Stuttgart's art museum shows portraits of the New Objectivity.

NBeing eu was tiring. The women of the Weimar Republic were now allowed to drink in public, smoke, wear trousers and have their hair cut to a hair length that was then reserved for men. They even let them vote. Nevertheless, they were torn between lived modernity and gender roles that they believed had been overcome. The fact that Hanna Nagel had to go through this painful experience is documented in a self-portrait from 1929. It shows the artist as a worried-looking young mother with appropriate clothing and the same hairstyle. She wraps her chubby arms protectively around an embryo that is mysteriously located outside her body in a transparent cylinder. Her peers, many of whom have lined up behind her and all embody the style-defining independence and extravagance of the so-called New Woman, present a completely different picture.

Nagel's small lithograph demonstrates the human dilemma of having to conform to a type and thus raises awareness of the ambivalence of the theme that is currently the focus of the exhibition “Look at the People!” at the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart: the one preferred by New Objectivity artists “Type portrait” that focuses on the “typical” representatives of the groups that are important for a changing society.

The fact that progress had a great chance between the two world wars is demonstrated by unashamed depictions of same-sex love. Christian Schad, for example, put “Loving Boys” on paper in the form of two half-nudes fused together in a kiss to form one figure. In addition to the New Woman, there was also the New Man. In Lotte B. Prechner's painting “Epoche” he appears as a colored intellectual who stands in front of a stack of books in a white shirt, tie and suit trousers, thereby providing a remarkably early example of the artistic reflection of social diversity. The fact that National Socialism would soon destroy this diversity and that the painter saw this coming is indicated by a banner with relevant snippets of words in the left half of the picture.

The increasing self-confidence of women is expressed not least among artists. Kate Diehn-Bitt shows herself as an androgynous creature with a straight spine and a brush in her hand, as only male masters have done before her. The worker also comes into the spotlight, who is commonly imagined as a berserker with a square forehead, wide nose, prominent chin and muscular upper arms. Maxe Bartel, who modeled for painting students at the Dresden Academy, fulfilled these characteristics so well that he is now known by name. His face, which served either as a model for an “unemployed dock worker” or an “unemployed coal miner,” is seen five times in the exhibition.

Otto Dix took the new-objective tendency to express human character traits through a often exaggerated depiction of physiognomic peculiarities to the point of caricature. The fact that it shows a Jewish jeweler with a waist constricted by a “men's belt” and claw-like fingernails serves not only anti-Semitic but also homophobic sentiments. His “Portrait of the journalist Sylvia von Harden” could also be called derogatory. You can see a gaunt, bad-tempered woman with a monocle, which suggests the gender swap in costume and equipment that was popular with lesbian women in the 1920s. Harden can be seen again in one of August Sanders' famous black-and-white photos, which is hardly imaginable in a more objective way. There she appears as an elegant creature with a clearly cut face.

In times when artificial intelligence is taking over the typification of people, it is only logical that Stuttgart is not limited to a look back at art history, but has also invited a young contemporary artist, Cemile Sahin. Her installation entitled “Alpha Dog” transforms the upper exhibition level into an irritating environment: a robot dog that moves seemingly aimlessly through the center is controlled by an algorithm, as is the selection and alteration of the images recorded by the camera integrated in its head and transferred to three screens in oversized smartphone format. Sahin thus gives an extremely confident form to the excessive willingness to publish personal data on social networks and the idea of ​​“AI” also being used for military purposes.

Aesthetically, the three-level tour is a delight. In Stuttgart, additional “context boards” with historical documents and displays with texts in simple language draw attention to the fine line that runs between the typification of people on the one hand and discrimination and surveillance on the other. At the same time, the exhibition borrows its title from a guide that was published by the Stuttgart publishing house in 1930. It was written by the doctor Gerhard Venzmer, who later was a member of the NSDAP and the SA. His publication is based on Ernst Kretschmer's constitutional psychology, which based on a person's external appearance his character traits and sowed the seeds for the racial ideology of National Socialism. At that time, Kretschmer became a judge at the “Hereditary Health Court” and ruled on the forced sterilization of mentally and physically disabled people. It is incomprehensible that the curators did not deal with this more critically and instead turned the book title into a harmless-sounding exhibition motto.

Look at the people! In the Stuttgart Art Museum; until April 14, 2024. The catalog costs 40 euros.