How to Look Sachlich: Fashion and Objectivity in Weimar Germany

Abstract

“How to Look Sachlich: Fashion and Objectivity in Weimar Germany” is an analysis of the representation and treatment of fashion in the late Weimar works of the architect and designer, Lilly Reich (1885-1947) and the painters, Otto Dix (1891-1969), Christian Schad (1894-1982), and Lotte Laserstein (1898-1993). Its argument is that these artists, through their acute handling of clothing and fabric, pushed the aesthetic program of Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) beyond strict Sachlichkeit (objectivity) and ultimately show that Neue Sachlichkeit, contrary to its association with sobriety, is a style of material extravagance. The terms “Sachlichkeit” and “Neue Sachlichkeit,” popular in every facet of Weimar culture from fashion to architecture and painting to journalism, connoted matter-of-factness, functionality, and realism. By examining the treatment of fashion and fabric in these paintings and architectural projects, this study, drawing upon design and architectural theory, sheds new light onto the painterly practices of Neue Sachlichkeit, while also demonstrating that an emphasis on surface materiality was an aesthetic strategy common to both the architecture and painting of the period. In this way, fashion and an accentuation of tactile surfaces serve as critical links between architectural Sachlichkeit and painterly Neue Sachlichkeit during the Weimar Republic.

Schad, Dix, Laserstein, and Reich undermine rationality and sobriety in their sachlich and neu sachlich works by emphasizing the texture and appearance of material surfaces to the extent that they take on expressive lives of their own. By presenting this material excess, these artists respond to a cultural preoccupation with objectivity, the sociopolitical conditions of the period, and counter the outgoing discourse of spiritualized subjectivity that was tied to Expressionism. For Schad, Dix, Laserstein, and Reich, Sachlichkeit offered a mode of cultural production that was oriented around externalized facts and the objective world. Instead of exposing social realities through abstraction and appeals to emotion, these artists represented tangible surfaces and charged them with the task of expressing the material realities of modern life. While neither rational nor sober, the striking appearance of surfaces in their works is nonetheless “objective” in the sense that it constitutes a mimetic response to the processes of objectification and fetishization in market capitalism, which transform both people (subjects) and commodities (objects) into instruments to aid in its perpetual growth.