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Kerry James Marshall: The Histories @ the Royal Academy

This is a massive, probably epoch-making exhibition, but which I found troubling and repelling for reasons I’ll try to explain later, in part 2 of this review. First I’ll try to give you all the information and as many images as I can so that you can make your own mind up.

Kerry James Marshall

Kerry James Marshall is, according to the curators at the Royal Academy, ‘America’s most important artist‘.

This huge exhibition of Marshall’s enormous paintings at the Royal Academy is the largest ever held outside the US and so the first chance for most of us Brits to experience his works in the UK.

Exhibition structure

The exhibition includes 70 works, primarily paintings, as well as examples of the artist’s prints, drawings and sculpture, from museums and private collections across North America and Europe.

It includes a dramatic new series of paintings made especially for the show.

The show marks Marshall’s 70th birthday (born 17 October 1955).

Marshall works in series and cycles. The exhibition brings together 11 groups of works made between 1980 and the present, displayed in 11 galleries.

For your information I’ll give the curators’ wall labels to each of the 11 rooms verbatim, distinguished from my commentary by being indented.

Gallery 1. The Academy

The works in this room feature scenes from art schools, studios and museums – places, like the Royal Academy, where artists study, create and exhibit their work. There is a deep fascination in Western art with the studio as the locus of production and the museum as the repository of wonders. Adding to this tradition, Marshall transforms it by centring Black figures as both producers and consumers.

The painters he depicts are masters of their medium and materials. The model in ‘The Academy’ strikes a pose reminiscent of the American athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Summer Olympic Games. On the student painter’s table there is a preparatory sketch of the model as well as a ‘nkisi nkondi’ ‘power figure’. In ‘Untitled (Studio)’, a painter adjusts the position of her model to match the picture in progress.

Untitled by Kerry James Marshall (2009) Yale University Art Gallery © Kerry James Marshall

These works emphasise the decisions artists make in composing and completing their work: whether to paint precisely or loosely, whether to render objects flatly or with more volume, and how to arrange colours. Marshall uses various black pigments to depict skin colours, layering, or placing side by side, ivory black, Mars black and carbon black, mixing in other colours to render black fully chromatic. As he has said, ‘if you say black, you should see black’. While his blacks are complex, Marshall rarely attempts to depict the browns of real skin tones. His figures are at once individual characters and examples of an emphatic Blackness, real and rhetorical, and as such, provoke wider questions about the idea of Black figures in art.

The Academy by Kerry James Marshall (2012) Collection of Dr. Daniel S. Berger © Kerry James Marshall. Image courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

Gallery 2. Invisible Man

Marshall’s family moved from Birmingham, Alabama, to Los Angeles in 1963. In 1965 he visited the Los Angeles County Museum of Art on a school trip. In 1968 he was selected for a summer drawing workshop at the Otis Art Institute, where he first encountered the work of Charles White and committed to becoming a full-time student there after high school. He enrolled at Otis in 1977 and received his BFA in 1978.

The 1970s was a volatile period at Otis, and within the art world in general. Conceptual artists were abandoning painting; some artists associated with the Black Arts Movement were distancing themselves from European art traditions and devoting themselves to political works aimed at uplift and protest.

Not to be deterred, Marshall continued his pursuit of an education dedicated to maximising the knowledge and skills associated with the best results in picture making. When the time was right, these could be put to effective use. That time arrived after he read Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel ‘Invisible Man’. In the novel, the protagonist feels he is invisible because he is not seen as desirable in American society. This idea inspired Marshall to begin a series of works in which Black figures are set against a dark ground, so that they become almost invisible to the viewer. The first of these was made with egg tempera, a medium strongly associated with Sienese painters like Duccio, and later revised by artists like Ben Shahn.

In this first major cycle of images, Marshall also explored histories of racial stereotypes and caricatures, choosing to render his figures in black paint. From this point on, his figures function rhetorically, raising questions about Black absence and presence both in society and in art history.

Installation view of Kerry James Marshall: The Histories @ the Royal Academy showing two of the invisible man paintings – if you look closely you can see the white teeth and white eyes of the invisible man (photo by the author)

Gallery 3. The Painting of Modern Life 1

The two largest galleries are devoted to Marshall’s ambitiously composed, large-format paintings that record scenes of everyday life in Black America.

In the nineteenth century, French artists like Édouard Manet and Georges Seurat transformed the genre of history painting to render scenes of modern life on an epic scale. Made on unstretched canvases and secured to the wall with grommets, the paintings in this room date from the early to mid-1990s, when Marshall, having relocated to Chicago and settled into a studio, began to make his own paintings of everyday life: children playing, lovers dancing, families enjoying a day in the park.

‘De Style’ (1993), showing a group of Black men in a barber’s shop, was the first work of Marshall’s to be acquired by a museum, and is both an amalgamation of established art historical styles and a monument to Black style.

De Style by Kerry James Marshall (1993) Los Angeles County Museum of Art © Kerry James Marshall. Photo: © Museum Associates/LACMA

A year after completing it, Marshall embarked on the works in his ‘Garden Project’ series, three of which are shown here. These look back to the American public housing projects named ‘Gardens’ whose first residents included families, like Marshall’s own, who had migrated from the South and settled in the north and west of the United States from the 1940s. Made at a time when many housing projects were suffering from a lack of resources, the images convey the hopes of the past and the resilience of residents in the 1990s.

OR:

Deeply influenced by artists such as Edouard Manet, Gustave Caillebotte, Georges Seurat and other painters of modern life, and conscious of the absence of large-scale images of daily life in the work of many Black artists before him, Marshall depicts Black families picnicking in the park, lovers dancing, children playing in communal gardens, and friends hanging out in hair salons, for example in School of Beauty, School of Culture, 2012 (Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham (AL)).

Installation view of Kerry James Marshall: The Histories @ the Royal Academy showing three of the Garden Project paintings (photo by the author)

At the centre of this room hangs the vast Knowledge and Wonder, 1995 (Legler Regional Library, Chicago Public Library, Chicago), Marshall’s largest painting to date, exhibited for the first time outside of Chicago.

Knowledge and Wonder by Kerry James Marshall (1995) City of Chicago Public Art Program and the Chicago Public Library, Legler Regional Library © Kerry James Marshall. Photo: Patrick L. Pyszka, City of Chicago

Gallery 4. Middle Passage

The five paintings in this room were made in the early 1990s and constitute Marshall’s first attempt to address the history of the Middle Passage – the treacherous crossing of the Atlantic Ocean, during which many captive Africans died before reaching the slave markets in the Americas. It is a history understood in fragments, and accordingly, instead of making works functioning like costume dramas, Marshall composes paintings with disparate images, motifs and textures, incorporating symbols and diagrams derived from Yoruban religion, Voodoo and other syncretic religions that were practised across the African diaspora as acts of defiance as well as to maintain connections to Africa.

Installation view of Kerry James Marshall: The Histories @ the Royal Academy showing Great America (left) and Plunge (right) (photo by the author)

Before embarking on the series, Marshall completed a group of woodblock prints called ‘African Powers’, imagining six Yoruban orishas – divine spirits or gods.

Installation view of Kerry James Marshall: The Histories @ the Royal Academy showing the six African Powers woodblock prints (photo by the author)

He had also recently worked as the production designer on Julie Dash’s film ‘Daughters of the Dust’ (1991), for which he constructed sets including bottle trees and grave markers that were derived from African religious traditions. The dream-like structure of the film has an affinity with some of the paintings here.

