Glitter and Doom: German Portraits from the 1920s

In the 1920s Germany was in the grip of social and political turmoil: its citizens were disillusioned by defeat in World War I, the failure of revolution, the disintegration of their social system, and inflation of rampant proportions. Curiously, as this important book shows, these years of upheaval were also a time of creative ferment and innovative accomplishment in literature, theater, film, and art.

Glitter and Doom is the first publication to focus exclusively on portraits dating from the short-lived Weimar Republic. It features forty paintings and sixty drawings by key artists, including Otto Dix, Max Beckmann, and George Grosz. Their works epitomize Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), in particular the branch of that new form of realism called Verism, which took as its subject contemporary phenomena such as war, social problems, and moral decay. Subjects of their incisive portraits are the artists own contemporaries: actors, poets, prostitutes, and profiteers, as well as doctors, lawyers, businessmen, and other respectable citizens. The accompanying texts reveal how these portraits hold up a mirror to the glittering, vital, doomed society that was obliterated when Hitler came to power.

During the first half of the 19th century, the open window emerged as a consistent motif in German, Danish, French, and Russian painting and drawing. Rooms with a View is the first book to explore this intriguing theme in European art, with its Romantic intimations of unfulfilled longing and its associated qualities of poetry, luminosity, and interiority.

Artists depicted this intangible mood with images of contemplative figures in hushed, sparsely furnished rooms; painters diligently at work in their studios; simple, serene displays of light entering a chamber; and windows as the focal point of views in their own right. Rooms with a View features forty oils and thirty works on paper by both well-known and largely undiscovered artists, including Caspar David Friedrich, Carl Gustav Carus, Georg Friedrich Kersting, Adolph Menzel, Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg, Martinus Rørbye, Jean Alaux, Léon Cogniet, and Fyodor Petrovich Tolstoy.

Sabine Rewald is Jacques and Natasha Gelman Curator, Department of 19th-Century, Modern, and Contemporary Art, at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.