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The New Objectivity movement (or Neue Sachlichkeit in German) sought to portray a raw, unfiltered reality amidst the social chaos of the era. Artists rejected idealism, focusing instead on precise, often stark depictions of modern society. Themes ranged from urbanization and technology to the aftermath of World War I and social inequality. The movement dissolved with the rise of Nazism, leaving behind a vibrant legacy of socially critical art.
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<h2>The Rise of the New Objectivity Movement</h2>
<figure id="attachment_100222" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-100222" style="width: 1200px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://cdn.thecollector.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/otto-dix-wounded-man.jpg" alt="otto dix wounded man" width="1200" height="884" /><figcaption id="caption-attachment-100222" class="wp-caption-text">Wounded Man by Otto Dix, 1924. Source: MoMA, New York.</figcaption></figure>
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The New Objectivity was a movement that flourished in <a href="https://www.thecollector.com/weimar-republic-hitler-rise-to-power/">Weimar Germany</a> after the First World War. Germany suffered greatly both during the war and in its aftermath. Rapid inflation led to extreme poverty and hunger. Many men were wounded, both physically and psychologically, and many women turned to sex work in order to make ends meet. After a period of destitution, the country experienced an economic upturn (also known as the Roaring Twenties), which resulted in a society that some people viewed as decadent and immoral. Much of the art of the New Objectivity was very critical of the war and of the society that emerged from it.
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Artists of this movement attempted to convey something about German society and its people from a detached and objective perspective. They wanted to portray Germany as it truly was, in all its decadent highs and terrible lows. The movement has been said to be roughly divided between two styles: the verists, whose work was focused on biting satire, and the classicists, whose work was perhaps more concerned with beauty. What ties the art of the New Objectivity together is a commitment to portraying German society, a detached perspective, a sense of cynicism, and an embrace of caricature and satire.
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<h2>Breaking From the Past</h2>
<figure id="attachment_100221" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-100221" style="width: 1033px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://cdn.thecollector.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/otto-dix-to-beauty.jpg" alt="otto dix to beauty" width="1033" height="1200" /><figcaption id="caption-attachment-100221" class="wp-caption-text">To Beauty by Otto Dix, 1922. Source: LACMA, Los Angeles.</figcaption></figure>
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Before the war, Expressionism had been the dominant movement in Germany—a movement that valued emotional expression, subjective experience, gestural brush strokes, and suggestive use of color. Immediately after the war, the Dada movement blossomed. In Dada, the fragmented minds and bodies of soldiers were expressed through the fragmented surfaces of collages and photomontages. The New Objectivity rejected the subjectivity of Expressionism and embraced the social commentary of Dada. This new movement was formed around a set of shared tendencies, rather than a specific visual style.
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<h2>1. Max Beckmann: A War Survivor’s Brutal Vision</h2>
<figure id="attachment_100216" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-100216" style="width: 1200px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://cdn.thecollector.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/max-beckmann-the-night.jpg" alt="max beckmann the night" width="1200" height="680" /><figcaption id="caption-attachment-100216" class="wp-caption-text">The Night by Max Beckmann, 1918-19. Source: Modernist Art History.</figcaption></figure>
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<a href="https://www.thecollector.com/max-beckmann-new-objectivity-movement/">Max Beckmann</a> was born on February 12, 1884, in <a href="https://www.thecollector.com/bach-leipzig-churches/">Leipzig</a>, Germany, as the youngest child in an upper-middle-class family. He studied art at the Weimar Academy. During his early career, he developed an Expressionist style. When World War I broke out, Beckmann joined the medical corps with enthusiasm and excitement. However, he soon suffered a nervous breakdown and returned to civilian life in 1915. His traumatic experiences during the war would have a huge impact on his work for years to come.
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In Beckmann’s work, we can see a commitment to capturing the evil and corruption he witnessed during the war and in the years that followed. His painting The Night is a damning indictment of violence, and its style in many ways bridges the gap between Expressionism and New Objectivity. It is an emotionally charged painting, which highlights the suffering of innocent people at the hands of authority. The left-hand side of the painting is dominated by a man whose neck is bound and whose face is contorted in pain. To the right, a woman lies, arms raised, legs spread, her clothing torn open, suggesting she has been abused.
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The shallow background is scattered with more figures whose faces are caught in pain and terror. A large figure with his hat pulled down over his eyes pulls the window blind down with one hand, while the other roughly clutches a small child. The crowded composition communicates the chaos of the scene. For Beckmann, it was essential to represent, in some way, the human suffering he had witnessed during the war.
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<h2>2. George Grosz: Berlin’s Bleak Streets and Broken Morality</h2>
<figure id="attachment_100213" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-100213" style="width: 823px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://cdn.thecollector.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/george-grosz-gray-day.jpg" alt="george grosz gray day" width="823" height="1200" /><figcaption id="caption-attachment-100213" class="wp-caption-text">Gray Day by George Grosz, 1921. Source: Oberlin College.</figcaption></figure>
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George Grosz was born in Berlin in 1893 to a devout Lutheran family. He studied at the Dresden Academy for Fine Arts from 1909 to 1911. He served in the army from 1914 to 1915, and again briefly in 1917. Grosz was hugely discouraged by what he saw as an inherent enthusiasm for violence in humans and adopted a cynical gaze after the war. His works provided biting commentary on the social corruption he saw in Berlin, focusing particularly on the middle class, the capitalists, the sex workers, and the Prussian military caste.