A section bringing together imagined portraits of historically significant Black figures such as Scipio Moorhead and Harriet Tubman, question how historical portraits can be created in the absence of archives and earlier representations of individuals.

Gallery 6. Vignettes

For Marshall, every historical genre and style of painting is ripe for reinvention, and in a long-running open series he has looked back to romance pictures, challenging himself to make serious and layered paintings with apparently light-hearted subject matter. The first ‘Vignette’, dating from 2003, was a landscape in the manner of Henri Rousseau set in an American park, showing a naked couple wearing jewellery related to the Afrocentric movement. In the later ‘Vignettes’, Marshall reworked the compositions of French Rococo artists like Jean-Antoine Watteau and Jean-Honoré Fragonard.

By painting romantic scenes, Marshall produces images of resistance. ‘Breeding’, not marriage, was encouraged by some slave owners as a way of increasing their wealth and workforce.

Vignette #13 by Kerry James Marshall (2008) Susan Manilow Collection © Kerry James Marshall. Image courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

Although the paintings are filled with flowers and lovebirds, the various scenes are marked in other ways by signs of protest, including burning tyres and political flags. Surrounded by pink brushstrokes and presented as dream scenes, the works also raise the question of whether Black couples can really relax in public spaces or if this idea remains an illusion.

Central Hall. Souvenirs

In 1998, Marshall produced a suite of paintings, photographs, sculpture, prints and video for the exhibition ‘Mementos’ at the Renaissance Society in Chicago – four paintings are reunited here for the first time since their debut. The paintings are set in the middle-class houses of Marshall’s friends and relatives. One is the house of his mother-in-law. Decorations in their living rooms included tributes to the assassinated Kennedys and Dr Martin Luther King Jr. The works concern the ways in which the tumultuous decade of the 1960s, marked by unfulfilled optimism and political upheaval, might be commemorated in the 1990s.

Of the four large horizontal-format paintings in the group, the first two, in full colour, memorialise political and activist martyrs, who are silkscreened as a frieze across the top. The other pictures, rendered in grisaille, expand the tribute to recognise the importance of cultural heroes who died between 1959 and 1970, bracketing the 1960s. As well as thinking about glittery greetings cards, Marshall wanted to transform the genre of Renaissance Annunciation paintings, where the archangel Gabriel appears in Mary’s home to tell her she will give birth to Jesus. The angels in these paintings call on us to remember. They appear somewhat exhausted by the process of assessing the unrealised dreams or real achievements of these political protagonists and cultural heroes.

Lecture Room. The Painting of Modern Life 2

In the 2010s Marshall continued to construct powerful scenes of everyday life. The settings were parks, nightclubs, homes, city streets and art galleries. He often reworked arrangements and elements from famous paintings, none more prominently than when he transformed the anamorphic skull in Hans Holbein’s ‘The Ambassadors’ (1533) into a distorted Sleeping Beauty, disturbing the space of a salon in ‘School of Beauty, School of Culture’, a sister work to his earlier barber’s shop painting ‘De Style’.

School of Beauty, School of Culture by Kerry James Marshall (2012) Collection of the Birmingham Museum of Art, Alabama © Kerry James Marshall. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. Photo: Sean Pathasema

Some paintings here refer to specific moments from the past, such as the crowning of Gloria Smith as the second Miss Black America at the height of the ‘Black Is Beautiful’ period in 1969.

Others provoke questions about Marshall’s own time: ‘Untitled (Policeman)’ (2015) was made shortly after the beginning of the Black Lives Matter movement when protesters campaigned to ‘defund the police’. Together, these paintings express a wide range of Black experiences of and attitudes towards America, from deep joy to a profound, uneasy ambivalence.

Untitled (Policeman) by Kerry James Marshall (2015) The Museum of Modern Art, New York © Kerry James Marshall. Photo: The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence

Gallery 7. Africa Revisited

Made specifically for this exhibition, the paintings here concern challenging moments in the recorded history of Africa, not often represented by artists. Five of them address the slave trade, showing people kidnapping children, rowing captives in a canoe to buyers out of scene, returning with all kinds of booty, and celebrating their successful trades. As with his previous works, several of these new paintings present confident Black people acting with agency. These figures are shown having sold slaves, driven by their greed for the consumer goods that Europeans supplied in exchange. Another painting depicts the murder of Shaka Zulu by his half-brothers in Zululand in 1828. Together, these paintings disrupt a view of the African past, providing a fuller picture of a complex history.

Installation view of Kerry James Marshall: The Histories @ the Royal Academy showing three of the Africa Revisited paintings (photo by the author)

Two final paintings depict the so-called ‘white queens’ of Africa, Colette Hubert and Ruth Williams, at their weddings to Léopold Senghor, the first president of Senegal, and Seretse Khama, the first president of Botswana. These scenes, showing real unions but with the details reimagined by Marshall, disturb narratives about the post-colonial period on the continent.

Gallery 8. Wake / Gulf Stream

Marshall first showed these two works together in 2003 at the Venice Biennale.

‘Wake’ centres on a black ship on a pedestal that stands for a black sea. While recalling the journey made by enslaved Africans, the work also suggests the growing power of Black cultural expression. Each time it is displayed, Marshall adds more medallions, representing the proliferating achievements of African Americans. The idea of accumulation comes from the ‘nkisi nkondi’, a type of Kongo ‘power figure’ into which users drove iron nails to increase its spiritual potency.

The painting ‘Gulf Stream’ was shown in front of ‘Wake’ in Venice. In it, Marshall revisits a painting by the American artist Winslow Homer, also called ‘The Gulf Stream’ (1899/1906), which featured a shipwrecked Black sailor whose boat is surrounded by sharks. Set off the coast of America in the present day, the friends in Marshall’s yacht here appear to be enjoying their day sailing, but storm clouds are visible on the horizon, indicative of unpredictable times ahead.

Installation view of Kerry James Marshall: The Histories @ the Royal Academy showing Wake (the sculpture on the floor) and Gulf Stream (the painting on the wall) (photo by the author)

‘Wake’ also encompasses ‘black light’ photographs of a slave ship, and plates commemorating the first cargo of twenty Africans brought to America, as well as one for William Tucker, the first person of African origin born in America in around 1624. Marshall represents Tucker with a photograph of himself as a teenager.

Installation view of Kerry James Marshall: The Histories @ the Royal Academy showing the plate from wake commemorating William Tucker but bearing a photo of the artist as a teenager (photo by the author)

Gallery 9. Red Black Green

In the works gathered here, Marshall deploys the colours of the UNIA (Universal Negro Improvement Association) or Pan-African Flag, created by Marcus Garvey in 1920, as well as the imagery and slogans of the Black Panthers from the late 1960s. But rather than straightforwardly celebrating Black Nationalism, Marshall constructs cheeky and layered works that also reference the connected histories of painting and erotica. Artists from Titian to Goya and Manet made famous canvases of reclining nudes. Marshall exchanges their female figures for a Black man who hides his genitals with a flag. Similarly, struck by the lack of Black women in American pin-up magazines, Marshall decided to make his own images.

