All posts tagged Sylvia von Harden

Under Cover: A Secret History Of Cross-Dressers @ the Photographers’ Gallery

The Photographer’s Gallery is a tall, narrow building on a corner of Ramillies Street (numbers 16 to 18, to be precise) just behind Oxford Street, a hundred yards east of Oxford Circus. It’s an enjoyable maze, with exhibition spaces on the 5th, 4th and 3rd floors, a café on the ground floor and a shop of photography books and film cameras in the basement.

I visited the gallery to see the large exhibition of rare vintage photos of men and women cross-dressing, entitled Under Cover.

The exhibition is drawn from the personal archives of French film-maker and photograph collector Sébastien Lifshitz. For over 20 years he’s been building up an extensive collection of amateur photographs from Europe and the US documenting the surprisingly widespread practice of adult cross-dressing. The very earliest photos are from the 1860s and the collection goes on through to the 1960s.

Man in makeup wearing a ring. Photograph from a photo booth, with highlights of color. United States, circa 1920.© Sébastien Lifshitz Collection courtesy of Sébastien Lifshitz and The Photographers’ Gallery

The photos are all ‘found’ – meaning none were commissioned or taken by Lifshitz, but are largely anonymous photos of unnamed and unknown figures which he has picked up at flea markets, garage sales, junk shops and on Ebay, among other non-specialist sources. As the exhibition introduction puts it:

These photographs of men and women posing for the camera, using the clothes and gestures traditionally assigned to the ‘opposite sex’ offer a moving and candid view into the hidden worlds of countless individuals and groups who chose to ‘defy gender conventions.’

Lifshitz’s initial impulse was simply to document the act of cross-dressing, limiting his aim to accumulating photographs which showed men dressing as women and vice versa.

But as the collection grew, he began to detect different themes among the images, themes which began to suggest more interesting ways of categorising and explaining cross-dressing culture.

A group of 12 cross-dressing women in America, 1912

A group of twelve cross-dressing women in America, 1912

The historical prevalence of cross-dressing

I’m not all that surprised that lots of men have enjoyed dressing up as women because I was raised on the TV sitcoms It Ain’t Half Hot, Mum, The Dick Emery Show and the Kenny Everett Show in which men routinely dressed up as women, albeit for comedic purposes.

Drag queen Danny La Rue was all over the telly in my boyhood. He was awarded an OBE. Later on came the popular success of Lily Savage and the ongoing career of her creator, Paul O’Grady, who was awarded an MBE in 2008. Somewhere in between was Julian Clary who dresses fairly modestly now but was on TV throughout the 1980s wearing in the most outrageous outfits.

As a teenager I read biographies of Oscar Wilde and his gay circle which included cross-dressers. Also accounts of the ‘decadent’ Paris of the Second Empire or the ‘decadent’ Germany of the Weimar Republic, where men dressed as woman, wore lipstick and so on, and women wore men’s clothes, smoked cigarettes. And so on and so on.

In fact it’s a strange thing about the present generation of art curators that they sometimes give the impression of thinking that they’ve invented ‘deviant’ sex – homosexuality, bisexuality and all manner of other sexual practices – as if all these things are somehow new or can ‘only now’ be brought to public attention. This ‘now it can be told’ tone was also apparent in the recent exhibitions of Queer Art at Tate Britain and Outsider Art (featuring plenty of transvestites and transsexuals) at the Barbican.

As if there aren’t records of this kind of thing happening among the ancient Greeks or among the Romans, as if we don’t have records of it in Hindu and Moghul societies, as if Shakespeare’s comedies aren’t packed with cross-dressing gender ambivalence, or as if playing with gender roles hasn’t even been recorded among tribal societies. My point is that there is good evidence for so-called ‘deviant’ sexuality having been a permanent feature of the human race for as long as we have records.

From Sappho to Sand: Historical Perspective on Crossdressing and Cross Gender (1981) This paper reviews the history of cross-dressing, commencing with the Great Mother Cult through the Greco-Roman period and Judeo-Christian times, followed by the Renaissance period up to the 19th century to illustrate that cross-gender behaviour and cross-dressing are not new phenomena but have been present since the beginning of recorded history.

What, I suppose, is new about this treasure trove of material which Sébastien Lifshitz has collected is not the fact of extensive cross-dressing – it is that it has been so extensively documented in photographs.

The photographs provide a treasure trove of incontrovertible visual evidence, as opposed to all previous accounts which are based on the more slender and unreliable evidence of written records, anecdote, autobiography etc.

What photography does that written journalism or history or ethnography can’t is to say Here we are: we were real people, we had lives like you, we were short and tall and fat and thin and had freckles and spots and imperfections, we were flesh and blood like you and this is what we liked to do. You can’t deny or block or repress us. We were here and this world is our world, too.

Themes and chapters

The most interesting thing about the exhibition is not the news that for hundreds of years men have liked dressing up as women and women dressing up as men. That in itself is boring. What I found fascinating was the themes or areas into which Lifshitz divides his material.

There are about a dozen of them, each introduced by a lengthy wall label and they are as well-ordered and thoughtful as the chapters of a book. They include ‘the New Woman’, cross-dressing in prison camps, cross-dressing in cabarets and vaudeville, the phenomenon of ‘drag queens’, cross-dressing in turn-of-the-century in American universities, in circus and travelling shows, and many more.

Cross-dressing prisoners of war

It’s the specificity of many of these sub-sets which grabs the attention. Thus anyone who didn’t realise there is a great deal of homosexual activity in any army is naive, but a wall of photos here demonstrate the existence of cross-dressing cabarets in prisoner of war camps during both the First and Second World Wars, surely a very specialised category of activity and image. It is extraordinary that prisoners were allowed to take photos of each other dressed up, and that so many of these images have survived.

French prisoners of war in the German camp Königsbrück circa 1915 © Sébastien Lifshitz Collection. Courtesy of Sébastien Lifshitz and The Photographers’ Gallery

French prisoners of war in the German prisoner of war camp Königsbrück circa 1915 © Sébastien Lifshitz Collection. Courtesy of Sébastien Lifshitz and The Photographers’ Gallery

Not a job for a woman

A section deals with the backlash against the ‘New Woman’, a term coined to describe a new vogue for independent and assertive (generally upper-class) women in the 1890s.

