Lecture by Sabine Kriebel: “Thrown Upon the World and No Place to Stay: Reconsidering the Neue Sachlichkeit”

Monday, February 17, 2025 at 4:30pm
Boger Hall, Room 112, 41 Wyllys Avenue, Middletown

Free and open to the public

Wesleyan students, faculty, and staff can RSVP on WesNest, but reservations are not required.

Sabine Kriebel, Senior Lecturer in History of Art at University College Cork, Ireland, will discuss New Objectivity in German painting and photography in the interwar years, “Thrown Upon the World and No Place to Stay: Reconsidering the Neue Sachlichkeit.”

The year 2025 marks the centenary of the “Die Neue Sachlichkeit” exhibition curated by Gustav Hartlaub, which gave the signature aesthetic movement of Weimar Germany its name. Variously translated as “The New Objectivity” or “The New Sobriety,” it swiftly became a buzzword of mid- to late- Weimar cultural production, from painterly mimesis to architectural austerity. Cold, detached, alienated, capitalist, cynical, retrograde, protofascist; these are among the descriptors associated with this broadly realist tendency in German painting that characterized the “stable” Weimar Republic of the mid-1920s. This lecture revisits the New Objectivity, or “Magical Realism,” as co-curator Franz Roh called it, to offer new directions of interpretation, using the work of Christian Schad, Otto Dix, Aenne Biermann, and Florence Henri, among others, to revive our understandings of this often maligned avant-garde.

Sabine Kriebel has published extensively on the art and visual culture of the Weimar Republic, including Dada, Bauhaus, and photography. Her first monograph Revolutionary Beauty: The Radical Photomontages of John Heartfield, 1929-1938 appeared with the University of California Press in 2014. Her groundbreaking study of Heartfield’s pioneering montages in Workers’ Illustrated Magazine (Arbeiter- Illustrierte-Zeitung [AIZ]) probed the intersections of affective pictures, radical politics, and technologies of mass replication in interwar Europe. Kriebel's current book project, Objectivity, Viewed Obliquely: The Neue Sachlichkeit Reframed, rethinks this moment of dubious modernism through the lens of psychoanalysis and phenomenology. Kriebel earned her PhD in Art History from the University of California, Berkeley.