art Archives - understand-culture

The New Objectivity

In June 1925 Gustav Friedrich Hartlaub, director of the Kunsthalle Mannheim, opened an exhibition called Neue Sachlichkeit: Deutsche Malerei seit dem Expressionismus. The name stuck to an entire era.

Hartlaub described the artists as those who had retained or regained their fidelity to positive, tangible reality. Otto Dix put it more bluntly: they wanted to see things quite naked, clearly, almost without art.

It was a reaction against Expressionism — against the mystical, the subjective, the utopian. A culture that names an art movement after objectivity has a strong relationship with the idea.

Borrowed from the stage

Along with Theater, Schauspiel, Inszenierung. German dismissals of a negotiating performance. All four are borrowed from the stage, and all four mean the same thing: what you are watching was arranged in advance to produce an effect on you.

Cobbler, stay with your lasts

Cobbler, stay with your lasts.

The story is from Pliny the Elder. A shoemaker criticized the sandal in a painting by Apelles, and the painter corrected it. When the cobbler went on to criticize the leg, the painter told him to stop.

The German use of the phrase is not an instruction in modesty. It asserts the opposite of what it appears to say: within your last, your judgment outranks anyone’s.

Hans Holbein the Younger

Of particular interest to us as students of German culture are minutes 22:20 to 25:00 in this very interesting mini-documentary about Hans Holbein. Pay particular attention to the segment 24:00-24:37. “If you wanted precision, quality and Vorsprung durch Technik (the current motto of Audi) you bought German.”

Hans Holbein the Younger (1497–1543) was a German painter and printmaker who worked in the Northern Renaissance style, and is considered one of the greatest portraitists of the 16th century.

Holbein was born in Augsburg, Bavaria, but he worked mainly in Basel, Switzerland as a young artist. Holbein travelled to England in 1526 in search of work, with a recommendation from the great European thinker, Erasmus of Rotterdam.

Holbein was welcomed into the humanist circle of Thomas More, the Archbishop of Canterbury, where he quickly built a strong reputation. By 1535, he was King’s Painter to none other than Henry VIII of England.

And by the way, the documentary is done exceptionally well. Tudor England. Henry the VIII. Thomas More. And, of course, Thomas Cromwell. Very much worth watching in full.