simplicity and standardization -- 6/23/23
Today's selection -- from The Cold Gaze -- Germany in the 1920s by Laerke Rydal Jorgensen (Editor) and Kirsten Degel (Editor). German art in the years after the First World War took a turn to meticulous still-life painting and aesthetic standardization in paintings, architecture, and other forms of art:
"Artists [in Germany in the 1920s] were particularly interested in the still life genre. Inspired by the hyper-realistic fidelity of photography, painters seized upon the visual language of the camera, and an intense dialogue was established between the two media. None of them, however, presented objects according to a purely mimetic logic; rather, they often placed them in strange spaces, which seem both empty and under tension, in compositions with incoherent perspectives.
"Cacti and rubber plants were very popular in Germany in the 1920s, where they were seen as the vegetal equivalent of crystalline stone: architectural, geometric, and abstract. Xaver Fuhr (1898-1973) and Alexander Kanoldt (1881-1939) painted ficus plants with great meticulousness in pure compositions that reveal their clear structure. Georg Scholz (1890-1945) emphasises the stiffness of the cactus, in keeping with the rigid pictorial style of New Objectivity. The enigmatic aspect of these plants is often heightened by placing them in deliberately empty surroundings. In Urformen der Kunst (Art Forms in Nature, 1928), Karl Blossfeldt (1865-1932) photographed plants in close-up against a neutral background, making them appear inanimate, strangely inert.
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| Art Forms in Nature 101 Karl Blossfeldt |
"This reified nature is part of a broader fascination with the world of objects. In his album Die Welt ist schön (The World is Beautiful, 1928), Albert Renger-Patzsch (1897-1966) captures standardised, mass-produced industrial products. Photographers and painters were also interested in glass objects, light bulbs and crockery. This fascination with transparency, also evident in Ella Bergmann-Michel's (1896-1972) films on modern architecture, reflects a desire to depict objects unfiltered, with objectivity.
"In the 1920s, the exaltation of the individual that characterized Expressionist aesthetics was replaced by an ideal of standardisation: singularities were erased in favour of recourse to models, standardised types, simple forms reproduced in series. In painting, Anton Raderscheidt (1892-1970) and others depicted faceless human figures, in strangely empty and impersonal urban settings. The impasto and vivid colours of Expressionism disappeared in a smoother, muted colour scheme.
"Rather than physical characteristics, artists now focused their attention on the individual's social background. In Cologne, the artists Gerd Arntz (1900-1988), Heinrich Hoerle (1895-1936) and Franz Wilhelm Seiwert (1894-1933) formed the Cologne Progressives group. Inspired by socialist utopias, they produced compositions in which exploiters and exploited are depicted. In Zwölf Häuser der Zeit (Twelve Houses of Our Time, 1927), a series of woodcuts, Gerd Arntz represented social classes using a set of easily identifiable codes. This recourse to schematisation was intended to raise the proletariat's awareness by revealing the reality of its oppression by means of simple forms. Arntz later worked with the philosopher and economist Otto Neurath (1882-1945) on developing a universal visual language called lsotype (International System of Typographic Picture Education). These pictograms with simple colours, readable by all, served to classify and render comprehensible complex political or economic data.
"In urban planning, the unprecedented shortage of housing after the First World War led to the construction of vast estates. As part of the Neue Frankfurt (New Frankfurt) programme, architect Ernst May (1886- 1970) headed a project that was to build almost 10,000 dwellings in five years. These were grouped together in uniform estates comprised of simple, identical forms, designed from standard prefabricated elements. Architect and furniture designer Marcel Breuer's (1902-1981) company, Standardmöbel, designed furniture made in pure forms using tubular steel, which was easy to reproduce on an industrial scale.
"The post-war economic crisis and spectacular inflation were followed by a period of relative stabilisation and growth, encouraged in particular by the American-led Dawes Plan, which among other things reorganized the Reichsbank. Germans began to develop a fascination for America and its social model. The rationalisation of work developed by the American engineer F.W. Taylor (1856-1915) was imported into German companies, leading to rapid industrialisation and the mechanisation of tasks.
"The principle of rationalisation and the aestheticization of machines soon became a new norm that structured social and cultural life: The Tiller Girls, a troupe of dancers who performed synchronised choreographies in a mechanical rhythm, were the visual expression of assembly-line work. Albert Renger-Patzsch's (1897-1966) photographs and Carl Grossberg's (1894-1940) paintings show sparklingly clean industrial sites in pared-down, meticulously detailed compositions. The graphic designer Paul Renner (1878-1956) created the Futura typeface (which is used in a redesigned version in this catalogue), based on elementary geometric shapes. The architect Margarete Schiltte-Lihotzky (1897-2000) designed a modern and functional kitchen, organised as a work space to limit the housewife's movements back and forth."
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