New Objectivity and Magic Realism
( Beginning 1925 )

   In 1925 an exhibition titled Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) was organised. More than 130 works by 32 artists were shown. For this event the journalist Franz Roh devoted an article titled Magischer Realismus ("Magic Realism"). These terms are referring to the less expressive aspects of the main trends in German painting between the wars. New Objectivity and Magic Realism is also seen as countermovement, opposition to abstraction.

   The main characteristic of New Objectivity and Magic Realism is the representation of domestic indoors or scenes of every day life expressed in an unreal dimension. The main protagonists in Germany are Max Beckman, Conrad Felixmuller, Georges Grosz, Otto Dix, Christian Schad.

   The first of these terms groups together imitators of Lucas Cranach the Elder, Hans Baldung Grien and Albrecht Durer, who depicted people and things with a cold and striking precision. The second encompassed the various heirs to the early Expressionist movements and such old masters as Matthias Grunewald - they painted greed, lust, rage, brutality, spinelessness and cowardice, showing what they considered to be a "true" portrait of man.

   Max Beckmann, a painter, and Grosz, a newspaper caricaturist and erstwhile Dadaist, were the most illustrious representatives of this group. When painted by them, priests, well-to-do middle-class capitalists, judges and military figures all became much more than mere caricatures. Dix had a place all his own, seeming to waver between the two branches of the New Objectivity, and in some instances to reconcile them. A precise and painstaking painter, he did not shrink from Expressionist distortions, at times making use of a technique imbued with fury and hatred.