One of his imagined models here becomes a ‘Black Star’. The painting also references the ‘Black Star Line’ – the shipping company that Marcus Garvey founded in 1919 to encourage commerce with Africa and the voluntary return of Black Americans to the continent. Gripping a star like a ship’s wheel, the woman here looks back like a model in a photoshoot. We are left to ask whether Garvey’s creations are now just useful for making stylish and sexy images, or if his political project remains relevant today.

Pros

1. Visitors The friend I went with pointed out that an unusually large number of the exhibition visitors were Black, and also young. This was noticeable because, no matter how much galleries go on about diversity and inclusivity, most of the exhibitions I go to have few if any Black visitors and are overwhelmingly populated with old white people. So this is Success if you’re trying to attract a younger, more diverse audience.

2. Black art She went on to say that if you’re a little Black girl or boy, and interested in art and go to galleries, it must be alienating or dismaying to see nothing but white faces in all the art works. You might end up feeling art is a White activity for White people. Whereas Marshall’s works clearly rectify that notion and would make you feel that art can very much be a Black interest and activity, after all.

3. Black presence The size of the paintings, their confident mix of classical examples with modern subject matter, their sweeping range over Black history from the dawn of slavery through key moments of American history, up to his numerous portrayals of everyday life in Black communities – all these triumphantly achieve his goal of restoring and emphasising a Black presence in art. So it’s a triumph.

But do you actually like any of it?

That said, she didn’t actually like any of the paintings on display. Usually we play a game of getting to the end of an exhibition, having read all the wall captions and absorbed all the information – then stroll back through the show selecting one key work from each room, and explaining why we like it more than the others.

But in this huge show neither of us saw any one work we liked in any of the rooms (with the possible exception of the six African Powers woodcuts, which I liked, up to a point). Neither of us chose any of the vast paintings because we didn’t really like any of them. We didn’t really enjoy looking at Marshall’s art. Big, colourful, striking, and in a good cause, sure, but…

So I get the point of the works, and they certainly succeed in fulfilling Marshall’s aims and agenda. But I felt alienated and outside all of them. Why? I think it’s for three reasons.

1. Blackness

It’s no use denying that the paintings’ insistence on Black Black Black was a problem for me for the simple reason that I am not Black. I don’t object or dislike the Blackness, I just don’t feel included. It feels like it’s for a different audience than me, which is fine, but explains why I didn’t feel engaged.

What puzzles me is that I really like specifically Black art. The London art gallery devoted to Black art, Autograph ABP, is one of my favourite galleries, and I go out of my way to review its shows. I absolutely loved shows there by:

To name a couple which really stick in my mind. I really liked Mary Sibande‘s brilliant show at Somerset House and who could forget the great Basquiat exhibition at Barbican? And I’ve really liked all the Afro-Futurism things I’ve seen, for example at the Barbican’s science fiction exhibition. So it’s not Black people or Black culture or Black art which troubled me, it’s something else.

2. American cultural imperialism

A big part of my abreaction is because it’s so American. In my opinion, British culture is super-saturated with American cultural products. In my youth we were exposed to a fair amount of Hollywood movies and TV shows, but this has now gone supersize with the explosion of streaming services, Disney, Netflix, Apple TV, HBO and hundreds of others. Then there’s the entire internet itself with its inbuilt bias towards American products and the American worldview. And then there’s American smartphones and social media which most people have willingly invited into their homes to record every aspect of their lives. And now we are about to be taken over by American artificial intelligence getting to know us better than we know ourselves.

In my opinion, the super-saturation of British culture with American products, ideas, technology and discourse ought to be resisted.

Instead of which British cultural curators and gatekeepers fall over themselves to promote American art and culture and movies and TV shows at every opportunity.

And, disappointingly, the same goes for academia where what used to be called Critical Theory has been superseded by various forms of identity theories (feminist theory, queer theory, Black theory, post-colonial theory) almost all imported from America, led by American academics (I was watching a video about Judith Butler recently, queen of Queer Theory) who speak to specifically American history and circumstances.

In my opinion this has two distinct negative consequences:

a) American culture swamps and obliterates British culture

The actual social and political and cultural situation of my country, England, gets swamped and lost in products, discourse and rhetoric which is and sounds American and stems from American history and politics.

So when I see yet another image of Martin Luther King or John fucking Kennedy, I just think, Fuck off. That’s your country, your history, your politics, your problems, you deal with them. I have my own country with its own history, politics and problems to deal with thank you very much.

b) Importing American culture means importing American politics

But there is a horrible historical inevitability here as well. In terms of social and cultural trends, America has often been seen as ahead of Europe; in some sense, America has often been seen as the future. So what do all these social, political and cultural trends get us? What is the shiny hi-tech America which British cultural guardians fall over themselves to promote, with its fabulous Oscars and Taylor Swift and woke activists, heading towards?

Donald Trump. Taken together, all the efforts of American feminists, queer and Black activists have ended up, through the mad irrationality of human society, handing power to an authoritarian moron and his henchmen. Fifty years of earnest American feminism has led up to… the revocation of Roe versus Wade and the ending of the nationwide right to abortion. All the Black Lives Matter calls to defund the police have ended up with… augmented powers for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) forces which now roam the streets like a semi-fascist militia, kidnapping and deporting people at will.

In other words, so many of these progressive causes in America, in the unique context of American history, politics, culture and society, have not only failed but triggered a huge and horrifying backlash.

My position is simple: I think of myself as left-wing. I support a woman’s right to abortion, I support LGBTQ+ rights, I sympathise with Black activists’ opposition to police brutality, and so on.

But I greatly fear that the wholesale importation of American cultural and political models and discourse into Britain risks triggering exactly the same white, heteronormative, masculine backlash here as has happened in the States, the followers of the new martyr Charlie Kirk. Why would we want to import the hugely conflicted culture wars which have brought America to the brink of some kind of civil war, into our own society?

And in fact it’s happening already. The rise and rise of Reform at the expense of the feeble Labour Party mirrors the rise of Trump’s MAGA movement within the Republican Party at the expense of the feeble Democrats.

It may seem grotesquely unfair to associate Kerry James Marshall with the rise of Donald Trump. All I’m saying is they both come from the same toxic culture. When I saw the images of Martin Luther King and John F. Kennedy I not only experienced a vast weariness with American pop history, but a premonition of how this all ends up.

I don’t want Reform, I don’t want the Conservative Party to adopt the tone and policies of Trump’s MAGA, and, in my opinion, one way to resist the rise of America-style authoritarianism is to insist on the difference between America and Britain. To insist on the specific Britishness of British social and political issues. To stop kowtowing before American cultural products and importing American discourse, with all its toxic resonances, into British culture.

3. The new figurativism

But just as impactful as all the above was that I was dismayed by the style of all these paintings, namely a return to a kind of naive realism, which I found dismaying. In the RA shop was a big expensive book about The New Figurativism. According to Google AI:

The new figurativism refers to the modern resurgence of figurative art, or art depicting recognizable subjects like people, in contemporary times, driven by a desire for greater artistic representation, a reflection of 21st-century realities, and a break from abstract art’s dominance. This movement allows for the exploration of social and personal identity, particularly for traditionally marginalized groups, and features bold, expressive styles often inspired by past movements like Neo-Expressionism.

Return to Representation: It marks a shift back to depicting the human form and recognizable scenes after a long period where abstract art was dominant.

Emphasis on Representation and Identity: A major driving force is a need for greater diversity and the ability to tell authentic stories from various perspectives, including those of people of colour, women, and LGBTQ+ individuals.

