Quick Facts
Born:
June 22, 1897, Würzburg, Bavaria [Germany]
Died:
September 27, 1966, Wamel Dorf, Über Soest, West Germany (aged 69)

Albert Renger-Patzsch (born June 22, 1897, Würzburg, Bavaria [Germany]—died September 27, 1966, Wamel Dorf, Über Soest, West Germany) was a German photographer whose cool, detached images formed the photographic component of the Neue Sachlichkeit (“New Objectivity”) movement.

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. In his book Die Welt ist schön (1928; “The World Is Beautiful”), he showed images from both nature and industry, all treated in his clear, transparent style. Such images were closely related to the paintings of the Neue Sachlichkeit movement of painters, who created detached and literal renderings of reality that were so extreme that they produced an eerie effect.

In the early 1930s, Renger-Patzsch taught photography. From the 1940s until his death, he focused on his own projects, working as a freelance photographer and publishing his photographs. His later subjects included natural landscapes, industrial landscapes (Eisen und Stahl, 1930), trees (Bäume, 1962), and stones (Gestein, 1966).

This article was most recently revised and updated by Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Neue Sachlichkeit

German art movement
Also known as: Magic Realism, New Objectivity
Quick Facts
Date:
1920 - 1930

Neue Sachlichkeit, (German: New Objectivity), a group of German artists in the 1920s whose works were executed in a realistic style (in contrast to the prevailing styles of Expressionism and Abstraction) and who reflected what was characterized as the resignation and cynicism of the post-World War I period in Germany. The term was fashioned in 1924 by Gustav F. Hartlaub, director of the Mannheim Kunsthall. In a 1925 exhibition assembled at the Kunsthalle, Hartlaub displayed the works of the members of this group: George Grosz, Otto Dix, Max Beckmann, Georg Schrimpf, Alexander Kanoldt, Carlo Mense, Georg Scholz, and Heinrich Davringhausen.

Various trends and styles have been noted within Neue Sachlichkeit. Three subdivisions are sometimes proposed. The Veristic includes the socially critical (and frequently bitter) works of Grosz, Dix, and the early Beckmann. The Monumental, or classical, is represented by Schrimpf, Kanoldt, Mense, and Davringhausen, whose paintings displayed smooth, cold, and static qualities, partially derived from the Italian pittura metafisica (see Metaphysical painting); the term Magic Realism, one of the names sometimes applied to the entire Neue Sachlichkeit movement, best describes the style of these particular painters. Finally, the Rousseau school includes works by Walter Spiess and Scholz, for example, which are deliberately naive, emulating the style of the French painter Henri Rousseau.

Although many Neue Sachlichkeit artists continued working in representational styles after the 1920s, the movement itself ended with the rise of Nazism.

Color pastels, colored chalk, colorful chalk. Hompepage blog 2009, arts and entertainment, history and society
Britannica Quiz
Ultimate Art Quiz