Christian Schad
Encyclopedia
Christian Schad was a German painter associated with Dada
and the New Objectivity
movement. Considered as a group, Schad's portraits form an extraordinary record of life in Vienna and Berlin in the years following World War I
.
, Upper Bavaria
, to a prosperous lawyer who supported him for nearly half his life. He studied at the art academy in Munich
in 1913. A pacifist
, he fled to Switzerland
in 1915 to avoid service in World War I
, settling first in Zurich
and then in Geneva
. Both cities were centers of the Dada movement, and Schad became a Dadaist. In Zurich, he met Dadaists like Hans Arp and Hugo Ball
, and also Walter Serner, with whom he launched Sirius, a literary review. He was witness of the foundation of the famous Cabaret Voltaire
. Beginning in 1918, while living in Geneva, Schad created his own version of the Photogram
(which later was named "Schadographs" by Tristan Tzara
) where a contour picture is developed on light-sensitive platters. From 1920 to 1925, he spent some years in Rome
and Naples
. Having married Marcella Arcangeli, the daughter of a Roman professor, he settled in Naples where he attended painting and drawing courses at the art academy. In 1927 the family emigrated to Vienna
. His paintings of this period are closely associated with the New Objectivity
Movement. In the late twenties, he returned to Berlin
and settled there.
Although many sense that Schad was horrified by the Nazis, his art was not condemned in the way that the work of Otto Dix
, George Grosz
, Max Beckmann
, and many other artists of the New Objectivity
movement was; this may have been because of his lack of commercial success. He became interested in Eastern philosophy
around 1930, and his artistic production declined precipitously. After the crash of the New York stock market in 1929, Schad could no longer rely on his father's financial support, and he largely stopped painting in the early 1930s In 1937, unknown to him, the Museum of Modern Art
showed three Schadographs, given by Tristan Tzara
, in a show about Dada and Surrealism. The same year, Nazis included Schad in Great German Art, their antidote to the Degenerate Art
show.
Schad lived in obscurity in Germany through the war and after it. After the destruction of his studio in 1943 Schad moved to Aschaffenburg
. The city commissioned him to copy Matthias Grünewald
's Virgin (Stuppach, parish church), a project on which he worked until 1947. Schad continued to paint in the 1950s in Magic Realist style and returned in the 1960s to experiments with photograms. Schad's reputation did not begin to recover until the 1960s, when a couple of shows in Europe dovetailed with the rise of Photorealism
.
Schad died in Stuttgart
on February 25, 1982.
and Futurism
. During his stay in Italy he developed a smooth, realistic style that recalls the clarity he admired in the paintings of Raphael
. Upon returning to Berlin in 1927 he painted some of the most significant works of the New Objectivity. They are characterized by "an artistic perception so sharp that it seems to cut beneath the skin", according to Wieland Schmied, who calls Schad the "prototypical possessor of the 'cool gaze' which distinguishes this movement from earlier forms of realism".
In 1918 Schad began experimenting by making cameraless photographic images inspired by Cubism. In 1834 and 1835, William Henry Fox Talbot (following on the heels of Thomas Wedgewood in 1801) had originally made these cameraless images, which were prints made by placing objects onto photosensitive paper and then exposing the paper to sunlight, on his way to inventing an early photographic process (which he called Photogenic Drawing). By 1919 Schad was creating photograms from random arrangements of discarded objects he had collected such as torn tickets, receipts and rags. He is probably the first to do so strictly as an art form, preceding Man Ray and Moholy-Nagy by at least a year or two.
Schad's new imagery was constructed by taking discarded unimportant objects and arranging them. The photograms created from these arrangements had taken on a new form and meaning not considered previously. These prints were published in 1920 in the magazine Dadaphone by Tristan Tzara, who called these images 'Schadographs' to express a Dadaist desire to create art from discarded objects. Schad's descriptions of his techniques were eventually used by both Man Ray
and László Moholy-Nagy
in their more extensive explorations.
, New York; the Tate
, London; and the Neue Nationalgalerie
, Berlin. The first retrospective dedicated to him in the United States was held at the Neue Galerie
, New York, in 2003.
