The New Objectivity (in German, Neue
Sachlichkeit), was an art movement that arose in Germany in the early 1920s
as an outgrowth of, and in opposition to,
Expressionism. The movement essentially ended in 1933 with the fall of
the Weimar Republic and the rise of the Nazis to power. The term is applied
to works of pictorial art, literature, music, and architecture.
New Objectivity in architecture, as in painting and literature, describes
German work of the transitional years of the early 1920s in the Weimar
culture, as a direct reaction to the stylistic excesses of Expressionist
architecture and the change in the national mood. Architects such as Bruno
Taut, Erich Mendelsohn and Hans Poelzig turned to New Objectivity's
straightforward, functionally-minded, matter-of-fact approach to
construction, which became known in Germany as Neues Bauen ("New Building").
The Neues Bauen movement, flourishing in the brief period between the
adoption of the Dawes plan and the rise of the Nazis, encompassed public
exhibitions like the Weissenhof Estate, the massive urban planning and
public housing projects of Taut and Ernst May, and the influential
experiments at the Bauhaus. |
