New Objectivity - 912

Narrator (m):

As in few other epochs before it, the artists of the Weimar Republic were interested in depicting the human being. At the same time, Weimar culture had a penchant for systemization and standardization. People were painted in their milieu, often accompanied by attributes that pointed to their practiced profession. Outward characteristics were emphasized much more than emotions. Their facial expressions were usually emotionless, distanced, melancholy. The gaze into the void dominated, going hand in hand with a passive pose and constricting spatial situation. “Stiffness” is the word employed frequently to describe the effect of the images.

Narrator (f):

The most important exponent of an alienated human image was the painter Anton Räderscheidt, who was represented by two works in the Mannheim exhibition in 1925. Räderscheidt belonged to the Cologne circle of Dadaists around Max Ernst and to the Cologne Progressives around Franz Wilhelm Seiwert and Heinrich Hoerle. Like Schrimpf and Grosz before him, he received important impressions from the Pittura metafisca, or Metaphysical Painting, of de Chirico and Carrà.

Narrator (m):

In Räderscheidt’s works, distance and alienation between the sexes are expressed through the rigidity, isolation, and lack of communication of the figures in barren rooms and public squares, as, for example, in the 1921 painting Young Man with Yellow Gloves, in which one can recognize the artist himself. Like a tailor’s dummy, he is wearing a suit, bowtie, and bowler before a desolate, sterile, urban backdrop.

Narrator (f):

In the painting House No. 9, also from 1921, Räderscheidt shows the meeting of man and woman: It is Marta Hegemann, his wife, who also worked as a painter. The lack of connection between the two people is underscored by the strict geometry of the city, reduced to a few lines. Räderscheidt said of House No. 9 that he regarded it as his “most essential painting.” Not coincidentally, it is now counted among the major works of New Objectivity or of Magical Realism.