Dada
Dada or Dadaism is a cultural movement that began in Zurich, Switzerland, during World War I and peaked from 1916 to 1922. The movement primarily involved visual arts, literature—poetry, art manifestoes, art theory—theatre, and graphic design, and concentrated its anti-war politics through a...
and the New Objectivity
New Objectivity
The New Objectivity is a term used to characterize the attitude of public life in Weimar Germany as well as the art, literature, music, and architecture created to adapt to it...
movement. Considered as a group, Schad's portraits form an extraordinary record of life in Vienna and Berlin in the years following World War I
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
.
Life
Schad was born in MiesbachMiesbach
Miesbach is a town in Bavaria, Germany, and is the capital of the Miesbach district. The district is at an altitude of 697 metres above sea level. It covers an area of approximately 863.50 km² of alpine headlands and in 2004 had a population of 93,942. The town is located 48 km southeast...
, Upper Bavaria
Upper Bavaria
Upper Bavaria is one of the seven administrative regions of Bavaria, Germany.- Geography :Upper Bavaria is located in the southern portion of Bavaria, and is centered around the city of Munich. It is subdivided into four regions : Ingolstadt, Munich, Bayerisches Oberland , and Südostoberbayern...
, to a prosperous lawyer who supported him for nearly half his life. He studied at the art academy in Munich
Munich
Munich The city's motto is "" . Before 2006, it was "Weltstadt mit Herz" . Its native name, , is derived from the Old High German Munichen, meaning "by the monks' place". The city's name derives from the monks of the Benedictine order who founded the city; hence the monk depicted on the city's coat...
in 1913. A pacifist
Pacifism
Pacifism is the opposition to war and violence. The term "pacifism" was coined by the French peace campaignerÉmile Arnaud and adopted by other peace activists at the tenth Universal Peace Congress inGlasgow in 1901.- Definition :...
, he fled to Switzerland
Switzerland
Switzerland name of one of the Swiss cantons. ; ; ; or ), in its full name the Swiss Confederation , is a federal republic consisting of 26 cantons, with Bern as the seat of the federal authorities. The country is situated in Western Europe,Or Central Europe depending on the definition....
in 1915 to avoid service in World War I
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
, settling first in Zurich
Zürich
Zurich is the largest city in Switzerland and the capital of the canton of Zurich. It is located in central Switzerland at the northwestern tip of Lake Zurich...
and then in Geneva
Geneva
Geneva In the national languages of Switzerland the city is known as Genf , Ginevra and Genevra is the second-most-populous city in Switzerland and is the most populous city of Romandie, the French-speaking part of Switzerland...
. Both cities were centers of the Dada movement, and Schad became a Dadaist. In Zurich, he met Dadaists like Hans Arp and Hugo Ball
Hugo Ball
Hugo Ball was a German author, poet and one of the leading Dada artists.Hugo Ball was born in Pirmasens, Germany and was raised in a middle-class Catholic family. He studied sociology and philosophy at the universities of Munich and Heidelberg...
, and also Walter Serner, with whom he launched Sirius, a literary review. He was witness of the foundation of the famous Cabaret Voltaire
Cabaret Voltaire (Zürich)
Cabaret Voltaire was the name of a nightclub in Zurich, Switzerland. It was founded by Hugo Ball, with his companion Emmy Hennings on February 5, 1916 as a cabaret for artistic and political purposes. Other founding members were Marcel Janco, Richard Huelsenbeck, Tristan Tzara, and Jean Arp...
. Beginning in 1918, while living in Geneva, Schad created his own version of the Photogram
Photogram
A photogram is a photographic image made without a camera by placing objects directly onto the surface of a photo-sensitive material such as photographic paper and then exposing it to light. The result is a negative shadow image varying in tone, depending on the transparency of the objects used...
(which later was named "Schadographs" by Tristan Tzara
Tristan Tzara
Tristan Tzara was a Romanian and French avant-garde poet, essayist and performance artist. Also active as a journalist, playwright, literary and art critic, composer and film director, he was known best for being one of the founders and central figures of the anti-establishment Dada movement...