The usual type of panic-stricken cultural conservative predicted that if women started taking up masculine habits and activities they would soon stop menstruating, become infertile and Western civilisation would grind to a halt. You can read this kind of thing in any number of histories of feminism.

Lifshitz has found various photos which are designed as a satire on this fashion. They show women posing in the costumes of traditionally ‘male’ roles (the army etc) and are designed to show how ridiculous it is for women to do the work of men – but done in a comically stylish way which suggests the photographer was taking the mickey out of the conservative critics as much as the women. The sequence is titled ‘Women of the Future’.

Women of the Future © Sébastien Lifshitz Collection. Courtesy of Sébastien Lifshitz Collection and The Photographers’ Gallery

It’s a tiny window on the past and its popular prejudices, but also shows photographers and their audience quite capable of joking about the subject, about traditional gender roles and their ‘subversion’.

Cross-dressing weddings

Apparently, cross dressing was fairly common on women-only university campuses in America in the last decades of the nineteenth century. There were clubs in which women could openly wear mannish dress. What I’d never heard of before is that there was a fashion for carrying out wedding ceremonies with an all-female cast, many of whom – well, at least the groom – were dressed as men.

Mock wedding, United States, circa 1900 © Sébastien Lifshitz Collection. Courtesy of Sébastien Lifshitz Collection and The Photographers’ Gallery

Were these a preparation for ‘adult’ life and marriage, or an odd fashion, or a satire on heterosexual norms?

The more of these sub-sets or sub-types of cross-dressing which Lifshitz presents, the more you realise that this apparently simple topic in fact covers or brings together a surprisingly diverse range of activities, attitudes and motives.

The nineteenth century growth of bourgeois conformity

Just to step back and remind ourselves of a little social history. The mid- and later-19th century saw a hardening of gender roles and stereotypes, and a concomitant a loss of psychological and sexual flexibility.

The flamboyant costumes which men commonly wore in the 16th, 17th and 18th century and which had endured into the Regency society which young princess Victoria grew up in – all those silks, ribbons, ruffs and bows – were steadily dropped as the century progressed in favour of increasingly plain, black, stiff and constricting clothes for men, and absurdly big, complex skirts with baffles and corsets, for women.

One of the complaints against Tory Party leader and Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli was that he dressed, oiled his hair and perfumed himself like the fashionable dandy which he’d been in the 1830s, long into the 1870s when such looks and behaviour had become frowned upon.

It is only in this particular historical context, in the setting of an increasingly ‘bourgeois’ concern for strict conformity to repressive social appearances, that all manner of previous types of ‘dressing up’ increasingly came to be seen as unfashionable, then undesirable, and then began to be perceived as a threat to social norms and conventions.

Why did all this happen? The conventional explanation is that the industrial revolution made life harder, more embattled and more intense for everyone, and that this was reflected in increasingly repressive cultural and social norms.

In the 18th century there had been the landowner who occasionally came up to Town and saw a small circle of bankers or courtiers, but mostly lived in reasonable agreement with the labourers who worked his land.

All this changed and kept on changing relentlessly throughout the 19th century as the new system of factories and industrialisation swept across the country. This turned rural labourers into an embittered and impoverished urban proletariat living in hastily thrown up terraced hovels, who periodically threatened to march on London or overthrow the entire political order.

In parallel was created a new class of arriviste factory owners who took advantage of their new-found wealth to try to and compete with the land-owning aristocracy in terms of lifestyle and attitude, but nervously aware of the fragility of their wealth and status.

All the classes of Britain felt more threatened and insecure. Britain had more wealth than ever before, but for many (many businessmen, factory owners and the bankers who served them) their wealth was more precarious that the wealth generated from land – as demonstrated by successive economic depressions and banking crashes through the later 19th century. These periodic economic depressions led to the steady sequence of violent socialist revolutions on continental Europe (for example, in France in 1848 and 1870) which put the fear of God into the English bourgeoisie.

In this socio-economic context, culture was permeated by a permanent anxiety, a dread that the existing state of affairs could easily collapse, from any number of causes. (I haven’t mentioned the dark cloud of anxiety created by the writings of Thomas Malthus who speculated that, if unchecked, the poorest of the poor would breed like rabbits and swamp society in illiterate thugs – yet another source for the widespread conviction that the uncontrollable sex instinct must be bridled, restricted and channelled into only the most strict, state-endorsed practices.)

And so the upper sections of society policed their own behaviour with ever-increasing anxiety that any lapse from the impeccably high standards of behaviour they set themselves might be it, the crack, the first tremor of the great social apocalypse they all feared.

The stress and anxiety about sexual deviation which had built up throughout the century into a permanent neurosis helps to explain the viciousness of the gaol sentence given to Oscar Wilde for homosexual behaviour (two years hard labour) since the judge and his class felt that an example must be made to terrify all other homosexuals into abandoning a practice which, according to their history books, had accompanied the decline and fall of the Roman Empire.

Imperial dressing up

Speaking of empires, it might be illuminating to take a detour to the big exhibition about the British Empire and Artists which Tate Britain held a few years ago.

This had a section about imperialists dressing up. It made the point that throughout the 18th century and the first half of the nineteenth century, British men, in particular, had a fancy for ‘going native’ and dressing up in the costumes of their colonial subjects. Take, for example, this image of Captain Colin Mackenzie of the Madras Army, wearing traditional Afghan Dress, by the painter James Sant (1842).

Captain Colin Mackenzie of the Madras Army, lately a hostage in Caubool, in his Afghan Dress (1842) by James Sant (Tate Britain)

But the Indian Mutiny (or the First War of Independence as Indian historians call it) of 1857 changed all this. It introduced a new note of bitterness between ruler and ruled. After the British Government took over direct rule of India from the East India Company it enforced far more strict divisions between ‘natives’ and their colonial masters, divisions which, within a generation, had hardened into unbreakable taboos.

