November 24, 2006

Glitter and Doom


The Metropolitan Museum is displaying a must see exhibition of portraits from the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) movement. The show is titled 'Glitter and Doom: German Portraits from the 1920s' and runs through February. The New York Times ran a nice review of the exhibition this weekend rightfully highlighting the Otto Dix portrait above titled "Lady With Mink and Veil". The review speculates "the image may depict one of the many war widows who turned to prostitution to keep afloat."

A book of the exhibition is available from the Yale University Press.

The artistic culture of Weimar Germany always fascinates and looking at the images one always wonders what happened to this rowdy saturated world; what were the stories of the sitters in the years that followed? Many reviewers then and now, call these portraits grotesque, but I wonder if the artists artists saw them that way or if they were celebrating the extreme in the manner of Almodovar or Diane Arbus, only in a more extreme political climate...

More reviews: New York Magazine, DP, CultureGrrrl

posted at 10:37 PM by raul

Filed under: art

Comments:

11/25/06 09:07 AM

I failed as a New Yorker (I lasted 14 months), but when I see postings like this I wish I had stuck it out.

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