What is New Objectivity?
Originally called Neue Sachlichkeit, the New Objectivity was an artistic movement that arose in Germany during the Weimar Republic (1918-1934) which characterized German painting and architecture as well as producing exciting and innovative results in photography.
Although principally describing a tendency in German painting, the term took a life of its own and came to characterize the attitude of public life in Weimar Germany as well as the art, literature, music, and architecture created to adapt to it. Rather than some goal of philosophical objectivity, it was meant to imply a turn towards practical engagement with the world—an all-business attitude, understood by Germans as intrinsically American.
Albert Renger-Patzsch
Albert Renger-Patzsch was a German photographer whose cool, detached images formed the photographic component of the Neue Sachlichkeit (“New Objectivity”) movement. He was born on June 22, 1897, Würzburg, Germany and died on September 27, 1966, Soest, Germany. Renger-Patzsch experimented with photography as a teenager. After serving in World War I, he studied chemistry at Dresden Technical College. In 1920 he became director of the picture archive at the Folkwang publishing house in Hagen.
In 1925 Renger-Patzsch began to pursue photography as a full-time career as a freelance documentary and press photographer. He rejected both Pictorialism, which was in imitation of painting, and the experimentation of photographers who relied on startling techniques. In his photographs, he recorded the exact, detailed appearance of objects, reflecting his early pursuit of science. He felt that the underlying structure of his subjects did not require any enhancement by the photographer.
Karl Blossfeldt
Karl Blossfeldt was a German photographer and sculptor. He is best known for his close-up photographs of plants and living things, published in 1929 as Urformen der Kunst. He was inspired, as was his father, by nature and the ways in which plants grow, which lead him to participate in the ‘New Objectivity’ movement. He was born on June 13, 1865, Schielo, Germany and died on December 9, 1932, Berlin, Germany.
In Berlin from the late nineteenth century until his death, Blossfeldt’s works were primarily used as teaching tools and were brought to public attention in 1929 by his first publication Urformen der Kunst (Art Forms in Nature). Published in 1929 when Blossfeldt was 63 and a professor of applied art at the Vereinigte Staatsschulen für freie und angewandte Kunst, Urformen der Kunst quickly became an international bestseller and in turn, made Blossfeldt famous almost overnight. The abstract shapes and structures in nature that he revealed impressed his contemporaries.