My point is that it wasn’t only in the realm of ‘sexuality’ that people (generally well-off, well-educated people) who had once felt free to dress up as natives or women or generally amuse themselves in fancy costumes, felt themselves, in the second half of the nineteenth century, increasingly constricted in all aspects of their behaviour. It became wise to keep quiet about their little hobby or fetish.

The strictness of the taboo reflected the profundity of the anxiety – the anxiety widespread among the ruling, law-making and judging classes that one millimetre of flexibility around these issues of ‘correct’ behaviour would open cracks and fissures, which would quickly see all the ‘civilised’ values of society snap and unravel, the natives throw off their imperial masters, the great mass of impoverished proles rise up and overthrow their frock-coated masters – just as the barbarians had overthrown Rome once it abandoned the high moral principles of the republic and declined into the Tiberius-Caligula-Nero decadence of the empire.

Dressing up, wearing lipstick – isn’t that precisely what the Emperor Nero had done!

More cross-dressing

Back to the exhibition, which continues to entertain and provoke by demonstrating the wide variety of meanings cross dressing can have.

Transvestite entertainers

Take the enormous subject of cross-dressing entertainers. The wall label usefully distinguishes between men dressing as women to entertain and the far more flamboyant tradition of burlesque, which is characterised not just by women dressing as men, but by the outrageous exaggeration of ‘female’ qualities of grandstanding, elaborate dress, vamped-up make-up and so on.

The exhibition has several sets of photos of entertainers from way back at the start of the 20th century, showing how simple, naive and innocent an activity men dressing as women can seem.

Five performers on a platform. Albumen print, Hungary, circa 1900 © Sébastien Lifshitz Collection. Courtesy of Sébastien Lifshitz Collection and The Photographers’ Gallery

It describes the different forms these entertainments took in different countries, from vaudeville, burlesque and music hall at the turn of the century, on to nightclubs and revue bars between the wars.

But the sweet innocence of the turn-of-the-century is a world away, in style, glamour and bombast, from the really outrageously flamboyant cross-dressing entertainers of the 1950s onwards, a hugely popular form of entertainment in post-War Germany and France, which in England was named ‘drag’ – hence ‘drag queens’ – which continued in English popular entertainment down to my day.

Straight or gay?

Not all these men need have been gay. Many cross-dressers have been happily heterosexual but just enjoyed dressing up as women. There is, quite obviously and supported by the evidence here, a spectrum of cross-dressing behaviours and motivations, from essentially straight men who just liked slipping into a comfortable floral dress and putting on a bit of lippy – all the way to the experience of transgender men who feel from puberty or even earlier that they are inhabiting a body of the wrong gender, and so have gone to various lengths to try and transition to the other gender.

Transgender

On this theme of tansgender – the story of Marie-Pierre Pruvot (born Jean-Pierre Pruvot, 11 November 1935) takes up a couple of walls but is well worth it.

Born a male in Algeria, Marie-Pierre became a French transsexual woman who performed under the stage name ‘Bambi’. Bambi was famous enough by 1959 to be the subject of a TV documentary. When her performing days were over she studied for a degree from the Sorbonne and became a teacher of literature in 1974.

There are several walls full of photos of her here because Lifshitz made an award-winning documentary about her in 2013. There’s no doubting that in her prime she was gorgeous, in that glamorous late 50s, early 60s way.

Bambi undertook her own gender reassignment in an amateur way, buying over the counter hormones, until she had enough money to arrange an operation and help from medical professionals. There are several photos of her nude showing well-formed ‘female’ breasts. She didn’t just want to dress as a woman; she wanted to become a woman.

My point is that the transgender experience of wanting to become another sex is completely different:

from the heterosexual who likes dressing up as the opposite sex, for a while, as a hobby or fetish
from the homosexual who is likewise happy in his or her own skin, but as part of their character or as occasional role-playing likes dressing mannishly or femininely
from the homosexual who makes a living as a flamboyant drag queen

The Washington cross-dressers

Off to one side is a room which exhibits what seem to be the photos taken and shared among a network of rather boring, homely men who lived in 1950s Washington D.C., and who liked to dress up as rather boring, homely women and meet up at each other’s houses for parties v as recorded in a trove of photos Lifshitz has come into possession of and puts on display here.

Nothing loud or garish about it. The opposite. Rather humdrum. ‘Hello Mr Peters’, ‘Hello Mr Philips’ v except that the men passing the time of the day are wearing tasteful 1950s dresses with matching handbags.

Washington cross-dressers © Sébastien Lifshitz Collection. Courtesy of Sébastien Lifshitz Collection and The Photographers’ Gallery

This sequence immediately reminded me of the section at the Barbican exhibition about the Casa Susanna, a retreat in the Catskill Mountains of New York state, created solely for cross-dressing men.

Casa Susanna explained in a Guardian article.

The more you look, the more you see.

Women dressing as men

As to women dressing as men, some were famous lesbians who made a point of their mannish attire – I can think of a number of Weimar portraits of such aggressively masculine women who cultivated a louche bohemian image.

Portrait of the journalist Sylvia von Harden by Otto Dix (1926)

But for everyone one of these ‘notorious’ literary or artistic figures, there must have been thousands of essentially ‘straight’ women at American campuses who enjoyed dressing up as men (apparently). And then millions and millions of women who were in no way homosexual but just rebelled against wearing the ridiculously encumbering outfits society had assigned to their gender at the turn of the twentieth century, and so – without ceasing to be heterosexual women – just wore more practical, less ‘feminine’ clothes.

What I’m struggling to say is that, the more you look at these photos and the more you study Lifshitz’s fascinating wall labels which draw distinctions and categories and types and flavours of cross-dressing, the more you realise that this apparently ‘simple’ activity has in fact been carried out by a staggeringly wide variety of people, over a long period of time, and for all kinds of reasons, from trivial game-playing to profound identity crisis, from student high jinks to being the basis for a prime-time television career.

The photos

The long section on Bambi is a bit of a spoiler, really, because not many of the other people on display here are quite as drop-dead gorgeous as her.

In this respect the photos serve as a reminder (like most other collections of historic photos) of the way in which sitters for photographs (and the photographers themselves) have become steadily more savvy, more stylish, more self-aware, from the embarrassing lumpishness of 1900:

Burlesque comedian Crun-Crun in Avignon, France, 1900, courtesy of Sebastien Lifshitz and The Photographers’ Gallery

to the knowing, rebel fagginess of the 1960s.

