Collection: New Objectivity

New Objectivity, Neue Sachlichkeit, was the German painting tendency that emerged in the early 1920s as a reaction against both prewar Expressionism and Weimar Republic political turmoil. The label was coined by Gustav Friedrich Hartlaub for a 1925 exhibition at the Mannheim Kunsthalle, and it covered painters working in a sharp-eyed, often satirical realism on subjects drawn from contemporary German life.

The movement divided into two tendencies. The Verists, the left wing, applied a harsh and satirical realism to social subjects: Otto Dix, George Grosz, Max Beckmann, Christian Schad, Rudolf Schlichter, and Georg Scholz. The Classicists, the right wing, sought timeless and orderly forms: Alexander Kanoldt, Georg Schrimpf, Carlo Mense, Heinrich Maria Davringhausen, and Wilhelm Heise. Anton Räderscheidt and Franz Radziwill produced the period's most ominous urban and landscape work.

The painters were targeted by National Socialism from 1933 onward, with much of their work confiscated for the Degenerate Art exhibition of 1937. Dix's Der Krieg portfolio of 1924 and Grosz's political portfolios remain the period's most circulated graphic productions.