The years between the world wars in Germany were years of glitter and doom. After a crushing defeat in World War I, Germans were facing economic catastrophe, failed revolution, and the disintegration of the old order. Yet the short-lived Weimar Republic, born in 1919 and swept away when Hitler came to power in 1933, saw an extraordinary flowering of culture marked by innovative accomplishments in art, literature, theater, film, and science. Artists, writers, and thinkers were liberated from the strictures of tradition and felt free to experiment and invent new forms. It was a brilliant, sinister time, when Berlin was the capital of art, sex, and violence. Among the most intriguing of the artistic inventions at that time was the Neue Sachlichkeit, or New Objectivity, in particular the branch of that realistic style of painting and drawing known as Verism. This volume examines how the Verist artists, using precise, hard-edged, smooth-surfaced forms, portrayed the Weimar demimonde of prostitutes, pimps, cocaine addicts, and transvestites as well as the republic’s businessmen, lawyers, and now-forgotten poets. These artists, among them Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, and George Grosz, along with others less familiar in the United States, sought to distill the appearance of each sitter so that he or she represented a type. In this way, the Verist artists created portraits that hold up a mirror to the rootless, doomed society of Weimar Germany that was obliterated when Hitler assumed power.

304 pages, 230 illustrations (135 in full color), 8 1/2 in. x 11 in. Hardcover; clothbound, with jacket.

Original Price $65


Glitter and Doom: German Portraits from the 1920s, Hardcover
05-009022
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