New Objectivity - 907

Narrator (f):

In the mid-1920sm, it was already evident that the New Objective visual language was transitioning increasingly into a neo-Romantic, backward-looking style. Elements of New Objectivity were instrumentalized by fascist painters, even though the Nazis ultimately rejected it. Heroic leitmotifs of National Socialist art, such as blood and soil, “racial health,” and the role of the woman as mother and provider contrasted starkly with the basic themes of New Objectivity into the mid-1920s. In the paintings of landscape, family, and farmers of the Third Reich, however, relics of New Objective forms lived on that were tied to a striving for interiority and a tendency to pathos and monumentality.

Narrator (f):

Adolf Wissel’s meticulously drawn, static depictions of German farmers and families were entirely in harmony with National Socialist racial stereotypes. With their mix of stylistic elements from both New Objectivity and old master works, his paintings were well suited to being integrated into blood-and-soil ideology of the National Socialist era: traditional, representational, and close to the people; last but not least, they propagated an image of women that illustrated an existence as a mother willing to make sacrifices.

Narrator (m):

Kalenberg Farmer Family of 1939 is a prominent example of how elements of the New Objective style could be put in the service of National Socialist ideology. Wissel grouped the family members around a table outdoors. The tablecloth has slipped out of place. A carefree togetherness reigns. The individual members are close to one another. The father and mother form small units with the son and a daughter, respectively. At the same time, however, they all seem very distanced, turned inward, and contactless. Hermetically sealed, they are stuck in rigid role models.

Narrator (m):

It was no coincidence that this painting won first prize in the competition The Family Portrait, organized by the National Socialist party leadership in 1937–38. Adolf Hitler purchased it at the Great German Art Exhibition in 1939. Wissel had joined the party already in 1933, received an honorary professorship in 1938, and finally was added to the list of “God-graced” artists in 1944, which exempted him from military service.