Relevance to Current Reality: The genre’s ability to capture and reflect the contemporary world makes it a potent tool for addressing social issues, expressing personal experiences, and engaging with contemporary culture.

Opportunity for Authenticity: It provides a powerful platform for artists to tell their own stories and to represent their communities in a way that abstract art cannot.

So on this definition, Marshall’s work is a prime example of the New Figurativism, both in style and very much in purpose, namely ‘to tell authentic stories from various perspectives, including those of people of colour’, in his concern to ‘represent his community’ and so on. As the Royal Academy curators put it, Marshall certainly:

makes visible those people who were so noticeably absent in the works that came before him.

But to [put my concerns in a nutshell, what is happening here is that woke political concerns are justifying a return to a deeply conservative, retro, anti-modern style of figurative painting. There are a few stylistic glitches and angularities which feebly gesture to the great innovations of the modernists a hundred years ago. But overall, it feels as if most of twentieth century art never happened.

I’ve just visited the van Gogh / Anselm Kiefer exhibition which is also playing here at the Royal Academy. I was thrilled by watching van Gogh develop his visual language and evolve his deployment of oil paint on an almost week-by-week basis; and dazzled at the enormous, thrilling innovations of Kiefer’s huge canvases clotted with surface detritus, stalks and twigs.

Coming from those thrilling and mind-opening innovations to Marshall’s deeply conservative, old-style, backward-looking figurativism felt like a big, big imaginative letdown.

Conclusion

As I said back at the start, Marshall’s art perfectly achieves his stated aim of putting the Black presence front and centre of his work, which has been enthusiastically taken up by galleries and commissions across the States and, I bet, will open doors for Black kids and teenagers and aspiring artists and just sympathetic gallery goers, to realise that they can do this, too, and that they have a voice and presence in the sometimes intimidating realm of ‘Art’. In terms of cultural politics it is an enormous success.

But in terms of actual aesthetics, of the style and value of what you actually see, I feel Marshall’s art represents an enormous step backwards, to a naively realist approach which erases everything I love and value about modern art.

So that’s the fundamental reason why I really didn’t like this exhibition.

Coda: Kerry Marshall and David Hockney

To take the race element out of the equation altogether, I feel the same when I look at David Hockney’s works from last 20 years or so. In the RA shop, next to a book about New Figurativism and umpteen books about Marshall, was a pile of books and merch celebrating Hockney’s dayglo renderings of the Yorkshire Wolds.

I flicked through one particularly enormous coffee table book and was staggered at how many there are, hundreds and hundreds of huge, vivid, simplistic pictures, I wonder if he’s done over a thousand by now, rattling them off on his ipad.

And as I flicked dispiritedly on, I thought: It’s as if the last 100 years or artistic experimentation never happened. A guy with a great eye and a love of bright colours is creating a never-ending stream of entertaining, easy-on-the-eye figurative paintings of a subject he loves; in Hockney’s case, the landscape of his beloved Yorkshire, in Marshall’s case, Black people, history, art and so on – and in both cases I can see that they’re big [both artists produce very big paintings, which is another rather dismaying aspect of contemporary art], bright and confident but… I just don’t like them.

And found myself thinking that this is anodyne, easy-on-the-eye, deeply reactionary, backward-looking anti-art, an art appropriate for an age which has lost any belief in the future and looks back to multiple pasts with a kind of crippling nostalgia, in both content and style.

Untitled (Porch Deck) by Kerry James Marshall (2014) Kravis Collection © Kerry James Marshall. Image courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner, London

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Posted by Simon on October 11, 2025

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After Impressionism: Inventing Modern Art @ the National Gallery

This is a lavish and deeply enjoyable exhibition portraying the great explosion of creativity in West European painting which took place in the decades between the last Impressionist exhibition in 1886 and the outbreak of the First World War in 1914.

Critics then and now struggled to find a blanket term for the period, as Belinda Thompson explains in her excellent survey of the period, ‘The Post-Impressionists’. The term ‘post-impressionism’ persists because the only thing all these different artists had in common was that they were painting after the great Impressionist breakthrough of the 1860s and 1870s and were clearly influenced by it. Beyond that it’s difficult to generalise, except that they were all experimenting and innovating and following through on the countless possibilities inherent in the act of putting oil paint on canvas.

Mont Sainte-Victoire by Paul Cezanne (1902 to 1906) © Philadelphia Museum of Art

Structure

The exhibition structure is simple: it opens by celebrating the artists who have emerged, in retrospect, as the great gods of the period – Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin – and then examines the influence they had on the younger generations of artists, in the hotbed of modern art, Paris.

Where this exhibition strikes out and is distinctive from many surveys of the period is that it then makes a conscious effort to broaden its scope, geographically, with rooms or sections dedicated to other capital cities where exciting experimentation was taking place, namely Barcelona, Berlin, Brussels and Vienna. The curators point out that there was more cross-fertilisation than ever before due to the steadily increasing numbers of exhibitions and exhibiting societies, illustrated periodicals and commercial dealerships.

For once there isn’t a particularly strong central thread or thesis being propounded in the show, just a lot of wall labels describing art movements and groups and trends in all these different places, and then picture captions going into detail on individual works.

The show is, therefore, in effect, just a feast of fabulous post-impressionist masterpieces, and strolling through it is a quite wonderful, mind-blowing, eye-filling experience.

Specific movements are mentioned along the way (the Nabis, Symbolism, Die Brücke, the Fauves), in passing, but towards the end the show crystallises, as it were, presenting examples of the radical Modernism which supplanted what had come before in the form of works by Picasso, Matisse, and Mondrian.

What characterised post-impressionist art?

Impressionism began the movement away from traditional Salon art which a) depicted high historical or mythological subject matter or b) monumental nudes in c) an intensely figurative realistic manner. Instead the Impressionists were interested not in what was there, but in what we see, which is a different thing, trying to capture the shimmer and play of light.

The post-impressionists continued this departure from the conventional representation of the external world. In a host of different ways they developed non-naturalist visual languages, emphasising shape or pattern or colour which don’t exist in the real world. Some of them were interested in line and form, some became obsessed with colour, some with pattern bringing out the decorative potential of art, some focused on symbols and meanings. Once you walked away from the idea of figurative, realistic depiction of the ‘real world’ a thousand doors opened.

All this was helped by the swift development of photography, with many artists realising that their traditional role as makers of portraits, recorders of events, annotaters of landscapes was being superseded by the new technology. But this was entirely positive: it freed them up to explore the expressive potential of paint on flat surfaces in a thousand new ways.

Artists

With almost 100 works, many lent from institutions abroad and seen in London for the first time, the show features a host of big name artists like Paul Cezanne, Vincent Van Gogh, Edgar Degas, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Gustav Klimt, Käthe Kollwitz, Sonia Delaunay, Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, Edvard Munch. It’s mostly paintings  but there’s a selection of ten or so sculptures carefully chosen to demonstrate innovation in that medium, too (notable sculptures by Rodin, Gauguin and Kollwitz).

I’m going to list the rooms, indicate what they contain i.e. which movements and artists, and then pick personal highlights.

