Neue Sachlichkeit

New Objectivity (German: Neue Sachlichkeit) was a German art movement of the 1920s that emerged as a reaction against the emotionalism of Expressionism and the idealism of the pre-war avant-garde. The name was coined in 1925 by curator Gustav Hartlaub for an exhibition in Mannheim that gathered a generation of artists who had turned toward a sober, critical, almost clinical realism. Practitioners of New Objectivity depicted the post-war reality of the Weimar Republic without embellishment: maimed veterans, prostitutes, profiteers, social inequality, and the moral decay of the big cities. Leading figures included Otto Dix, George Grosz, and Max Beckmann, whose sharply satirical canvases exposed the cynicism and brutality of the era. The style combined cold precision of detail with biting social commentary. The Nazi rise to power in 1933 ended the movement: many works were branded as degenerate art, confiscated, or destroyed. New Objectivity remains one of the most penetrating testimonies to the interwar crisis in European culture.