The great 1925 art exhibition

Mannheim's Kunsthalle

Artists like Otto Dix and Max Beckmann painted a great number of pictures in a realistic style around 1925.They were very different from the expressionist style which had prevailed in Germany in the years before. It was a new style, anyone could see that, but, what would it be called ? Post-expressionist? New Realism?

The answer is :New Objectivity, Or, in German: Neue Sachlichkeit.  The movement didn’t start in Mannheim, but its name was coined there.

The Neue Sachlichkeit arose as a reaction against expressionism, judged too subjective, too emotional. The New Objectivists aimed to portray the reality, often the social reality, in a more direct way. Not really realistic, as they allowed themselves to accentuate some traits, achieving something that was sometimes close to a caricature. 

But what about the term itself ? It was invented by Gustav Friedrich Hartlaub, the director of the Kunsthalle in Mannheim, who used it as the title of an art exhibition in 1925 to showcase artists who were working in a post-expressionist spirit. That exhibition, though not a big success at the time, would have long-lasting effects.

The main artists exposed were Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, George Grosz, Alexander Kanoldt, Georg Schrimpf and Niklaus Stoecklin.

Another art critic, Franz Roh, suggested the name "magic realism" for the movement », a term that today make us think of latin-american literature or of naive painting. 

Max Beckmann

Alexander Kanoldt

Niklaus Stoecklin