Introduction

The introductory room contains just four works, a painting each by Pierre Puvis de Chavannes and Paul Cezanne, framed by two sculptures by Auguste Rodin (‘Monument to Balzac‘, 1898, and ‘Walking man‘, 1907). Cezanne’s ‘Mont Sainte-Victoire’ (1906) is obviously a greatest hit but after the recent Cezanne exhibitions at Tate Modern and the National Portrait Gallery I’m a bit Cézanned out. The Rodin pieces confirm my very strong dislike; I object to because of the lumbering clumsy size of his works and the crude, horrible unfinished nature. In terms of modern sculpture I like Epstein, Gill and Gaudier-Brzeska, small, smooth, beautiful lines and angles, the opposite of everything Rodin stands for.

Therefore I preferred the Puvis work, ‘The Sacred Grove’ from 1885, although this struck me as a very odd choice, because its idyllic classical setting, figurative approach, use of perspective etc seem completely contrary to everything which follows.

The Sacred Grove, Beloved of the Arts and the Muses by Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (1884) Art Institute of Chicago

Room 2: Cézanne, van Gogh, Degas, Gauguin

Greatest hits from some of Western art’s biggest names. Cezanne is represented by a classic version of The Bathers (1905) where he is transforming human figures, trees and landscape into geometric shapes, leaning rectangles of paint, the semi-abstract human figures having blank masks. You can clearly see the origins of Picasso and Braque’s cubism. A still life of a sugar bowl and apples, plus another of his numerous views of Mont Saint-Victoire.

There are 4 works by Van Gogh: ‘Snow-Covered Field with a Harrow (after Millet)‘ (1890) had the classic van Gogh wavy paint, as did ‘Sunset at Montmajour‘ and ‘Enclosed field with ploughman‘. But I found myself more drawn to ‘Houses in Saintes-Maries-de-la-mer’. Apparently the tight, constricted feel of the composition is a new thing in his style. It was painted in the south of France where the bright light made him realise he could exaggerate colour effects even more than he’d been doing previously.

Houses in Saintes-Maries-de-la-mer by Vincent van Gogh (1890)

An oddity I noticed is that the National Gallery itself owns some outstanding van Gogh masterpieces, such as the chair, and sunflowers and these aren’t in the exhibition. The only reason I can think of is that they’re part of the permanent collection which tourists quite possibly come to London to see and so the curators took the decision to exclude them from the exhibition and keep them on general display.

The caption to his ‘Woman from Arles’, a portrait of the owner of the Café de la Gare in Arles, raises an interesting point. Apparently, when they were sharing a house in the south of France, Gauguin and van Gogh had an ongoing argument about the nature of art: Gauguin argued that the artists is like a priest questing for the spiritual essence of a subject and therefore it was best to paint from memory, distance from the actual object freeing the artist to bring out the essential shapes and colours. Van Gogh, on the contrary, argued it is the artist’s sacred duty to paint what they see, as they see it.

No such scruples with the little selection of Degas works, the biggest example of which is the famous ‘Combing the Hair (Le Coiffure)’, an orgy of reds and oranges. It’s accompanied by a good example of his ballet dancers, ‘Dancers practicing in the foyer’. But my favourite piece was a small but exquisite piece, ‘Woman reading’ (1885).

Femme lisant by Edgar Degas (1883 to 1885)

It’s tightly focused, cropping the figure at the knee. Degas applied layers of pastel over a monotype print

Taken together this room makes a strong case for the dazzling impact these artists had both in Paris and elsewhere in Europe, with their reconsiderations of form, surface and space. The strokes are called ‘gestural’ because they convey the actual strokes by the artists as much as the object. Strong short dark lines make it look as if elements of the image have been stitched together. The use of bold pure colours and highly gestural strokes were very influential on later artists.

Then onto the Gauguin section. I was bowled over. Gauguin strikes me as less covered than Cezanne, van Gogh or Degas, maybe because he is the boldest, most radical, most muscular and controversial of them. He’s represented by a greatest hit, ‘Nevermore’, ‘The Wave’, ‘Fête Gloanec’, ‘The Wave’, ‘The Wine Harvest’ and his expressive ‘primitive’ carving in the circular shape of a totem, ‘The afternoon of a faun’. But it was the huge and amazing ‘Vision of the Sermon (Jacob Wrestling with the Angel)’ which bowled me over.

Vision of the Sermon (Jacob Wrestling with the Angel) by Paul Gauguin (1888) © National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh

As per the explanation on the van Gogh caption, you can see how Gauguin has taken real elements, such as peasant women from his native Brittany, a cow, a tree, but placed them in an abstract ‘symbolic’ landscape where the grass is bright orange and perspective is gestured at but mocked or transcended. And, contrary to all traditional rules, the nominal subject, the wrestling match, doesn’t take place at the front and centre of the painting, but is a strange, obscure, garbled struggle happening off in the middle distance.

Degas is more consistently sensually and visually pleasing, but Gauguin is bracing and weird. He is a godfather of the pictorial Symbolism which was a major strand of the 1890s with its concern for Big (if often nebulous) Ideas and a completely non-naturalistic treatment, both combining to convey a strong if indefinable emotion.

Room 3: Different paths

Side by side are placed dark, heavily outlined depictions of the city, and the tremendously light and airy works of the ‘divisionists’ or ‘pointillists’.

Part of the enjoyment of visiting art exhibitions is to test out my own tastes. Over the years my tastes have changed, and are also liable to vary from day to day depending on mood and circumstance (e.g. pressure of work). Something which appears to remain consistent is I am instantly drawn to works with strong outlines. This is part of the reason I like Gauguin over van Gogh and Degas over Cezanne.

So in this room I really liked the works by Emile Bernard and Louis Anquetin with their ‘intensified colour and flattened forms bounded by strong outlines’.

‘Avenue de Clichy: five o’clock in the evening’ by Louis Anquetin (1887)

The strong black lines defining figures or folds of clothes were described by some critics as cloisonné work. According to the curators it anticipates and to some extent influence Gauguin.

By contrast I found the works by pointillists Georges Seurat and Paul Signac pallid and limp. These were ‘Setting sun: sardine fishing’ and ‘Bertaud’s Pine’ by Signac, alongside ‘By the Mediterranean by Henri-Edmond Cross. I know they’re great works in their own right. I understand that they called themselves Neo-Impressionists because they saw themselves as applying ‘scientific’ rigour and analysis to the depiction of sunlight and shade. I appreciate that the pointillists were, surprisingly, associated with workers’ rights and socialism and thought of themselves as depicting a better lighter world for all. But it’s the dark urban night-time visions of Louis Anquetin which pull my daisy.

The Channel of Gravelines, Grand Fort-Philippe by Georges Seurat (1890) © National Gallery, London

Room 4:The Nabis

Beside them are two works showing the highly stylised approach of Toulouse Lautrec, ‘Tristan Bernard at the Vêlodrome Buffalo‘ and ‘The Reader‘. The room contains a partitioned-off section about the Nabis or ‘prophets’. According to Wikipedia, the Nabis were:

a group of young French artists active in Paris from 1888 until 1900, who played a large part in the transition from impressionism and academic art to abstract art, symbolism and the other early movements of modernism. They included Pierre Bonnard, Maurice Denis, Paul Ranson, Édouard Vuillard, Ker-Xavier Roussel, Félix Vallotton, Paul Sérusier and Auguste Cazalis.

