Lecture
Widening the Lens: Neue Sachlichkeit in the Light of History
Apr 10, 2025, 10:30 PM
Presented by John Maciuika, Professor of Modern Architecture at the City University of New York's Baruch College and at the CUNY Graduate Center
John Maciuka, Professor of Modern Architecture, City University of New York's Baruch College and at the CUNY Graduate Center
This lecture examines the art of Neue Sachlichkeit against the backdrop of early twentieth-century artistic developments in the fine arts, applied arts, and architecture. Much as Gustav Hartlaub's Neue Sachlichkeit exhibition of 1925 provided an organizing concept for a veritable kaleidoscope of artistic innovations in the Weimar era, the term's progenitor, Sachlichkeit, mirrored an array of historically significant developments during the Wilhelmine era. For all the differences between pre-World War I Second Empire Germany and the turbulent Weimar era, early cultural calls for Sachlichkeit anticipated some of the concerns that would give rise to the Neue Sachlichkeit of the 1920s.