Glitter and Doom: German Portraits from the 1920s

by Sabine Rewald, Ian Buruma, Matthias Eberle

In the 1920s Germany was in the grip of social and political turmoil: its citizens were disillusioned by defeat in World War I, the failure of revolution, the disintegration of their social system, and inflation of rampant proportions. Curiously, as this important book shows, these years of upheaval were also a time of creative ferment and innovative accomplishment in literature, theater, film, and art.
Glitter and Doom is the first publication to focus exclusively on portraits dating from the short-lived Weimar Republic. It features forty paintings and sixty drawings by key artists, including Otto Dix, Max Beckmann, and George Grosz. Their works epitomize Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), in particular the branch of that new form of realism called Verism, which took as its subject contemporary phenomena such as war, social problems, and moral decay. Subjects of their incisive portraits are the artists’ own contemporaries: actors, poets, prostitutes, and profiteers, as well as doctors, lawyers, businessmen, and other respectable citizens. The accompanying texts reveal how these portraits hold up a mirror to the glittering, vital, doomed society that was obliterated when Hitler came to power.

Genres: Art, History, Art History, Nonfiction, Germany, Art and Photography, German Literature

304 pages, Hardcover

First published November 28, 2006

Reviews

[P. · Rating 4 out of 5]

There's some really fabulous art in here that I've never had the privilege to see, and all the reproducations are in color (nice color, which just makes me think of how amazing they would be in person). Take my advice and skip the introduction, where the curator makes some specious arguments about why the collected works are thematically important (for example: that landscapes cannot convey disgust). I tried to read through all the descriptions, but they were lacking in what I really wanted to read about, which was something that wasn't the descriptions' responsiblity to tell me about anyway.

[Meghan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Also reading through this one while I'm at work. Mostly I picked it up cause the book store doesn't have any Christian Schad (amazing artist...one of my favorites, did the painting on the front of the book) monographs, but some of his work is in this book. So I'm sort of reading selective parts, skipping the Otto Dix parts.

[Rose · Rating 4 out of 5]

Many of these portraits are disturbing but many are also beautifully painted. Wonderful illustrations and insightful text.