The show includes what is commonly thought to be the first ‘Nabis’ painting, ‘Le Bois d’Amour à Pont-Aven or Le Talisman’ of 1888 by Paul Sérusier. You can see why it was widely felt to have pushed painting significantly beyond figurativism into an entirely new place where colour and pattern became the main aim of a painting. Serusier painted it under the supervision and direct encouragement of Gauguin at Pont-Aven in Brittany. This fact and the almost complete abstraction of the work itself had a dramatic impact on his friends back in Paris and helped crystallise the new movement.

‘Le Bois d’Amour à Pont-Aven or Le Talisman’ by Paul Sérusier (1888)

And so the show includes comparable works by other members of the Nabis, including ‘Island and village of Le Pecq‘ and ‘The evening wash by lamplight‘ by Maurice Denis. Nearby there’s a work by Pierre Bonnard, ‘Madame Claude Terrasse and her son Charles‘ (1893). I went to the Bonnard exhibition at Tate Modern back in 2019 and, eventually, overcome my initial dislike to sort of ‘get’ his messy way with colour and pattern but this specimen epitomised that lack of draughtsmanship which I find hard to overcome. Next to it are two pieces by Edouard Vuillard, ‘Figures in an interior: Music‘ (1896), ‘Lugny-Poe‘ (1891) and ‘Lady of Fashion‘ (1892), both of which highlight his interest in pattern and design over strict realism. No likee.

Room 5: New voices – Barcelona and Brussels

By my count there were 6 paintings from Barcelona and 5 from Brussels.

Barcelona

Barcelona is represented by works by Hermenglido Anglada-Camaras, Ramon Casas i Carbo, Santiago Rusiñol I Prats, Isidro Nonell i Monturio and Pablo Picasso. The exhibition goes heavy on the enormous painting by Casas i Carbo, ‘The Automobile’.

The Automobile by Ramón Casas i Carbó (about 1900) © Círculo del Liceo / photo Fotogasull

It’s imposingly big and has a long backstory. Casas, a leading figure in the Barcelona avant-garde, was commissioned to the series of 12 paintings for the private club, Círculo del Liceu in Barcelona, depicting modern musical life. In this one a woman dressed in modern (1900) clothes drives that amazing new invention, the automobile. Casas was one of the first in the city to own a motor car and, of course, the curators point out how ‘radical’ it was to depict a woman driving one. The link to ‘music’? She’s meant to be driving to or from a concert. You can see it in the background on the right. The bold simplicity of the design is said to represent ‘Catalan Modernism’ and to have impressed the young Picasso.

Picasso is represented by an early work, ‘The absinthe drinker‘ and a portrait of ‘Gustave Coquiot‘, Hermenglido Anglada-Camaras by ‘The White Peacock‘ (1904), Isidre Nonell by a tough naturalistic depiction of poverty titled ‘Hardship‘. But I particularly liked the portrait of Modesto Sanchez Ortiz by Santiago Rusiñol, not particularly radical or modernist but just very powerful. Ortiz’ eyes followed me round the room.

Brussels

As to Brussels, the curators tell us it was home to progressive exhibiting societies like The Twenty and The Free Aesthetic which fostered close links with the Paris avant-garde. The Twenty was an exhibition society founded in 1883 by 20 artists who wanted to break away from the conventional art establishment. It was in Brussels that van Gogh made his only sale during his lifetime. The five pieces felt very light and pointillist. They include the decorative and soothing ‘The Scheldt upstream from Antwerp‘ by Theo van Rysselberghe (1892), the political motive behind ‘The eve of the strike‘ by Jan Toorop (1889), and a strikingly pointillist work, ‘Going to church’ by Henry van de Velde (1892). As you can see, although pointillist in technique, it has a much darker, gloomier vibe than the sun-drenched works of Signac and Seurat.

Woman in front of the Church by Henry Van de Velde (1889)

Off in a corner is a single work by the outlier James Ensor, ‘Astonishment of the Mask Wouse‘ (1889). As you can see, Ensor’s art goes beyond satire into the weird and the grotesque.

Room 6: New voices – Vienna and Berlin

In both Vienna and Berlin at the start of the 20th century artists withdrew from the traditional art academies and salon exhibitions and set up breakaway organisations, the Secessions.

Vienna

Dominating the left side of the room are two huge portraits of women by Gustav Klimt in his trademark style, combining a highly realistic sensual face with a luscious depiction of stylised dress and fabric: ‘Hermine Gallia (1904) and ‘Adele Bloch-Bauer II‘ (1912). I loved Klimt when I first discovered him at school but move quickly on to prefer his disciple Egon Schiele and eventually found him too sweet and chocolate box. Also from Vienna is ‘The Artist’s Mother‘ by Broncia Koller-Pinell (1907).

Surprisingly, there are some works by Norwegian depressive Edvard Munch. Why? Because Munch actually exhibited and sold his works in Berlin. The works here show a healthy lack of interest in traditional perspective and preference for pattern and design, but aren’t particularly impressive: ‘Consul Christen Sandberg‘. More characteristic is ‘The death bed‘ (1896). I was interested to learn that Munch eventually had a complete nervous breakdown (in 1908) and that, when he returned to painting, it was in a far looser style and of relatively unemotional landscapes: ‘Cabbage field‘ (1915).

Berlin

I was surprised by this room because so many of the works seemed the opposite of ‘modern’ but surprisingly old fashioned. Thus the two works by Lovis Corinth are, maybe, a bit candid and honest about the female body but they are, nonetheless, female nudes in the time-honoured tradition, without a hint of the stylisation we’ve seen throughout the show up to this point: ‘Perseus and Andromeda‘ (1900).

Nana by Lovis Corinth (1911) St Louis Art Museum

There’s a portrait of historian and philosopher George Brandes by Max Liebermann (1901) and ‘Danae‘ (1895) where I really admired the frank peasant ugliness of the servant, and ‘Children by the Pond: The Garden in Godramstein‘ (1909) by Max Slevogt.

I was surprised by this entire room because it all seemed so reactionary and old fashioned. A glimmer of modernism was given by the sole piece by the great German artist Käthe Kollwitz, not a painting but a tightly conceived sculpture, ‘Pair of Lovers‘ from 1913 to 1915. I’m a huge fan.

Room 7: German Expressionism

The penultimate room is a small one tucked off to the side of the flow of big rooms but it came to me as a huge relief after the retro kitsch of the previous room, a sudden burst of vibrant colour and exciting non-conformity.

Why stick to traditional methods of compositions? Why not use blaring flagrant primary colours! Why bother to cover the whole canvas when leaving blank spots creates a sense of urgency and drama! Bang!!

Many of the works are by members of Die Brücke (The Bridge), a group of German expressionist artists formed in Dresden in 1905. Founding members were Fritz Bleyl, Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. What they had in common was interest in primitivist art and expressing extreme emotion through high-keyed colours that were non-naturalistic. God, this is the dog’s bollocks, I thought, what a relief after the stodgy naturalism of the previous room!

Here are splendidly bold and unfettered works by Erich Heckel – ‘The house in Dangast‘ (1908) – and Karl Schmitt-Rottluf – ‘Break in the dyke‘) (1910). I loved Sonia Delaunay’s ‘Jeune Finlandaise’ (1907). In this small room experienced a physical sense of liberation.  This is the real McCoy.

Young Finnish woman by Sonia Delaunay (1907)

It’s significant that this painting captures Delauney on her journey towards pure abstraction which she would achieve a few year later. Part of the thrill of paintings like this is you can feel the future in them, ready to burst through. In the same vein is the National Gallery’s portrait of Charlotte Cuhrt by Max Pechstein (1910).