) where a contour picture is developed on light-sensitive platters. From 1920 to 1925, he spent some years in Rome
Rome
Rome is the capital of Italy and the country's largest and most populated city and comune, with over 2.7 million residents in . The city is located in the central-western portion of the Italian Peninsula, on the Tiber River within the Lazio region of Italy.Rome's history spans two and a half...
and Naples
Naples
Naples is a city in Southern Italy, situated on the country's west coast by the Gulf of Naples. Lying between two notable volcanic regions, Mount Vesuvius and the Phlegraean Fields, it is the capital of the region of Campania and of the province of Naples...
. Having married Marcella Arcangeli, the daughter of a Roman professor, he settled in Naples where he attended painting and drawing courses at the art academy. In 1927 the family emigrated to Vienna
Vienna
Vienna is the capital and largest city of the Republic of Austria and one of the nine states of Austria. Vienna is Austria's primary city, with a population of about 1.723 million , and is by far the largest city in Austria, as well as its cultural, economic, and political centre...
. His paintings of this period are closely associated with the New Objectivity
New Objectivity
The New Objectivity is a term used to characterize the attitude of public life in Weimar Germany as well as the art, literature, music, and architecture created to adapt to it...
Movement. In the late twenties, he returned to Berlin
Berlin
Berlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...
and settled there.
Although many sense that Schad was horrified by the Nazis, his art was not condemned in the way that the work of Otto Dix
Otto Dix
Wilhelm Heinrich Otto Dix was a German painter and printmaker, noted for his ruthless and harshly realistic depictions of Weimar society and the brutality of war. Along with George Grosz, he is widely considered one of the most important artists of the Neue Sachlichkeit.-Early life and...
, George Grosz
George Grosz
Georg Ehrenfried Groß was a German artist known especially for his savagely caricatural drawings of Berlin life in the 1920s...
, Max Beckmann
Max Beckmann
Max Beckmann was a German painter, draftsman, printmaker, sculptor, and writer. Although he is classified as an Expressionist artist, he rejected both the term and the movement...
, and many other artists of the New Objectivity
New Objectivity
The New Objectivity is a term used to characterize the attitude of public life in Weimar Germany as well as the art, literature, music, and architecture created to adapt to it...
movement was; this may have been because of his lack of commercial success. He became interested in Eastern philosophy
Eastern philosophy
Eastern philosophy includes the various philosophies of Asia, including Chinese philosophy, Iranian philosophy, Japanese philosophy, Indian philosophy and Korean philosophy...
around 1930, and his artistic production declined precipitously. After the crash of the New York stock market in 1929, Schad could no longer rely on his father's financial support, and he largely stopped painting in the early 1930s In 1937, unknown to him, the Museum of Modern Art
Museum of Modern Art
The Museum of Modern Art is an art museum in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, on 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It has been important in developing and collecting modernist art, and is often identified as the most influential museum of modern art in the world...
showed three Schadographs, given by Tristan Tzara
Tristan Tzara
Tristan Tzara was a Romanian and French avant-garde poet, essayist and performance artist. Also active as a journalist, playwright, literary and art critic, composer and film director, he was known best for being one of the founders and central figures of the anti-establishment Dada movement...
, in a show about Dada and Surrealism. The same year, Nazis included Schad in Great German Art, their antidote to the Degenerate Art
Degenerate art
Degenerate art is the English translation of the German entartete Kunst, a term adopted by the Nazi regime in Germany to describe virtually all modern art. Such art was banned on the grounds that it was un-German or Jewish Bolshevist in nature, and those identified as degenerate artists were...
show.
Schad lived in obscurity in Germany through the war and after it. After the destruction of his studio in 1943 Schad moved to Aschaffenburg
Aschaffenburg
Aschaffenburg is a city in northwest Bavaria, Germany. The town of Aschaffenburg is not considered part of the district of Aschaffenburg, but is the administrative seat.Aschaffenburg is known as the Tor zum Spessart or "gate to the Spessart"...
. The city commissioned him to copy Matthias Grünewald
Matthias Grünewald
Matthias Grünewald or "Mathis" , "Gothart" or "Neithardt" , , was a German Renaissance painter of religious works, who ignored Renaissance classicism to continue the expressive and intense style of late medieval Central European art into the 16th century.Only ten paintings—several consisting...
