Editing Post-expressionism (section)

=== New Objectivity and Verism ===
{{Main|New Objectivity}}

The artists most associated with the ''Neue Sachlichkeit'' today are those Hartlaub identified as 'verists'. These artists tended to oppose expressionism, but did not so much exemplify the “return to order” as much as they opposed what they saw as the political impotence of expressionist art. They sought to involve themselves into revolutionary politics and their form of realism distorted appearances to emphasize the ugly, as they wanted to expose what they considered the ugliness of reality. The art was raw, provocative, and harshly satirical.

[[Bertolt Brecht]], a German dramatist, was an early critic of Expressionism, referring to it as constrained and superficial. Just like in politics Germany had a new parliament but lacked parliamentarians, he argued, in literature there was an expression of delight in ideas, but no new ideas, and in theater a 'will to drama', but no real drama. His early plays, ''Baal'' and ''Trommeln in der Nacht'' (Drums in the Night) express repudiations of fashionable interest in Expressionism. Opposed to the focus on individual emotional experience in expressionist art, Brecht began a collaborative method to play production, starting with his ''[[Man Equals Man]]'' project.<ref>Midgley 2000, p.16</ref>

Overall, the ''verist'' critique of expressionism was influenced by [[Dadaism]]. The early exponents of Dada had been drawn together in Switzerland, a neutral country in the war, and in common cause, they wanted to use their art as a form of moral and cultural protest — shaking off not only the constraints of nationality, but also of artistic language, in order to express political outrage and encourage political action.<ref>Midgley 2000, p.15</ref> Expressionism, to Dadaists, expressed all of the angst and anxieties of society, but was helpless to do anything about it.

Out of this, Dada cultivated a “satirical hyperrealism”, as termed by [[Raoul Hausmann]], and of which the best known examples are the graphical works and photo-montages of [[John Heartfield]]. Use of collage in these works became a ''compositional'' principle to blend reality and art, as if to suggest that to record the facts of reality was to go beyond the most simple appearances of things.<ref>Midgley 2000, p.15</ref> This later developed into portraits and scenes by artists such as [[George Grosz]], [[Otto Dix]], and [[Rudolf Schlichter]]. Portraits would give emphasis to particular features or objects that were seen as distinctive aspects of the person depicted. Satirical scenes often depicted a madness behind what was happening, depicting the participants as cartoon-like.

Other ''verist'' artists, like Christian Schad, depicted reality with a clinical precision, which suggested both an empirical detachment and intimate knowledge of the subject. Schad's paintings are characterized "an artistic perception so sharp that it seems to cut beneath the skin", according to Schmied.<ref>Schmied 1978, p.19</ref> Often, psychological elements were introduced in his work, which suggested an underlying unconscious reality to life.