August Sander, Secretary at West German Radio in Cologne, ca. 1931, from August Sander: People of the 20th Century (Aperture, 2022)

New Objectivity—in German Neue Sachlichkeit, a word which also connotes “fact”—was used by the curator G. F. Hartlaub in a 1925 exhibition at the Mannheim Kunsthalle to define a generation of painters who came after Expressionism. It described artists who shared a keen interest in realist representations of modern life, which at times resembled a form of reportage. These artists produced portraits of urban bohemians and professionals, like Otto Dix’s Portrait of Writer Max Hermann-Neiße (1925), still life paintings, such as Rudolph Dischinger’s Grammaphone (1930), or political or social satires. A recent exhibition at the Pompidou Center in Paris, entitled Germany / the 1920s / New Objectivity / August Sander, attempted to explore how artists produced new forms of culture that reflected the massive changes of an unstable era. These artists, however, did not necessarily share ideology or politics. Some veered left, others right. “Objectivity,” it seems, had more than one side.

Curated by Angela Lampe and Florian Ebner, this compelling exhibition placed New Objectivity within larger aesthetic and social contexts of 1920s Germany. There were standard examples of neue sachlichkeit paintings, like those from Hartlaud’s exhibition of Georg Grosz, Dix, Max Beckmann, and Alexander Kanoldt, as well as other artists who later became associated with the term like Walter Schulz-Matan, whose fascinating painting The Faience Collector (1927) portrays a seated man obscured by his own earthenware. Organized into eleven thematic groupings (Rationality, Utility, Montage, and Standardization, for instance), the exhibition opens up to a variety of other aesthetic trends in Germany that have some relationship to New Objectivity. What, for example, is its relationship to Bauhaus design? Or how does the political and economic chaos of the twenties, as expressed in New Objectivity, tumble into the well-known horrors of the 1930s and 1940s? Facts, it turns out, are never simple.

August Sander, Usherettes, 1926–1932, from August Sander: People of the 20th Century (Aperture, 2022)
All Sander photographs © Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur, Cologne—August Sander Archiv, Cologne, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2022

The exhibition title, with its slashes, is further telling of the curatorial method and aims, as it implies that the exhibition is split in a variety of different concerns that relate to one another. Those slashes also perhaps represent the shutter of a camera opening and closing: each a different perspective on the same reality, a series of snapshots of a chaotic period. That is particularly evident in the only name singled out in the title: although not in Hartlaub’s original exhibition—no photographers were—August Sander is often associated with New Objectivity, particularly through social connections to artists like Otto Dix (whom Sander photographed).

Installation view of Germany / the 1920s / New Objectivity / August Sander, Pompidou Centre, Paris, 2022, with works by Otto Dix
Photograph by Bertrand Prevost

A massive presentation of Sander’s prints cuts through the exhibition, a sort of exhibition-within-an-exhibition. Around 1920, Sander started a project titled People of the Twentieth Century, a compendium of all types, kinds, and classes of people from the areas in and surrounding the Germany city of Cologne (a new edition of the compendium has recently been reissued by Schirmer/Mosel and Aperture). He organized it into seven main categories: Farmers, Skilled Tradesmen, Women, Classes and Professions, Artists, the City, and a final category the Last People, which included the transient populations, and even corpses. Sander’s pictures are blank, factual. They straddle a line between art and artlessness, between depiction and documentation. He captures his subjects—from bourgeois children to the homeless—with little room for ambiguity, or even aesthetic contemplation, either in situ or against neutral backdrops. They include disabled miners, the wives of architects, street musicians, unemployed men, bakers, and mixed-race circus performers. He is best known for portraits of labourers and of men in suits.

“Work like Sander’s could overnight assume unlooked-for topicality,” writes Walter Benjamin. “Whether one is of the Left or the Right,” he continues, “one will have to get used to being looked at in terms of one’s provenance . . . Sander’s work is more than a picture book. It is a training manual.” Sander’s first publication, The Face of Our Time (1929), which was a selection from his larger ongoing project, was confiscated and destroyed by the Nazis in 1936. After being interrupted by the Third Reich, he continued his project for another twenty years.  

It is within the context of Sander’s work—its documentation of modernisation and urbanisation, its sociological aim of classifying people of all walks of life in a dignifying way—that the exhibition attempts to present the facts of German art in the 1920s. It does so by also including other artists, photographers, and designers. There are, for example, photographs by Albert Renger-Patz of industrial objects, often aestheticizing their formal qualities, including his canonical Glasses (1926–27), which is juxtaposed with a still life painting of the same subject (and year) by Hannah Höch. There is a section devoted to the industrial design and architecture of the era, from architectural photographs by Werne Mantz to a complete reconstruction of Maragrete Schütte-Lihotzky’s “Frankfurt Kitchen” (1926). Further images of Walter Gropius’s architecture, as well as Marcel Breuer chairs, are also displayed, filling out the kind of radical experiments in modern life that are often associated with the Bauhaus. One of the final sections, “Transgressions,” focused on non-normative expressions of sexuality, from queer representations, such as the lesbian cabaret images of Jeanne Mammen, to Otto Dix’s violent and misogynistic sexual fantasies. These are presented as the social and aesthetic “facts” of the era, though the exhibition spends less time on the conservative elements, the painters Hartlaub called “classicists.”

The emphasis in “Germany / the 1920s / New Objectivity / August Sander”—on the facts—on that somewhat untranslatable word sachlichkeit—indicates something that many of the cultural producers of the era were considering: how to build a new way of living based on what they saw around them. The exhibition suggests that artists, architects, designers, and photographers attempted to take the facts of their circumstances and produce something new from them. The problem, as Walter Benjamin wrote in an unfinished critique of New Objectivity, is, “that the fashionable appeal to ‘facts’ is a two-edged sword.” While the exhibition focuses on the twenties instead of forecasting the end of a story that we all know too well, it hints that certain ideas, within the hotbed of their cultivation, sprout in untended ways. And, thus, it becomes, for us in our contemporary moment, another form of “training manual,” to use Benjamin’s term for Sander.

Germany / the 1920s / New Objectivity / August Sander was on view at the Pompidou Center, Paris, from May 11 through September 5, 2022.