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<figure id="attachment_100218" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-100218" style="width: 894px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://cdn.thecollector.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/new-objectivity-george-grosz-street-scene.jpg" alt="new objectivity george grosz street scene" width="894" height="1200" /><figcaption id="caption-attachment-100218" class="wp-caption-text">Street Scene (Kurfürstendamm) by George Grosz, 1925. Source: Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid.</figcaption></figure>
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In Street Scene, Grosz depicts a busy Berlin street, where all walks of life mingle on the pavements. The painting is executed in drab colors, dominated by grays and browns, with little light. In the foreground, we see a well-off middle-class businessman who stares blankly ahead through eyes that are barely open, ignoring the begging war veteran beside him. The veteran himself walks using crutches and stares at the world through one milky eye. In the background, we see a fashionable middle-class woman and a huge, lumbering businessman. Nobody seems to pay any attention to anyone else; they simply go about their day in gray silence. Grosz’s impression of life in <a href="https://www.thecollector.com/cultural-life-weimar-republic/">Weimar</a> Berlin is one of isolation and moral decay.
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<h2>3. August Sander: Photographing the Faces of a Changing Germany</h2>
<figure id="attachment_100211" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-100211" style="width: 905px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://cdn.thecollector.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/august-sander-new-objectivity.jpg" alt="august sander new objectivity" width="905" height="1200" /><figcaption id="caption-attachment-100211" class="wp-caption-text">Portrait of August Sander, 1925. Source: MoMA, New York.</figcaption></figure>
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August Sander was born in 1876 in Herdorf, Germany, the son of a carpenter who worked in the mining industry. As a child, Sander discovered <a href="https://www.thecollector.com/what-is-ghost-spirit-photography/">photography</a> while helping a company photographer carry equipment into the mines. He later served in the military from 1897 to 1899 as an assistant to a war photographer. By 1909, he had set up his own photography studio in Cologne.
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Sander is best known for his People of the 20th Century series, which he began in the mid-1920s. His goal was to document the full spectrum of German society through portraits organized into categories such as The Farmer, The Woman, The Skilled Tradesman, The City, The Artists, and The Last People. Each photograph aimed to depict a social type rather than an individual identity. In Country Girls, for example, two young women stand side by side, mirroring each other in dress and posture. Their symmetry reinforces the idea of them as social types.
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<figure id="attachment_100212" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-100212" style="width: 873px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://cdn.thecollector.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/august-sander-portrait-twins.jpg" alt="august sander portrait twins" width="873" height="1200" /><figcaption id="caption-attachment-100212" class="wp-caption-text">Country Girls by August Sander, 1925. Source: J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.</figcaption></figure>
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His portraits followed a consistent formula: face-on, full-body compositions often taken against neutral backgrounds. He avoided naming his subjects and resisted new photographic technologies, favoring a large-format camera and long exposure times to capture minute detail. His method emphasized clarity, structure, and a cool, objective eye. Additionally, for Sander, For Sander, it was important that his subjects felt comfortable, natural, and at ease in front of the camera.
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Sander continued his portrait project well into the 1960s. His influence on photography has been far-reaching, seen in the work of Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Diane Arbus, Bernd and Hilla Becher, and Rineke Dijkstra. Through his lens, Sander offered one of the most ambitious visual records of a modern society ever attempted.
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<h2>4. Jeanne Mammen: The New Woman Through an Unflinching Lens</h2>
<figure id="attachment_100215" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-100215" style="width: 866px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://cdn.thecollector.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/jeanne-mammen-she-represents.jpg" alt="jeanne mammen she represents" width="866" height="1200" /><figcaption id="caption-attachment-100215" class="wp-caption-text">She Represents by Jeanne Mammen, c. 1927-30. Source: Schirn.</figcaption></figure>
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Jeanne Mammen was born in Berlin in 1890 and moved to Paris at age five. Between 1906 and 1911, she studied painting in Paris, Rome, and Brussels. During World War I, her family fled Paris, but Mammen returned to Berlin, where she struggled to support herself before settling into regular work as a fashion illustrator and poster artist.
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Her 1931 piece She Represents appeared in Curt Moreck’s Guide to Immoral Berlin, a pocketbook highlighting the city’s underground culture. Published alongside a guide to lesbian locales, the work foregrounded lesbian identity, which had long been marginalized in German society. Mammen’s style, cool and objective, lacked the satire of her contemporaries but revealed everyday life with striking clarity.
