Neue Sachlichkeit

About

“I must paint you! I simply must!” said Otto Dix to Sylvia von Harden when he ran into her on the street. “You are representative of an entire epoch!”

Clearing out her closet of the heavy dresses that burdened her mother’s generation and replacing them with a cigarette and a perky bob, the “New Woman” of the 1920s had become a myth of its own. The famed flâneuse, gazing at displays in department store windows, be it for the newest coat or her own reflection, she quickly became the image of consumerism and vanity. 

Even though the artistic and literary movement of the time, New Objectivity, had turned its disillusioned, post-avantgarde eye toward the everyday political and social conditions in the Weimar Republic and its back on sentimentality and inwardness as championed by Expressionism, the image of the New Woman remained a cliché rather than a reflection of women's everyday lives. This frozen iconography, largely created by the media, was being challenged and explored in her many facets by the female artists and writers of the time. Until recently, many of them have been half-forgotten. Without question, "the New Woman of the Weimar Republic didn’t exist, but there were plenty of new women." 

Fast forward a hundred years and a lot has changed, but a lot hasn’t. Amidst the all-pervasiveness of digital image phenomena, contemporary artists gathered in this exhibition revisit the notions of objectivity and facticity through their distinct takes on figuration and femininity. Indeed, in a time when the flâneuse is no more and the scrolleuse takes her place, as the world unfolds at our fingertips, the real and the surreal are bound to get mixed up. 

While the media continues to strip women of their beauty only to sell it back to them, the fragmentation of the female body is poignantly indicated in Bednarsky’s colossal breasts without a body, while being face-to-no-face with Belanger’s Self Image disappearing in the mirror might feel as painfully familiar as it is alienating. Voyeuristic curiosity is teased in Facciola's latex horse suit but ultimately shamed by a weary stare and baffled by Merrill’s frisky diptych, while the pensive gaze of Seib's pink lady is at once irresistible and discomforting. With Berkenblit’s cartoonish, larger-than-painting character, one might be compelled to go and try to figure out what is going on inside that overproportioned head, whereas the seeker of the boundary between the absurd and the hypothetical in Schutz's gouaches might just as well give up right away.

The female subjects in paintings gathered in this exhibition might disappoint the prying male gaze but prompt an active investigation of their psychic states instead. From the cropped and faceless women, over one-eyed ones, to bodiless breasts, and stilettos made of wheat, female archetypes are humorously renegotiated, at once adopted and discarded. Thus, Mother Nature acquires a whole new meaning in Reinhold’s colorful mountains, as it does in Smith's reading of the uselessness of wheat straws in agriculture as analogous of the displacement of women from public life throughout history. 

Even in the heydays of New Objectivity, figurative painting was considered a backward-looking business in the eyes of the avant-garde proponents. Since then, it has been declared outmoded, obsolete, and even dead. In recent painting, objective representation of reality is hardly anyone's goal, while the real, the imaginary and the virtual come together as equals. The new(est) objectivity might as well be the one that knows that there was never such a thing in the first place.