced a kind of freak show of types, often choosing their sitters from the margins of society. Strangely, the professional classes were also popular subjects — lawyers, doctors, art dealers — though they can scarcely have relished the manner of their depiction.
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