This latter photograph could have been taken today, a reminder that the world changed out of all recognition in the 60 years from 1900 to 1960, from the Boer War to the Beatles, whereas in the sixty years since then most aspects of culture – sex and drugs and rock and roll, package holidays, blockbuster movies and the ‘rebel’ look – have remained surprisingly static.

Interview with Sébastien Lifshitz

P.S. Size isn’t everything

Contrary to the impression given by the reproductions above, all of the images are quite small, certainly none of them are poster-size or painting size. The biggest ones are postcard-size being themselves old prints made from photographic film in the old-fashioned way.

Some are even smaller than that – there are whole walls of images no more than a few inches wide: for example, the iconic image of the man wearing lipstick at the top of this review is in reality only a few inches across and you have to lean right in to see it properly.

Installation view of Under Cover at the Photographers’ Gallery (photo by the author)

Somehow this makes the images seem all the more rare and precious. Not commercially-made images capable of being blown up and sensationalised, but hundreds of small, often intimate, snapshots of secret lives, secret pleasures, secret wishes and secret fantasies, preserved in this fragile format to come back and haunt our brasher, more loudmouth age.

P.S. Floof yourself

A room to one side of the exhibition contains a big fabric blob covered in felt stick-on glasses, beards, moustaches and so on. To quote the instructions:

“Soof the Floof is a genderless, gelatinous, hairy little blob. This installation invites visitors to question ideas of gender, how wear gender, how we can subvert, deconstruct and reimagine gender. Soof the Floof is large felt Floof with felt props you can mix and match and playfully challenge ideas of gender.”

The room was empty. Shame. I’d have liked to watch some gender subversion in action.

Instructions on how to floof yourself

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The New Objectivity: Modern German Art in the Weimar Republic 1918-33 edited by Stephanie Barron and Sabine Eckmann (2015)

This awesomely big, heavy hardback book is the catalogue published to accompany a major exhibition of Weimar Art held at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2015.

It contains some 150 glossy, mostly colour reproductions of a huge variety of works (mostly paintings and drawings, but also quite a few stunning art photos from the period) by nearly 50 artists associated with the Neue Sachlichkeit or New Objectivity movement. The main text is followed by 28 pages of potted biographies of all the main artists and photographers of the time. All very useful.

Die Begegnung by Anton Räderscheidt

I had only gleaned hints and guesses about many of these artists from the two books on the Weimar Culture by John Willetts which I read recently, and this book is exactly what I wanted – it goes to town with a really comprehensive overview of the different types of Neue Sachlichkeit and then – crucially – gives you plenty of examples so you can understand their common themes but diverse styles for yourself.

As I’d begun to figure out for myself in my post about New Objectivity, the phrase Neue Sachlichkeit was never a movement in the way Impressionism, Fauvism, Futurism or Dada were, never a self-conscious tag used by a cohort of allied artists. As so often, it was an attempt by critics to make sense of what was going on, in this case in post-war German art.

Weimar art came in a lot of varieties but what they all had in common was a rejection of the strident emotionalism and deliberately expressive style of German Expressionism, and a return to figurative painting, generally done to a meticulous and painterly finish. A rejection of utopian spiritualism, or apocalyptic fantasies, or the deep existential angst of the artist – and a sober, matter-of-fact depiction of the actual modern world in front of them.

Self-portrait with Ophthalmological Models by Herbert Ploberger 91928)

Self-portrait with Ophthalmological Models by Herbert Ploberger (1928)

The term Neue Sachlichkeit (as we are told in virtually every one of the book’s 14 essays, pp.6, 17-18, 105, 126, 203) was coined by Gustav Friedrich Hartlaub, the director of the Kunsthalle in Mannheim. He used it as the title for a 1925 exhibition which for the first time brought many of the new artists working in the Weimar Republic bringing together in the same exhibition space. (The introduction explains that the new trend had already been spotted by, among others, critic Paul Westheim who labelled it Verism in 1919 and tried again with New Naturalism in 1922, by Paul Schmidt who suggested Sachlichkeit in 1920, and by the critic Franz Roh whose 1925 book, Post-Expressionism: Magic Realism (which was sold to accompany Hartlaub’s exhibition when it went on tour of German galleries) presented two possible terms.)

Roh included in his book a table with two columns, in one an Expressionist characteristic, next to it its post-Expressionist equivalent. There were 22 qualities in all. According to Roh Magical Realist paintings were notable for their: accurate detail, smooth photographic clarity, painterly finish, and portrayal of the ‘magical’ nature of the rational world. They reflect the uncanniness of people and our modern technological environment. In all these ways Roh’s phrase is arguably a better descriptor for the majority of the hyper-accurate but subtly distorted and unnerving paintings of the period. But Neue Sachlichkeit stuck.

Self-portrait by Christian Schad (1927)

In fact this book makes clear that the terminology has gone on being debated, refined, rejected and refreshed right down to the present day. Maybe a word cloud or, more precisely, a phrase cloud summarise some of the ways various writers have sought to characterise it. According to various writers, New Objective paintings display:

an alienated relationship to the real… a disenchanted experiential world…detached alienated people…anti-human… treating humans like objects… lack of empathy…. excessively German objectification… a cold passion for the exactness of clichés… an aesthetics of the ugly… [according to Roh] abstraction instead of empathy… [according to critic Wilhelm Michel] the rediscovery of the ‘thing’ after the crisis of the ‘I’…

The nine essays

Of the book’s 14 essays, nine on specific academic subjects, while the last five are about the five themes which the exhibition was divided into. The nine essays are:

1. New Objectivity – by Stephanie Barron introducing us to the timeframe, the basic ideas, the origins of the term and so on.

2. A Lack of Empathy by Sabine Eckmann – looking back at 19th century Realism to conclude that the New Realism turned it inside out, concentrating on surfaces but deliberately lacking old-style empathy for the subjects.

3. Hartlaub and Roh by Christian Fuhrmeister – a dry, scholarly examination of the working relationship between the museum director Hartlaub who organised the famous 1925 show and the art critic Roh, who wrote the book which introduced Magical Realism.

