NEW SOBRIETY.

The term New Sobriety (Neue Sachlichkeit) arose in German artistic circles during the mid-1920s. An umbrella term embracing numerous developments in painting, the visual arts, and literature during the turbulent post–World War I Weimar era, the New Sobriety seemed an effective label for capturing the spirit of the times among artists seeking to reground their work in "objective" reality following the abstractions of cubism and the vitalism of expressionism. Emphasizing a rigorous return to figural art, strong lines and color, and themes drawn from the characters, landscapes, and tableaux of the modern city and modern experience generally, the art of the New Sobriety balanced objectivity with an interest in social and to some extent political themes.

When the German museum director Gustav F. Hartlaub gave the title "The New Sobriety" to an exhibition of 124 paintings held in mid-1925 at the Mannheim Kunsthalle, the phrase quickly took on wide significance. The term, like the work of the thirty-two artists chosen for the exhibition, distinguished a particular postexpressionist, postcubist, and postfuturist sensibility. Less a style or a formal school than a worldview and way of seeing, the New Sobriety—as represented by such diverse artists as Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, George Grosz, and Alexander Kanoldt—reemphasized the concept of the everyday, the here and now, and the stark or even harsh realities of modern urban life. The New Sobriety thus opposed the futurists' fiery visions and sweeping predictions, the expressionists' emotional gestures or views of apocalypse, and the cubists' abstraction of objects and spaces. Opting for rationality and a hardened (if also dramatized) sense of objectivity, practitioners associated with the New Sobriety, as well as with the related movements of verism and magic realism, expressed a certain exhaustion with the tumult and convulsive changes wrought by World War I and its immediate aftermath. Although individual painters' and writers' works differed substantially from one another, the New Sobriety was distinguished in tone by a self-conscious, even forced emphasis on stark characterizations and individual object qualities; a sharp, unsentimental view of the world, which included an embrace of "ugly" or "grotesque" subject matter; compositions assembled out of isolated objects and details, seldom integrated into an organic or experiential whole; and a manner of depicting human subjects with the same dispassionate detachment that the artist devoted to the objects and the environment, creating a particular, banal, dry yet taut atmosphere in many scenes.

This Sachlichkeit was "new" precisely because it seemed to be a rediscovery of the objective world following the aesthetic, philosophical, and psychological excursions of Dada, surrealism, expressionism, and cubism. It was also "new" because Sachlichkeit had been one of the watchwords of the progressive prewar design association, the Deutscher Werkbund, and before it, of art critics such as Ferdinand Avenarius of Dresden. As early as 1888, Avenarius had called for a "party of realists" (Partei der Sachlichen) in his journal, Der Kunstwart, one of the mainstays of Germany's broad-based art education movement. Avenarius's writings called upon these "realists" to monitor national health by promoting a culture that sensibly adapted German traditions to the altered realities of modern industrial and urban life. More concerned with "life reform" (Lebensreform) through arts education, attention to the tasteful design of domestic environments, and consumer education, the Sachlichkeit of the pre–World War I era nonetheless resurfaced during the Weimar era. Its particular form is evident in painters' efforts to reground German art in matter-of-fact material under the significantly altered conditions of life in Weimar Germany. In this respect too, New Sobriety sensibilities, and particularly a general post–World War I "call to order" (rappel à l'ordre), can be seen as related to such post–World War I movements as the purism of Amédée Ozenfant and Le Corbusier, the industrial objectivity of Fernand Léger, the figural works of the Bauhaus artists Oskar Schlemmer and Joost Schmidt, and, more broadly, to the rational architecture of the "New Building" (Neues Bauen) and the radical functionalism of the Dessau Bauhaus director Hannes Meyer. The popularity of the New Sobriety waned, however, by the late 1920s, as cool detachment and social observation gave way increasingly to art influenced by rising political mass movements, nationalism, and technical progress. Nevertheless, the diverse body of works associated with the New Sobriety provide compelling documentation of the turbulence and creative ferment characteristic of Weimar Germany before the Nazi seizure of power.

See alsoArchitecture.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Hartlaub, Gustav F. Neue Sachlichkeit. Mannheim, 1925. Published in conjunction with the exhibition at the Städtische Kunsthalle Mannheim.

Schmid, Wieland. "Neue Wirklichkeit—Surrealismus und Neue Sachlichkeit." In Tendenzen der Zwanziger Jahre, edited by Stephan Waetzoldt and Verena Haas, part 4, vol. 15, pp. 1–36. Berlin, 1977.

Willett, John. Art and Politics in the Weimar Era: The New Sobriety, 1917–1933. New York, 1978.

Zeller, Ursula. "Neue Sachlichkeit." In The Grove Dictionary of Art. From Expressionism to Post-Modernism: Styles and Movements in Twentieth-Century Western Art, edited by Jane Turner, 267–270. New York, 2000.

John V. Maciuika