Two outliers are a portrait by Henri Rousseau (‘Joseph Brum’), whose ‘naive’ self-taught style became very popular in turn of the century Paris where ‘primitivism’ of all kinds was becoming fashionable.

And, off to one, side, the eerie and disturbing ‘Seated girl with a white shirt and standing nude girl’ by Paula Modersohn-Becker (1906).

8: New Terrains

Finally the exhibition closes with a big room drawing together strands which have emerged during the exhibition to date, and pointing forwards to the radical ruptures of Modernism.

Thus there’s a work by Wassily Kandinsky which is well on the way of his journey towards abstraction – ‘Bavarian Village with Field‘ (1908).

There are three paintings by Matisse, highlighting his move towards decoration, colour and pattern:

There are three little works by Piet Mondrian which neatly capture his progression from traditional figurativism in a realistic depiction of a tree by a river bank; to a half-way house, a tree painted in a style influenced by van Gogh’s broad brushstrokes; and finally onto pure abstraction:

In a similar spirit there are four Picassos which capture his progression from deliberate ‘primitivism’ of 1907 on to the invention of cubism in 1911:

But dominating the room is the enormous work ‘The Dance’ by André Derain. Derain was one of the group of Parisian artists who, in a review of a 1905 exhibition, were mockingly called ‘les Fauves’ (which simply means ‘the wild things’) by a Parisian critic and adopted the name as a badge of pride. Other works by Derain are included:

But it’s ‘The Dance’ which dominates the entire room and is your lasting, lingering visual image of it. Wild, high-toned colours, a cheerful disregard for perspective and, in this image in particular, a complete transition to fantasy, fairy-tale, exotic subject matter.

‘The Dance’ by André Derain (1906) Private Collection © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2023

It’s funny but, although the curators started out by claiming there was a great explosion of styles and approaches from the late 1880s onwards, the works chosen for this final room suggest that all along there were in fact just two threads or streams or approaches.

For me the drab colouring and obsessive interest in volumes, hard-edged angles, facets and geometry found in the cubism of Picasso and Braque relates directly back to the exploration of volumes, forms, rectangles and blocks developed by Cézanne. Maybe we can call this the Analytic tradition and define it as stretching from (on one wing) the scientific approach of the Neo-Impressionists and, on the other, the pure, geometric abstraction of Mondrian.

Whereas the wild children’s drawing of brightly coloured figures dancing in the jungle obviously comes from a completely different place, clearly relates directly back to Gauguin’s symbolic exoticism. Maybe we could call this the Expressive tradition. Obviously, it incorporates, in Germany, the Bridge artists who we saw in the previous room, and includes the other Fauves, besides Derain.

Analytical versus expressive. Composition versus colour. Well, that’s the neat and simple pattern which struck me as I came to the end of this brilliant, exhilarating exhibition.

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Posted by Simon on June 24, 2023

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The New Objectivity

As I read through John Willett’s collection of imagery – photos, posters, plays, book design – from the Weimar Republic, The Weimar Years, I began to realise that I was confused about the precise meaning of the much-used phrase Neue Sachlichkeit, as it applies to the art of the period.

Key facts about Neue Sachlichkeit

1. The term Neue Sachlichkeit was first used by Gustav Friedrich Hartlaub as the title of an exhibition of art works he organised in Mannheim in 1925, which featured artists including Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, and George Grosz.

2. As to translating this phrase into English, the neue bit is easy, it just means ‘new’. Sachlichkeit is generally translated (by Wikipedia and Tate) as ‘objectivity’, although John Willett also translates it as ‘sobriety’ (hence the title of his book on the subject, The New Sobriety) or as ‘matter-of-factness’.

3. Gustav Hartlaub in his introduction to the 1925 exhibition, and then successive critics and journalists following him, used the phrase to describe the widespread rejection of Expressionism which characterised all the arts in the early 1920s. Pre-war Expressionism had stood for grand, utopian, mystical, world-shaking visions and had represented the artist as a seer and prophet. Neue Sachlichkeit rejected artistic pretension and utopian visions, calling for the artist to become socially committed and paint the world of hard facts as they actually appear in front of him.

The puzzle

So far so easy. What puzzled me, as I read Willett’s book, is how the following two paintings can be said to be part of the same visual movement.

The Eclipse of the Sun by George Grosz (1926)

The eclipse of the sun seems to me a bizarre and grotesque painting – headless dummies, prisoners in dungeons (at bottom right), the sun blotted out by a silver dollar, all done with a deliberately vertiginous perspective and lack of continuity between different planes

Compare and contrast with the cool realism of this portrait of the artist’s friend, done by the same artist, George Grosz, in the same year.

Portrait of Dr Felix J. Weil by George Grosz (1926)

Portrait of Dr Felix J. Weil by George Grosz (1926)

How can they be part of the same movement?

It turns out that New Objectivity in art can be broken down into at least three, and maybe four, distinct streams (the following is based on the Wikipedia article, cross-checked against Willett’s two books).

Types of New Objectivity in art

In his introduction to the 1925 New Objectivity exhibition, Hartlaub distinguished between a ‘left’ and a ‘right’ wing of new art.

On the left were the Verists, who ‘tear the objective form of the world of contemporary facts and represent current experience in its tempo and fevered temperature’. The Verists’ aggressive brand of realism emphasized the ugly and sordid. Their art was raw, provocative, and harshly satirical. So George Grosz and Otto Dix in their harshest moments are Verists.

As Wikipedia explains, the Verists developed Dada’s abandonment of any pictorial rules or artistic language into a ‘satirical hyperrealism’. Yes, I agree: this perfectly describes Grosz’s harshest paintings and the photo-montages he made with the bleak satirist John Heartfield.

Collage as a technique blends the subjective and the objective (e.g. objective newspaper or magazine text or photos stuck onto bizarrely subjective assemblages).

This sense of multiple realities, or that the work can go beyond reality to depict the madness behind it, certainly underpins a lot of Grosz, whose drawings and Verist paintings depict human beings as grotesque puppets or cartoons.

This classic Grosz painting, The Pillars of Society, is a good example. Note the deliberate abandonment of perspective, the collage-like inclusion of ‘objective’ elements like the newspapers and flag, and the obviously caricature approach to the human face.

The pillars of society by George Grosz (1926)

The Pillars of Society by George Grosz (1926)

So much for the Verists. Hartlaub then distinguished the Verists from artists on the right who, he called ‘Classicists’ – artists who ‘search more for the object of timeless ability to embody the external laws of existence in the artistic sphere.’

Compared to the Verists, the Classicists more clearly exemplify the ‘return to order’ that swept the arts throughout Europe soon after the war. Apparently, the Classicists included Georg Schrimpf, Alexander Kanoldt, Carlo Mense, Heinrich Maria Davringhausen, and Wilhelm Heise – none of whom I’d heard of.

But I can see how their look was inspired partly by traditional 19th-century art, but more by the so-called Italian ‘metaphysical painters’ (Giorgio de Chirico and Carlo Carrà) and, maybe, by the naive painter Henri Rousseau.

De Chirico is the man who painted umpteen paintings of cool, empty, rather sinister piazzas and featureless geometric architecture, just before the Great War, and who Breton tried to appropriate as a precursor of the Surrealists.