4. New Women, New Men, New Objectivity by Maria Makela – Makela describes the prominence of gay and lesbian people in many Weimar portrait

Portrait of the journalist Sylvia von Harden by Otto Dix (1926)

I enjoyed this article hugely for the sheer unimaginative repetitiveness of its ‘ideas’. Here are choice snippets:

a mannish lesbian who cares little for the traditional codes of femininity… images of women who blurred clear-cut gender boundaries…women’s participation in sport undermined traditional gender roles… the 1920s independent young woman who undermined traditional gender roles… the prevalence of caricatures about New Women in the illustrated mass media considerable anxiety about the breakdown of traditional gender roles… the transgression of traditional gender codes was more threatening in Germany than elsewhere… clear-cut gender boundaries were being eroded in all industrialised countries… the horrible physical and psychic maladies [caused by the war] were intolerable for many German men whose gender identity was in tatters… sex, sexual alterity and gender ambiguity… an era of gender confusion… multiple and mobile gender positionalities…

5. The Politics of New Objectivity by James A. van Dyke. Van Dyke examines this potentially huge subject via the rather small example of the 1927 exhibition of 140 New Objective art works put on by the Berlin art dealer Karl Nierendorf for which the ubiquitous art critic, Franz Roh, wrote the programme. What comes over is that as early as 1927 both left-wing and right-wing critics had begun to turn against the style, accusing it of shallowness, fashionableness and petit-bourgeois crowd-pleasing.

6. New Objectivity and ‘Totalitarianism’ by Olaf Peters – A look at how the artists and idioms of New Objectivity lived on into Hitler’s Reich and then into the East German communist dictatorship. The left-wing artists fled Hitler immediately – Grosz most famously of all, managing to flee the country only weeks before the Leader’s accession. But plenty stayed behind and Peters shows how some of the blander ‘classicists’ managed to sustain careers, some even garnering commissions from powerful Nazi figures. Politicians and some artists for a while cooked up a new movement called New German Romanticism…

The situation in post-war East Germany was even more complex, as artists attempted either to deny their Objectivist pasts or to rehabilitate Objectivism as a precursor of the state-favoured style of Socialist Realism. Peters shows artists, critics, historians and scholars bending over backwards to try and rehabilitate some of the more extreme Objectivist works with the narrow Party line. In practice this seems to have been done by examining the artists’ origins: if he was the son of working class parents his art must be proletariat, and so on. It occurred to me that one reason why Weimar is such a popular period to write about is because it was the last time German writers and artists didn’t have to lie and feel compromised about their political beliefs. It was (briefly) a vibrantly open society. Post-war both East and West Germany were more crippled and constrained by their historical legacies.

7. Painting abroad and its nationalist baggage by Keith Holz looks at the way New Objective art was perceived abroad, by the neighbouring Czechs, by the French, but mostly by the Americans.

8. Middle-class montage by Matthew S. Wittkovsky – Wittowksy suggests that montage, among many other things, can be a way of allowing the real world back into a medium torn up by modernist experiments. In other words, a cubist effect is created but with elements which are hyper-realistic (photographs).

Metropolis by Paul Citroen (1923)

Wittowksy points out that both Christian Schad and Otto Dix made collages during their Dada years and tries to show that the collage mentality – conceiving the painting as an assemblage of disparate elements – underpins their oil paintings. He uses Schad’s self portrait (shown above) to suggest that 1. the two human figures are disconnected. 2. They are separated from the Paris skyline by some kind of gauze. 3. Even the body of the main figure is distanced by the odd translucent chemise he’s wearing. He pushes the idea of layers into history, suggesting that there is a collage-like superimposition between Schad’s painterly finish, derived from Northern Renaissance painters, and the 20th century subject matter.

9. Writing photography by Andreas Huyssen – This essay is not at all about Weimar photography but about the conflicted opinions about photography of a couple of Weimar-era writers and critics, namely the super-famous (if you’ve studied critical theory) Walter Benjamin, his colleague Siegfried Kracauer, the right-wing warrior and writer Ernst Jünger, and the Austrian philosophical novelist, Robert Musil. It’s always good to be reminded how culturally right-wing even Marxist sociologists and theorists are: thus both Kracauer and Benjamin thought that photography was just one of the mass media, or instruments of distraction, which were undermining older human skills and values. Huyssen is concerned with the fact that all these writers wrote collection of short pieces, short feuilletons, prose pieces and fragments, which they published in various collections, to try to convey the Modernist notion of the fragmented quality of life in the ‘modern’ city. (Wonder what any of them would make of life in Tokyo 2018.)

Like Benjamin’s buddy, Theodor Adorno, their brand of Marxism amounted to a continual lament for the good old values which were being overthrown by the triviality and vulgarity of the ‘entertainment industry’ promulgated by the hated capitalist system.

And yet…. when Hitler rose to power they all emigrated to the heart of capitalism, America, where they spent the war in exile happily slagging off the vulgarity of American culture while 300,000 American boys died in combat to liberate their culturally superior Europe.

Once Europe had been made safe again for Marxist philosophers they went back to Germany and set up the Frankfurt School for Social research where they spent the rest of their careers criticising the economic and legal system which made their cushy, professorial lives possible.

Criticisms

1. I have tried to make these essays sound interesting, and they certainly address interesting topics, but in every case the authors are more interested in the work of curators, critics, gallery owners, art dealers and so on than in the art. This means you have to wade through quite a lot of stuff about particular critics and how their views changed and evolved. Thus the art scholar Keith Holz gives us his interpretation of the German curator Fritz Schmalenbach’s essay on the changing ways in which the German curator Gustav Hartlaub used the expression Neueu Sachlichkeit. Which is of, well, pretty specialist interest shall we say.

The essay on how New Objectivism was perceived abroad, maybe inevitably, is more about galleries and curators and critics than about the work or ideas or style of particular artists.

The essay about New Objectivity in Eastern Germany is mainly about the efforts of various critics and theorists to incorporate it into narratives of German art which would be acceptable in a communist regime.