's Virgin (Stuppach, parish church), a project on which he worked until 1947. Schad continued to paint in the 1950s in Magic Realist style and returned in the 1960s to experiments with photograms. Schad's reputation did not begin to recover until the 1960s, when a couple of shows in Europe dovetailed with the rise of Photorealism
Photorealism
Photorealism is the genre of painting based on using the camera and photographs to gather information and then from this information creating a painting that appears photographic...
.
Schad died in Stuttgart
Stuttgart
Stuttgart is the capital of the state of Baden-Württemberg in southern Germany. The sixth-largest city in Germany, Stuttgart has a population of 600,038 while the metropolitan area has a population of 5.3 million ....
on February 25, 1982.
Work
Schad's works of 1915–1916 show the influence of CubismCubism
Cubism was a 20th century avant-garde art movement, pioneered by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, that revolutionized European painting and sculpture, and inspired related movements in music, literature and architecture...
and Futurism
Futurism
Futurism was an artistic and social movement that originated in Italy in the early 20th century.Futurism or futurist may refer to:* Afrofuturism, an African-American and African diaspora subculture* Cubo-Futurism* Ego-Futurism...
. During his stay in Italy he developed a smooth, realistic style that recalls the clarity he admired in the paintings of Raphael
Raphael
Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino , better known simply as Raphael, was an Italian painter and architect of the High Renaissance. His work is admired for its clarity of form and ease of composition and for its visual achievement of the Neoplatonic ideal of human grandeur...
. Upon returning to Berlin in 1927 he painted some of the most significant works of the New Objectivity. They are characterized by "an artistic perception so sharp that it seems to cut beneath the skin", according to Wieland Schmied, who calls Schad the "prototypical possessor of the 'cool gaze' which distinguishes this movement from earlier forms of realism".
In 1918 Schad began experimenting by making cameraless photographic images inspired by Cubism. In 1834 and 1835, William Henry Fox Talbot (following on the heels of Thomas Wedgewood in 1801) had originally made these cameraless images, which were prints made by placing objects onto photosensitive paper and then exposing the paper to sunlight, on his way to inventing an early photographic process (which he called Photogenic Drawing). By 1919 Schad was creating photograms from random arrangements of discarded objects he had collected such as torn tickets, receipts and rags. He is probably the first to do so strictly as an art form, preceding Man Ray and Moholy-Nagy by at least a year or two.
Schad's new imagery was constructed by taking discarded unimportant objects and arranging them. The photograms created from these arrangements had taken on a new form and meaning not considered previously. These prints were published in 1920 in the magazine Dadaphone by Tristan Tzara, who called these images 'Schadographs' to express a Dadaist desire to create art from discarded objects. Schad's descriptions of his techniques were eventually used by both Man Ray
Man Ray
Man Ray , born Emmanuel Radnitzky, was an American artist who spent most of his career in Paris, France. Perhaps best described simply as a modernist, he was a significant contributor to both the Dada and Surrealist movements, although his ties to each were informal...
and László Moholy-Nagy
László Moholy-Nagy
László Moholy-Nagy was a Hungarian painter and photographer as well as professor in the Bauhaus school. He was highly influenced by constructivism and a strong advocate of the integration of technology and industry into the arts.-Early life:...
in their more extensive explorations.
Recognition
Schad's works are now part of the collections of, among others, the Museum of Modern ArtMuseum of Modern Art
The Museum of Modern Art is an art museum in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, on 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It has been important in developing and collecting modernist art, and is often identified as the most influential museum of modern art in the world...
, New York; the Tate
Tate
-Places:*Tate, Georgia, a town in the United States*Tate County, Mississippi, a county in the United States*Táté, the Hungarian name for Totoi village, Sântimbru Commune, Alba County, Romania*Tate, Filipino word for States...
, London; and the Neue Nationalgalerie
Neue Nationalgalerie
Neue Nationalgalerie at the Kulturforum is a museum for modern art in Berlin, with its main focus on the early 20th century. It is part of the Nationalgalerie of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin...
, Berlin. The first retrospective dedicated to him in the United States was held at the Neue Galerie
Neue Galerie
The Neue Galerie New York is a museum of early twentieth-century German and Austrian art and design located at 86th Street and Fifth Avenue in New York City, United States...
, New York, in 2003.