Piazza d'Italia by Giorgio de Chirico (1913)

Piazza d’Italia by Giorgio de Chirico (1913)

You can immediately see how calm, cool and detached de Chirico painting is, and why critics, starting with Hartlaub, have seen his influence in the super-detachment of the Neue Sachlichkeit artists who he called ‘the Classicists’. De Chirico’s images are simple and uncluttered, and the picture surface is smoothly finished. There is absolutely nothing like the collage mentality to be seen, no extraneous elements cut and pasted in at wacky angles, no grotesque figures.

Compare the cool feel of de Chirico with an early work by Anton Raederscheidt.

House No.9 by Anton Raederscheidt (1921)

House No.9 by Anton Raederscheidt (1921)

The style is cool and factual when compared with Grosz’s hyper-ventilating, collage hysteria. Sometimes, in the hands of other Classicist artists, this approach can be stylised, becoming a little cartoony – but it always remains calm and sensible, as in this attractive work by Georg Scholz.

Self-Portrait in front of an Advertising Column by Georg Scholz (1926)

Self-Portrait in front of an Advertising Column by Georg Scholz (1926)

Note the urban setting and the urban banality of the subject matter. The torn adverts on the pillar and a car showroom are miles away from the symbolic landscapes of the pre-war Expressionists, and the artist has deliberately portrayed himself as a banal bourgeois dressed in suit and tied and glasses and bowler hat. The strategy of depicting the modern world as it is, and fostering an image of utter conformity, reminds me of the Anglo-American poet T.S. Eliot with his bowler hat and respectable job in a bank.

There are lots of examples of these stylised and smoothly finished portraits in Willett’s book. Their smooth oil finish is completely at odds with the deliberately rough finish of many Expressionist works and with the crazy cutout collages Grosz and Heartfield were making during the late 1910s and early 1920s. Here’s a more obviously stylised example: note the de Chirico tenements in the background.

Self portrait by George Schrimpf (1919)

Self portrait by George Schrimpf (1919)

More often than not these ‘classical’ works are located in real world situations, featuring ordinary streets, cars and houses. Maybe they’re done in a simplified and stylised way but these works all accept the modern world, they aren’t pining for romantic landscapes.

And the ones Willett likes most depict practical men, business men, builders and designers, facing the world as it is and coming up with hard-headed, practical solutions.

Portrait of an architect by Wilhelm Schnarrenberger (1923)

Portrait of an architect by Wilhelm Schnarrenberger (1923)

Magic realism

But Verists and Classicists aren’t alone. There is a third category of Neue Sachlichkeit, which can be gathered under the term introduced at the time of the 1925 exhibition by co-organiser Franz Roh.

Roh called it ‘Magic Realism’, by which he meant not that it’s about magic and unicorns – the opposite: it declares that ‘the autonomy of the objective world around us was once more to be enjoyed; the wonder of matter that could crystallize into objects was to be seen anew.’ In other words, there’s something magical about just being, about the real world, when we really look at it. The real is magical.

Roh originally intended it as a descriptive term to cover all the artists of the time, but in practice it ended up being applied mostly to works of what you could describe as the dreamy end of Neue Sachlichkeit. Willett gives examples by Georg Schrimpf, Alexander Kanoldt and Carlo Mense. Many of these artists were from south Germany.

Girl with sheep by Georg Schrimpf (1923)

Girl with Sheep by Georg Schrimpf (1923)

As you might expect, the left-wing Willett doesn’t like this style, seeing it as a ‘compromise’ with the tough-minded, politically committed art which he prefers. Looking at this example, ‘compromise’ hardly seems the word: complete abandonment, or indifference to all politics, seems more accurate.

Willett claims that, because of its southern German provenance and its association with the Italian painters de Chirico and Carrà, Magical Realist art was ‘based on the new establishment art of Fascist Italy’ (p.81). For example, Willett calls Mense’s softer work ‘a sad concession to the new Italian art’ (p.127).

Portrait of a girl by Carlo Mense (1924)

Portrait of a girl by Carlo Mense (1924)

Well, maybe… Looks like a bland harmless portrait of a young woman to me.

Both the examples Willett gives are set in landscapes, and landscapes feature heavily in Magic Realism art (unlike the unrelentingly urban scenarios of Dix and Griosz). I’d like to share but can’t find on the internet the Mense painting which Willett includes in order to criticise – an idealised naked lady lying in a naive-style landscape.

Summary

So there you have it – the Neue Sachlichkeit in German art of the 1920s can be divided into three distinct strands:

  • Verism – the grotesque satires of Grosz and Dix
  • Classicism – cool, detached, highly finished works, often portraits, in a definite urban setting
  • Magic realism – dream-like, naive paintings, mostly of young women, often in idealised landscapes

Practical applications

Easy in theory, it’s not necessarily that simple to apply these distinctions in practice. For example, which of these three categories does this work by Grosz fall in? It’s not Dada-hysterical Verism, is it? Probably more ‘classical’, though a bit muscular and aggressive for that cool approach…

Max Schmeling the Boxer by George Grosz (1926)

To my surprise the Wikipedia article classifies Christian Schad as a Verist. I’d have thought his clinical precision and slick detachment make him a Classicist. Wouldn’t you say so, from the smooth soulful face of the central figure here? Is it the distorted faces of the women, the depictions of the women’s breasts and bottom, and the distortion of the woman on the right’s face which make this Verist?

Count St. Genois d'Anneaucourt by Christian Schad (1927)

Count St. Genois d’Anneaucourt by Christian Schad (1927)

And what, then, of this amazingly ‘classical’ painting by Schad of a medical operation? Surely it has next to nothing in common by any work by Grosz or Dix? With a poster of Stalin on the wall it could be a piece of 1930s Socialist Realism. How can both hysterical Grosz and lancet-precise Schad be ‘Verists’?

The Operation by Christian Schad (1929)

The Operation by Christian Schad (1929)

Provisional conclusions

From this little investigation I conclude that:

1. Neue Sachlichkeit painting is more complex than it appears. There are at least three strands of Neue Sachlichkeit – Verism, Classicism and Magical Realism – but Verism very much looks to me like it can be further sub-divided into satirical Verism (Grosz, Dix) and cool detached Verism (Schad).

2. Maybe a more pragmatic way of looking at it is to acknowledge that, within an over-arching return not only to figuratism and forms of realism, but to the idea of a painting as just a painting (unlike the multi-levelled ‘object’ pioneered by the cubists or the three-dimensional provocation engineered by Dada) which deserves to be brought to a high level of completion or ‘finish’ – within this great generational shift, there were in fact a variety of strands and strategies – some setting out to be deliberately grotesque and satirical, others to be cool and detached, some to paint eerily empty streets, others to depict the streets as crazy confusions of chaotic crowds, some to paint humans as crack-faced cyborgs, others to give the human face a calm and only slightly stylised appearance (Scholz and Schad), and others again drifting off altogether into faux naif landscapes littered with dreamy, cartoon ladies (Schrimpf and Mense) – and that artists of the period could move easily from one style to another.

I.e. within Neue Sachlichkeit, certain nameable strands are readily identifiable, but hundreds of artists working in the same Zeitgeist produced a varying profusion of results which often elude definition at all.

For example, from all the painters mentioned above, on the evidence of style alone, who do you think painted this picture?

Woman in a black dress (1926)

Woman in a black dress (1926)

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by Simon on January 29, 2018  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on January 29, 2018

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2018/01/29/the-new-objectivity/