After a while you begin to wish you could read something about the artworks themselves.

The Dreamer by Heinrich Maria Davringhausen ( 1919)

2. You get the strong sense most of the essays are not written for a general public, for us who know little or nothing about the twists and turns of abstruse debates among art historians for the past forty years. They are not written in a spirit of introducing and explicating the art or the artists, or of giving a history of the reception of Weimar paintings abroad to the likes of you or me. No, the dominant feeling is that the essays are overwhelmingly written by art historians and scholars for other art historians and scholars.

3. Therefore all of the essays are written in the kind of semi-sociological jargon which is uniform among art scholars and historians these days, a prose style which rejoices in ‘projects’ and ‘negotiations’ and ‘situating’ debates and ‘transgressing gender norms’, the tired critical theory style which makes them not exactly incomprehensible, but simply boring.

The prose often sounds like the annual reports of company accountants, like the kind of corporate brochures I helped to write and distribute when I worked in the civil service. Here’s a sliver from Olaf Peters describing how difficult East German art historians found it to include New Objectivity in their orthodox Marxist narratives of German art.

The fear of the so-called bourgeois formalist tradition in art history indeed made it impossible for art historians in East Germany to appropriately analyse the artistic potential of New Objectivity. The GDR was hardly prepared aesthetically or theoretically to reflect adequately on the phenomenon of New Objectivity as an all-encompassing presence in the interwar period. (p.86)

Maybe that’s not long enough to give you the taste of crumbling concrete which so many of these essays leave behind on the palate. Here’s a slice of Keith Holz.

The comparative manoeuvres that art historians are enticed to make between New Objectivity and its apparent variations (or influences) outside Germany are not new, nor are they likely to subside. A more comprehensive approach might ask what is at stake in such comparisons by noting similarities between, say, American, Czech, French or Italian paintings of the 1920s and early 1930s and paintings associated with German New Objectivity. On the German-American front, this ground is well traversed, nowhere more critically or richly than in recent work by Andrew Hemingway. Based on substantial original research, Hemingway has recently reconstructed the careers of Stefan Hirsch, George Ault, and Louis Lozowick in relation to German art of the 1920s. Relating the German-born Hirsch to the public face of Precisionism, Hemingway stations the artist’s incipient career within a history of the promotion and reception of New Objectivity in the United States. For Hemingway, the link between these Precisionist-allied artists and German New Objectivity is the representational function of their artworks within international capitalism, particularly the reification of people and objects within this system. (p.93)

You will be thrilled to learn that Hemingway’s ‘trenchant interventions’ represent a ‘methodological paradigm shift’ in historical research. Phew.

My point is – I can read and understand the words, and I understand that these essays are (disappointingly) snippets and excerpts from long and specialised scholarly conversations about the historical interpretation of Weimar art among scholars and historians, living and dead, but — hardly any of it takes me one millimetre closer to the actual works of art.

Quite the opposite, fairly often as I waded through this prose I had to remind myself that the authors were talking about art at all, and not production figures for concrete pipes.

The Parents by Otto Dix (1921)

4. Repetition. Lots of short essays means lots of generalising introductions and lots of vapid conclusions. This helps to explain why they feel very repetitive. For example, the passage here the curator Hartlaub distinguished between left or verist painters (who use harsh satire, fierce colours and ugly caricature to make a political point) and right or classical artists (who take a more cool and detached view of the world) is explained in detail at least five times (pp.17, 29, 42, 126, 263). The idea that the Weimar era was one of political and economic turmoil is repeated in some form in most of the essays. The idea that capitalism is nasty and exploitative is repeated in almost all of them. The following quote from Walter Benjamin, about Albert Renger-Patzsch’s photo album, The World is Beautiful, is repeated three times:

In it is unmasked the posture of a photography that can endow any soup can with cosmic significance but cannot grasp a single one of the human connections in which it exists. (p.213)

In one long text like Walter Laqueur’s account of Weimar culture (which reads like a masterpiece of calm authority next to many of these works) basic ideas and events need only be mentioned once. In these dozen or more essays you find the same basic ideas (1920s city life was faster and more disorientating than ever before, women had more rights than before the war) being stated again and again and again.

In the wake of the war and in light of the rapid modernisation of working life, increased gender equality and sexual emancipation, and ongoing political uncertainty, artists sought to redefine their role in society. (p.260)

I wonder which decade from the last hundred and fifty years that hasn’t been true of.

Conclusions are hard enough to write at the best of times: it’s difficult to sum up the content of an essay without repeating it. It’s bad enough reading the conclusion of a single book, but reading 15 essays means reading 15 conclusions which, by their nature, tend to be very generalised: again and again they say that ‘more work’ needs to be done to properly understand or fully explore or adequately decode the multiple streams of art of the time. Just like any other time, then.

5. The fourth really irritating aspect about the essays is how many of these scholars appear to live in the 1970s as far as ‘capitalism’ is concerned. They all breezily refer to the evil affects of ‘capitalism’ as if we’re all a bit silly for not choosing one of the countless other economic systems we could be using, like… like, er… And quite a few deploy the word ‘bourgeois’ as if it still means anything. Witkovsky in particular is lavish with the expression:

The new realism could continue the avant-garde attack on bourgeois subjectivity while simultaneously addressing the incipient subjugation of all subjectivity by the seductions of capital and by political dictatorship. (p.106)
[Schad’s subjects] belong to a decadent social space removed from the normative bourgois economy of labour and domestic comforts. (p.106)
[Schad’s paintings] are montages of different social spaces. They mask the materiality of that conflict [between the different social spaces] which the photograms laid bare, but they also suggest its social dimension more directly, through the illusions of figuration. This scrambling of the separations effected by bourgeois society makes the paintings discomfiting. (p.108)
Sander, like the artists of the New Objectivity, fully inhabited the bourgeoisie. His chosen portrait locations likewise emanate a degree of comfort and intimacy typically associated with the private home, the single most vaunted bourgeois setting. (p.112)
[The photographer August Sander embarked on a project to photograph all possible job types in 1920s Germany, a project he never completed.] In the necessary incompleteness of Sander’s project lies, perversely, its greatest promise of enlightenment – a realisation that modern society is grounded in accumulation without end. Infinitude may be implicit in the foundational bourgeois idea of capital accumulation, but to put such an idea on display – and to depict it, moreover, through portraiture of the citizenry – forces a rupture with the equally bourgeois ideals of closure, separation and control. (p.113)

In short, if you like your Marxism shorn of any connection with an actual political party or programme i.e. any risk of ever being put into practice, but you still want to enjoy feeling smugly superior to ‘bourgeois’ society with its vulgar ideas of ‘capital accumulation’ and its ghastly ‘gender stereotyping’, then being a white, middle-class art historian in a state-funded university is the job for you. Your sense of irony or self-awareness will be surgically removed upon entry.

