New Anthology: Modernist Aesthetics in Transition
Modernist Aesthetics in Transition: Visual Culture in the Weimar Republic & Nazi Germany, anthology.
Deborah Ascher Barnstone and Donna West Brett, eds., Modernist Aesthetics in Transition: Visual Culture in the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany has hit the press and is available for preorders from Bloomsbury Academic, 2024. Authors: Erin Maynes, Ben Seyfert, Donna West Brett, Birgit Lang and Eliza Coyle, Camilla Smith, Patrick Roessler, Deborah Ascher Barnstone, Peter Chametzky, Mila Ganeva, Nina Lübbren and Fae Brauer.
How did German aesthetic values change during the Weimar Republic and after its immediate collapse at the beginning of the National Socialist period? Contrary to conventional narratives that depict modernist aesthetics as static, shaping principles of modern art and design, this volume argues for their complexity and ever-shifting nature. Illuminating the vital exchanges that occurred across multiple art forms during a period of unmatched cultural activity, this multi-disciplinary volume explores the cultural transition between Weimar- and National Socialist-era Germany and offers a fresh perspective on the fate of modernism during a time of censorship and social stigma.
Featuring essays on architecture, painting, photography, film, sculpture, cabaret, typography, and commercial design, the volume explores competing and comparable themes across German art from 1919-1945 and addresses how modern approaches like New Vision coexisted with more traditional and established artistic modes.
Such visual complexity is evident from the volume's eclectic coverage: these include 'sexology' and eroticism, visual grammar in typography and architecture, the reception of Weimar art in the National Socialist period, and the formation and transformation of queer and Jewish identities. The volume encompasses subjects as different as shadow in the animated films of Lotte Reininger, filmic adaptations of Heinrich Zille's social commentary in the 1920s, the photography of László Moholy-Nagy, and depictions of female sexuality in Magnus Hirschfeld's oeuvre. By bridging multiple artistic fields, this highly interdisciplinary work provides a fresh perspective on the ever-changing art and aesthetic principles of early-20th-century Germany.
Endorsements:
Uniting leading scholars in the Weimar avant-garde and Nazi modernism, this timely collection helps us better understand the continuities as much as the disruptions between the periods' aesthetic styles and schools. Such precise analyses of celebrated works and forgotten resistance require us to challenge many long-held assumptions about artists caught in turbulent political times. Randall Halle, Klaus Jonas Professor of German Film and Cultural Studies, University of Pittsburgh
This marvellous anthology counters conventional wisdom that cultural production in the Weimar and Nazi eras was either traditional and conservative or radically modernist. A must-read for all scholars of German history and visual culture in the 1920s and 1930s, it proves that there were often significant aesthetic overlaps between old and new forms of art in these turbulent times. Maria Makela, Professor Emerita History of Art and Visual Culture, California College of the Arts
Germany's transition from the Weimar Republic to National Socialism is too often posited as a total break with the past. With its stellar contributions from a global cast of scholars, this book offers a new narrative through outstanding, in-depth case studies drawn from diverse spheres including art, architecture, film, sculpture, cabaret, erotic photography, and colour theory. Elizabeth Otto, Professor Modern and Contemporary Art History, The University at Buffalo.
Image: Manassé, Die Retoucheurin, Das Magazin, 6, 1929/30, H.64, December, 4259. arthistoricum.net