The canvas and the camera in Weimar Germany: A New Objectivity in painting and photography of the 1920s

This dissertation re-evaluates Neue Sachlichkeit painting and New Objectivity photography in relation to visual technologies of observation in 1920s Germany. Specifically, I relate the critical, disciplinary, and taxonomic systems of representation in Weimar artistic practice to the clinical gaze of modern science. I propose that the emergence of this empirical aesthetic of sachlichkeit correlates to cultural and economic values of technological efficiency in German society and anxieties concerning postwar national identity.;Chapter One combines careful scrutiny of Neue Sachlichkeit paintings with close readings of the movement's criticism. My analysis relates the renewal of realism in interwar German painting practice to broad visual and societal changes wrought by wartime devastation and postwar recovery. My discussion demonstrates that pictorial lucidity, which I define as clarity of figuration, underpins both the ruthless social critiques of "left-wing" Neue Sachlichkeit painters and the idealizing, sentimental depictions of "right-wing" Neue Sachlichkeit painters. Chapter Two revisits Otto Dix's paintings of the wounded war veteran and his critical realist portraits. My investigation links his depictions of somatic deformity and individual character to newly cultivated visual and ideological mechanisms of social observation. The pictorial lucidity of Dix's work, I argue, ties his scrutiny of the body to both venerated aesthetic conventions and "objective" scientific taxonomies of modern biomedical representation.;Chapter Three investigates New Objectivity photographic techniques and theoretical publications that emphasized the medium's formal clarity and indexical quality. Sharp focus, high contrast, close-ups, and unexpected perspectives deliberately countered the compositional style and subject matter of Kunstphotographie. My analysis asserts that a renewed interest in facticity and precision anchored the movement's conceptual matrix of technological innovation, objectivity, and veracity. Chapter Four addresses photographs by Karl Blossfeldt and Albert Renger-Patzsch: derived from industrial and scientific representational codes, their images sought to interrogate architectonic structures of nature as models for art and technology. By relating their photographic methods to social, cultural, and scientific narratives of rationalization and regeneration, I conclude that Weimar era visuality emerged from a desire to represent truths about individual and collective postwar experience and identity.