It’s not just that this anti-bourgeois, anti-capitalist view seems so rife among these art scholars now, in 2018, thirty years after the collapse of communism – it’s that they’re all based in America. America. The centre of global capitalism for the past century. Do they not own private property, cars and houses and mobile phones? Are the art galleries and colleges they work for not funded and supported by big banks and finance houses (as most exhibitions are). If they’re so disgusted by capitalism and the revolting bourgeoisie why don’t they go to a country where neither exist. North Korea is lovely this time of year. The people there are wonderfully free of the reification and alienation and objectification which make life in Southern California so unbearable.

The five thematic essays

The second part of the book consists of five thematic essays, each of which is nine or ten pages long and followed by 40 or so full colour, full page reproductions. This, then, is the visual core of the book. I hoped the essays would be a bit more general and informative. Alas no.

1. Life in the Democracy and the Aftermath of War by Graham Bader. Bader invokes the usual suspects among contemporary Marxist thinkers (György Lukács, Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer) to declare that the art of the period reflected a new level of capitalism (‘this process of capitalist rationalisation appeared to have triumphed in the interwar period’ it was ‘rationalisation run amok’, p.125). Capitalism depersonalised people, reducing them to objects with no centre, to collections of surfaces. Bodies were ‘colonised and deformed’. Lukács lamented:

capitalist rationalisation’s penetration and capture of the human body, its dismissal of the ‘qualitative essences’ of the individual subject in the process of transforming human beings into abstractions, mere numbers for a general’s war plans or a pimp’s balance sheet. (p.131, 182, 228)

Like Lukács, Kracauer:

understood industrial capitalism’s ‘murky reason’ – its faith in a totalising abstractness that has ‘abandoned the truth in which it participates… and does not encompass man‘ – as having come to colonise rather than liberate the subjects it ostensibly served.

Among all this regurgitation of 100-year-old communist rhetoric Bader makes a simple point. The war and the crushing post-war poverty left highly visible marks on people’s bodies. The streets were full of maimed soldiers and the impoverished unemployed, and also a flood of women driven by poverty to prostitution. Hence the huge number of sketches, drawings and paintings of prostitutes and war cripples among Neue Sachlichkeit artists.

Two victims of capitalism by Otto Dix (1923) According to Bader, ‘the paradigmatic couple of the age’ (p.130)

It doesn’t occur to Bader, any more than it occurred to any of the Weimar artists, that this situation wasn’t brought about by capitalism; it was the result of Germany losing the war. Their idiotic military leaders decided to take advantage of the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand to implement their long-cherished plan to knock out France in a few weeks and then grab loads of lebensraum off Russia. That resulted in a social and economic cataclysm. If lots of men were war cripples it was because they fought in a stupid war. If lots of women became prostitutes that is because Germany’s economy was brought to its knees by its leaders’ stupidity, by the fact that they were undergoing a military blockade because they lost the war.

If capitalism was always and everywhere so utterly exploitative and destructive how do you account for the experience of the 1920s in the world’s most capitalist country, America – the decade they called ‘the Roaring Twenties’, a decade of unparalleled economic growth and a huge expansion in consumer products and liberated lifestyles?

In fact the Weimar Republic experienced its golden years (1924 to 1929) precisely when it was at its most capitalistic, when it received huge loans from capitalist America and its capitalist factory owners were able to employ millions of people.

Art historians cherry pick the evidence (using a handful of paintings to represent a nation of 60 million people), quote only from a self-reinforcing clique of Marxist writers (Benjamin, Kracauer, Lukács, over and over again) and ignore the wider historical context in way which would get any decent historian sacked.

2. The City and the Nature of Landscape by Daniela Fabricius. Fabricius quotes the Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch who pointed out the fairly obvious idea that different groups of people live in different ‘nows’ i.e. city dwellers live in a more technologically and culturally advanced ‘now’ than isolated country dwellers. This leads her into a consideration of different types of ‘space’, inparticular the new suburbs which sprang up outside German cities, generally of modernist architecture, which lent themselves to stylish modern photography by the likes of Arthur Köster, Werner Mantz and Albert Renger-Patzsch.

St Georgs-Garten Housing Settlement, 1926 by Arthur Köster

Albert Renger-Patzsch published a photo album called the World is Beautiful which the egregious Walter Benjamin disliked for showing the world as beautiful and therefore not ‘problematising’ it, not subjecting it to the kind of dialectical analysis which would have shown that in fact the World Needs a Communist Revolution. Renger-Patzsch stayed in Germany during the Nazi years and was commissioned to do idealised studies of the German regions by the Nazis.

Fabricius ends her essay with a rare piece of useful information about a specific artist rather than an analysis of other art historians – by telling us a little about George Schrimpf, a self-taught painter who spent his early years bumming round south Germany, eventually getting involved with artistic and anarchist circles in Munich. All this is completely absent from his naive paintings of women in interiors with views of perfect landscapes or outside among the perfect landscapes.

On the Balcony by Georg Schrimpf (1929)

3. Man and Machine by Pepper Stetler. Stetler explores the way the word Sachlichkeit was used as early as 1902 (by architect Hermann Muthesius) to describe a no-frills, functionalist aesthetic derived from the way machines are designed, built and work. The architecture critic Adolf Behne in the 1920s tried to shift the term to refer not to a visual style but to a way of working with machines, a way for humans to interact via machines. These were just some of the people debating this word when Hartlaub used it as the title for his famous 1925 exhibition. As well as Muthesius, Hartlaub and Behne, we are also introduced to the art historian Carl Georg Heise, the art critic Wilhelm Lot, the art critic Kurt Wilhelm-Kästner, the art critic Justus Bier, the critic Walter Benjamin and the Marxist philosopher, György Lukács. Again. Maybe the editors stipulated that Benjamin, Kracauer and Lukacs had to be referenced in every essay.

