"Otto Dix (1891-1969) was a leading figure of the Neue Sachlichkeit, or New Objectivity, movement in painting in 1920s Germany. This groundbreaking study analyses for the first time the relationship between Dix's verist-realist portrait paintings and the rapidly expanding mass media culture of the Weimar era that surrounded it. The book focuses on a small number of portrait paintings created in the first half of the 1920s to explore four specific aspects: the way Dix engaged with fashion and celebrity culture; how he responded to the challenge posed by photography and film; how he dealt with a situation where black-and-white reproductions were the most common way in which a diverse audience encountered his work; and the way in which Dix's career development ran in parallel with the commentary on his work in journalistic and specialist media publications. Temporality, medium-specificity and reproduction are identified as concerns that drove the artist's aesthetic responses to a historically specific environment. The book draws upon archival material, letters and interviews by the artist, and a broad variety of contemporary publications by art critics and art historians to reveal new information about key paintings such as his Portrait of the Dancer Anita Berber (1925)"--

Otto Dix fought in the First World War for four years before becoming one of the most important artists of the Weimar era. This book takes Dix's very public, monumental works out of the isolation of the artist's studio and returns them to a context of public memorials, mass media depictions, and the communal search for meaning in the war.

Between the end of World War I and the Nazi assumption of power, Germany's Weimar Republic (1919-1933) functioned as a thriving laboratory of art and culture. As the country experienced unprecedented and often tumultuous social, economic and political upheaval, many artists rejected Expressionism in favour of a new realism to capture this emerging society. Dubbed Neue Sachlichkeit - New Objectivity - its adherents turned a cold eye on the new Germany: its desperate prostitutes and crippled war veterans, its alienated urban landscapes, its decadent underworld where anything was available for a price. Showcasing 150 works by more than 50 artists, this book reflects the full diversity and strategies of this art form. Organised around five thematic sections, it mixes photography, works on paper and painting to bring them into a visual dialogue. Artists such as Otto Dix, George Grosz and Max Beckmann are included alongside figures such as Christian Schad, Alexander Kanoldt, Georg Schrimpf, August Sander, Lotte Jacobi and Aenne Biermann. Also included are numerous essays that examine the politics of New Objectivity and its legacy, the relation of this new realism to international art movements of the time; the context of gender roles and sexuality; and the influence of new technology and consumer goods. Published in association with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. AUTHOR: Stephanie Barron is a Senior Curator and heads the Modern Art department at the Los Angeles Contemporary Museum of Art. Sabine Eckmann is the William T. Kemper Director and Chief Curator of the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum in St. Louis, Missouri. 300 colour illustrations

Bringing together the work of scholars in many disciplines, Women in the Metropolis provides a comprehensive introduction to women's experience of modernism and urbanization in Weimar Germany. It shows women as active participants in artistic, social, and political movements and documents the wide range of their responses to the multifaceted urban culture of Berlin in the 1920s and 1930s. Examining a variety of media ranging from scientific writings to literature and the visual arts, the authors trace gendered discourses as they developed to make sense of and regulate emerging new images of femininity. Besides treating classic films such as Metropolis and Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, the articles discuss other forms of mass culture, including the fashion industry and the revue performances of Josephine Baker. Their emphasis on women's critical involvement in the construction of their own modernity illustrates the significance of the Weimar cultural experience and its relevance to contemporary gender, German, film, and cultural studies.

Reproduces (translated into English) contemporary documents or writings with an introduction to each section.

"Explores the recent proliferation of literary and filmic representations of Weimar Berlin in German culture, probing the connections between historical and contemporary texts, their contexts, and their creators, often German Jews and women. More than a century after its founding, there can be little doubt that Weimar is back. The recent proliferation of references to and portrayals of the Weimar Republic-Germany's first democracy, born out of the aftermath of the First World War and characterized by economic and political crisis-is not surprising given our crisis-filled present. That said, the Weimar era has been a consistent focus of scholarly work in both the German-speaking and the Anglo-American academic worlds since the 1970s, and yet depictions of this period in German literature and visual culture were few and far between until the beginning of the 21st century. This book traces this renewed fascination with Weimar-specifically its capital, Berlin-in contemporary German-language culture, providing both wide-angle and close-up views. While discussions of the time period in mainstream media and historiography tend to focus on Weimar as a warning against the dangers of economic and political instability, the novels and visual works produced by contemporary German writers and filmmakers in the last 15 years revive and reshape the cultural legacy of Weimar Berlin. The Afterlives of Weimar Berlin explores the creative interplay between contemporary and historical texts, their contexts, and their creators, tracing a cultural legacy that has the work of German Jews and women as its foundation"--

This book examines the many functions of paper in the fine art and aesthetics of the early twentieth-century modernist or historic avant-garde (Expressionism, Cubism, Futurism, Dadaism, Surrealism, Constructivism and many more). With its many collages and photomontages, the historic avant-garde is generally considered to have transformed paper from a mere support into an artistic medium and to have assisted in art on paper gaining a firm autonomy. Bringing together an international team of scholars, this book shows that the story of paper in the avant-garde has thereby hardly been told. The first section looks at a selection of canonized individual avant-gardists’ work on paper to demonstrate that the material and formal analysis of paper in the avant-garde’s artistic production still holds much in store. In the second section, chapters zoom in on forms and formats of collective artistic production that deployed paper to move around reproductions of fine art works, to facilitate the dialogue between avant-gardists, to better promote their work among patrons, and to make their work available to a wider audience. Chapters in the third section lay bare how certain groups within the avant-garde began to massively create monochrome works, because these could be easily reproduced when transferred to, or reproduced as, linocuts. In the last section of the book, chapters explore how the avant-garde’s attentiveness to paper almost always also implied a critique of the ways in which paper, and all that it stood for, was treated and labored in European culture and society more broadly. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, modernism, and design.