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<figure id="attachment_100219" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-100219" style="width: 896px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://cdn.thecollector.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/new-objectivity-jeanne-mammem-two-women-dancing.jpg" alt="new objectivity jeanne mammem two women dancing" width="896" height="1200" /><figcaption id="caption-attachment-100219" class="wp-caption-text">Two women, dancing by Jeanne Mammen, ca. 1928. Source: Tumblr.</figcaption></figure>
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Much of Mammen’s art centers on women. While the New Objectivity movement often explored the &#8220;<a href="https://www.thecollector.com/new-woman-movement-norms/">new woman</a>&#8220;—a figure representing the social liberation of post-war German women—it is in Mammen’s work that the motif feels most nuanced. These women, with short bobbed hair and androgynous clothing, symbolized freedom to some and transgression to others. For Mammen, they were simply a fact of modern life—worthy of observation, not judgment.
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<h2>5. Christian Schad: Weimar’s Gender Revolution Captured in Paint</h2>
<figure id="attachment_100225" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-100225" style="width: 1080px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://cdn.thecollector.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/christian-schad-st-genois.webp" alt="christian schad st genois" width="1080" height="1485" /><figcaption id="caption-attachment-100225" class="wp-caption-text">St. Genois d&#8217;Anneaucourt by Christian Schad, 1927. Source: Centre Pompidou, Paris.</figcaption></figure>
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Christian Schad was born in 1894 in Miesbach in Upper Bavaria. His father, a wealthy lawyer, supported Schad for much of his life. In 1913, he attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. He did not participate in the war, since he obtained a medical report that exempted him from service. He moved to Zurich in 1915, where he stayed until 1920. After the war, he traveled extensively throughout Europe, visiting Italy, Paris, Vienna, and Germany, before eventually settling in Berlin in the late <a href="https://www.thecollector.com/artists-defined-roaring-twenties/">1920s</a>.
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In this portrait, Schad painted St-Genois d&#8217;Anneaucourt, a famous actor in Viennese high society, alongside his companions, Baroness Glaser and a well-known cross-dresser from the Eldorado cabaret in Berlin. In this piece, we see an exploration of the rapid shifts in gender and sexual norms that occurred in Weimar Germany. People like the famous physician Magnus Hirschfield actively researched sex and sexuality and campaigned for gay rights. His research supported the existence of transsexuality and advocated for these individuals.
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<h2>6. Otto Dix: War, Nightlife, and the Grotesque Realities of Berlin</h2>
<figure id="attachment_100220" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-100220" style="width: 1200px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://cdn.thecollector.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/new-objectivity-otto-dix-metropolis.jpg" alt="new objectivity otto dix metropolis" width="1200" height="527" /><figcaption id="caption-attachment-100220" class="wp-caption-text">Metropolis by Otto Dix, 1928. Source: Wikimedia Commons.</figcaption></figure>
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Otto Dix was born in 1891 in Thuringia, Germany. He was the eldest son of an ironworker. He apprenticed in the decorative arts and then trained at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts. At the outbreak of the war, Dix volunteered with enthusiasm. He went on to spend four years on the front line as an artillery gunner.
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His experiences on the battlefield traumatized him greatly and would stay with him for life. He made numerous sketches of the horrors he saw at the front line. Once he returned, he resumed his studies in fine art. After the war, his work became focused on conveying the depravity of war and of society in Weimar Germany. In Dix’s work, figures are portrayed as ugly caricatures and horrible satirical visions of contemporary culture.
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Metropolis is a triptych showing three scenes of Berlin nightlife. The central panel depicts a typical, decadent Berlin party, filled with jazz, dancing, and modern women in lavish outfits. The panels on the sides, however, tell a very different story. On the left, we see a war cripple who has lost both legs, pulling himself along on crutches. On the ground beneath him, a body lies sprawled on the cobblestones. A line of sex workers stretches into the background, enticing him to join them.
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On the right panel, a similar scene unfolds. There’s a legless veteran sitting on the ground, begging, with his head in his hands. A line of sex workers walks past him, ignoring the man’s suffering. The figures in these paintings are depicted with exaggerated features that make them appear grotesque and awful. Each person, except the veterans, is supposed to represent a caricature of moral decay.
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<h2>The End of The New Objectivity</h2>
<figure id="attachment_100217" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-100217" style="width: 1200px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://cdn.thecollector.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/new-objectivity-Entartete-Kunst-photo.jpg" alt="new objectivity Entartete Kunst photo" width="1200" height="809" /><figcaption id="caption-attachment-100217" class="wp-caption-text">Degenerate Art (Entartete Kunst) exhibition in Munich, 1937. Source: MoMA, New York</figcaption></figure>
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The rise of Nazism had a massive impact on Germany&#8217;s cultural landscape from the early 1930s onward. The Nazis disapproved of many modern art forms, including those associated with the New Objectivity movement. They promoted art that adhered to their own ideological principles, leading to censorship, suppression, and the persecution of artists. Some of the works of the New Objectivity were included in the <a href="https://www.thecollector.com/entartete-kunst-nazi-project-against-modern-art/">Degenerate Art</a> exhibitions, and some artists simply stopped making art as a creative protest against the regime.

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