Stetler doesn’t mention it but the Dadaists had already conceived all kinds of man-machine combinations, and Dix and Grosz produced some grotesque caricatures of maimed war veterans who were more false limbs, artificial eyes, springs and contraptions, than men.

But the main thrust of this piece is to introduce a selection of wonderful paintings and photos of machinery. They demonstrate the way the machinery is 1. painted in punctiliously accurate engineering detail. 2. Is often depicted isolated, clean, often seen from below, as if it is an art work placed on a plinth for aesthetic enjoyment. 3. No people, no workers, no mess. Frozen in time. The star of the machine artists is Carl Grossberg, who trained as an architect and draftsman.

The paper machine by Carl Grossberg (1934)

It is interesting to learn how systematic and methodical these German artists were: Albert Renger-Patzsch’s project was to take 100 photographs of the modern germany for The World Is Beautiful. August Sandler’s Face of our Time (1929) contains a selection of 60 portraits from the larger project, People of the 20th Century which he intended to include 600 portrait photographs. Grossberg set out to do a series of twenty-five monster paintings which would provide a survey of Germany’s most important industries (p.209). Grosz published his drawings in themed portfolios.

4. Still Lifes and Commodities by Megan R. Luke. Luke scores full marks for mentioning Walter Benjamin early on in her essay about the New Objectivity’s use of still lives, and for slipping in a steady stream of Marxist terminology: in Weimar ‘the commodity reigned supreme’; there was a ‘general cultural anxiety’. She quotes the historian Herbert Molderings who, if not a Marxist, is happy to use Marxist terminology, on the still life photos of Neue Sachlichkeit:

‘They are the modern still lifes of the twentieth century: the expression of exchange value incarnate, the detached form of the fetish character of commodities.’ (quoted p.231)

She also takes the time to explain that photographs in adverts are designed to make us want to buy the products.

Advertising seeks not to show products of our labour or need but rather to excite and choreograph a desire that has the power to overwhelm us. (p.231)

Where would we be without art scholars to guide us through the confusing modern world?

This is the third essay in a row to tell us that the photographer Albert Renger-Patzsch’s produced a photo album titled The World is Beautiful (p.236).

The only useful idea I found was that objects were somehow cleansed of all significance, hollowed out, and subjected to ‘suffocating scrutiny’. Now wonder the Walter Benjamins of this world were so deeply ambivalent about photography: it revealed the complexity of the world in a way the human eye isn’t designed to (something pointed out by Moholy-Nagy in his book on photography) and yet this new type of image runs the risk of claiming to capture or depict reality and thus – as Benjamin and Brecht emphasised – completely erasing the web of human relationships it appears amid.

If Expressionist paintings screamingly overflowed with the artist’s distraught emotions, Sachlichkeit still lives seem to have been magically drained of all passion or emotion. It is this erasure of human presence, of human touch and context, which makes so much of the photography and painting of buildings and machinery both powerfully evocative, charged with mystery and yet bereft: all at the same time.

Insulated High Tension Wires from Die Welt Ist Schon by Albert Renger-Patzsch (1928)

5. New Identities: Type and Portraiture by Lynette Roth. Amid the politically correct commonplaces (Dix’s portrait of Sylvia von Harden ’embodies the masculinised woman whose appearance challenged norms of sexual difference’), Roth brings out how a notable aspect of Neue Sachlichkeit was the interest in types. August Sander’s project to photograph 600 ‘types’ of profession and trade is the locus classicus, but the painters Grosz or Dix also offered combinations of the same ‘types’ over and again (war cripples and prostitutes throng their works).

She suggests the use of types and sterotypes was a way of addressing, sorting out, the post-war chaos. Thin ice, because the Nazis also were keen on types, notably the good Aryan and the bad Jew. And Roth definitely doesn’t mention this, but one of the easiest stereotypes in the world is the bad capitalist and the poor innocent proletarian ‘alienated’ from his work.

I am astonished how from start to finish all the art historians and scholars in this book make extensive and unquestioning use of Marxist terminology based on a fundamentally anti-capitalist worldview. On the last page she is quoting a fellow ‘scholar’ who suggests that some of Sanders’s photographs ‘challenge hegemonic bourgeois structures’.

Quite breath-taking.

Painterly finish

In 1921 Max Doerner published a popular handbook The Materials of the Artist and Their Use in Painting which provided information and guidance for artists wishing to use the techniques of the Old Masters, info about oil, tempera, fresco and other methods of artists like Jan van Eyck, Holbein, Rembrandt and Rubens.

Doerner’s book helped artists who were committed to painting works with hyper-realistic attention to detail and smooth invisible finish (compared to the deliberately obvious brush strokes of the impassioned Expressionists). The emphasis on portraiture of so many works of this era recall the portraits of Northern Renaissance painting.

It can be summed up in one word – painterliness – what Roth lists as ‘careful finish, attention to detail and smooth finish’ (p.263).

The current Van Eyck show at the National Gallery is focused round his wondrous use of a concave mirror, showing how this motif was picked up by later painters. I wonder if Herbert Ploberger is deliberately referencing it in the convex reflection in the powder case, middle left, in this painting.

Dressing Table by Herbert Ploberger (1926)

Kanoldt and O’Keeffe

Doesn’t Alexander Kanoldt’s Olveano II from 1925…

… look like Georgia O’Keeffe’s Black Mesa Landscape (1930)?

The spirit of the age. A parallel tendency towards cartoon simplification, of both landscape and colour.

Last words

While both an aesthetics of the ugly and modernist innovation dovetail with nineteenth-century Realism, interestingly enough it is the specific German mentality and political context that is seen as necessitating a new form of realism characterised by unconditional attack, excessive exposure, and radical critique transgressing the paradigm of empathy. (Sabine Eckmann, p.35)

Books & Boots