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Lot Essay
‘The people want kitsch… it will be the task of the youngest generation to let ‘art-for-art’s-sake’ fall by the way and to bridge the opposition between art, on the one hand, and kitsch on the other. In striving for a form that will be understood by the general public, one must above all renounce one’s own anxiously guarded “individuality”.’
(Georg Scholz, Karlsruhe Tagesblatt, 1922)
Georg Scholz was one of the leading pioneers of what has become known as the Verist wing of the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) tendency that emerged in Germany in the early 1920s. ‘There have to be new, interesting (!) pictures that will fill with objectivity and concreteness the space reclaimed by Expressionism’ Scholz argued in 1922, ‘pictures completely unconcerned with Impressionist or Expressionist ‘achievements’ and descriptions of “quality”’, pictures that, in a clear and seemingly objective and sober manner, can be understood by everyone. (Georg Scholz, ‘Kunst und Kitsch,’ in Kunst in Karlsruhe, 1900-1950 exh. cat., Karlsruhe: 1981, pp. 75-76.)
Kleinstadt bei Tag (Small Town by Day), is one of the great series of oil paintings depicting small town caricatures that Georg Scholz produced between 1919 and 1923 and in which, under the guise of just such a clean, clear-cut and objective style of painting, he attacked the bourgeois and Nationalist ideals of the small German town and the pleasures and orderliness of life therein.
On his return to Germany from the Front at the end of the First World War, Scholz, tired and hungry, had attempted to buy something to eat for himself and his family from a farmer living in such a community. The heartlessness of the farmer, who in response to Scholz’s request had pointed the artist in the direction of his compost heap, clearly rankled, and led ultimately to the creation of Scholz’s most famous painting, his Industriebauern of 1920. This work, which Scholz exhibited at the International Dada Fair in Berlin that same year, was, in turn, followed by a number of paintings directly critical of the selfishness and petty-minded values of the petit-bourgeois and other small-town inhabitants.
Of these, Kleinstadt bei Tag along with its companion-piece Kleinerstadt bei Nacht (now in the Kunstmuseum Basel) is one of the finest and most comprehensive examples, being an attempt to provide, through the guise of an objective overview, an insight into all the evils inherent to such a small rural town by both day and by night. It is, in many respects an expansion of Scholz’s 1921-22 painting of a village Veterans Association that had depicted the pompous, self-important, corrupt and disturbingly Nationalist members of a local Veterans society set amidst a kitsch, toy-town-like German village, which they clearly regarded as their own play-set.
Appearing to show the apparently ordered, model-train-set-type world of a small town in the clear light of day, Kleinstadt bei Tag is riddled with suggestions of the all the sinister and criminal events that are subsequently shown to be taking place within it by night in its companion-painting, Kleinerstadt bei Nacht. From the overt enjoyment that the fat butcher appears to take in his work to the courteous visit of the local undertaker or the old grandma hurrying to the outhouse, something too is clearly rotten in this apparently model town.
(Georg Scholz, Karlsruhe Tagesblatt, 1922)
Georg Scholz was one of the leading pioneers of what has become known as the Verist wing of the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) tendency that emerged in Germany in the early 1920s. ‘There have to be new, interesting (!) pictures that will fill with objectivity and concreteness the space reclaimed by Expressionism’ Scholz argued in 1922, ‘pictures completely unconcerned with Impressionist or Expressionist ‘achievements’ and descriptions of “quality”’, pictures that, in a clear and seemingly objective and sober manner, can be understood by everyone. (Georg Scholz, ‘Kunst und Kitsch,’ in Kunst in Karlsruhe, 1900-1950 exh. cat., Karlsruhe: 1981, pp. 75-76.)
Kleinstadt bei Tag (Small Town by Day), is one of the great series of oil paintings depicting small town caricatures that Georg Scholz produced between 1919 and 1923 and in which, under the guise of just such a clean, clear-cut and objective style of painting, he attacked the bourgeois and Nationalist ideals of the small German town and the pleasures and orderliness of life therein.
On his return to Germany from the Front at the end of the First World War, Scholz, tired and hungry, had attempted to buy something to eat for himself and his family from a farmer living in such a community. The heartlessness of the farmer, who in response to Scholz’s request had pointed the artist in the direction of his compost heap, clearly rankled, and led ultimately to the creation of Scholz’s most famous painting, his Industriebauern of 1920. This work, which Scholz exhibited at the International Dada Fair in Berlin that same year, was, in turn, followed by a number of paintings directly critical of the selfishness and petty-minded values of the petit-bourgeois and other small-town inhabitants.
Of these, Kleinstadt bei Tag along with its companion-piece Kleinerstadt bei Nacht (now in the Kunstmuseum Basel) is one of the finest and most comprehensive examples, being an attempt to provide, through the guise of an objective overview, an insight into all the evils inherent to such a small rural town by both day and by night. It is, in many respects an expansion of Scholz’s 1921-22 painting of a village Veterans Association that had depicted the pompous, self-important, corrupt and disturbingly Nationalist members of a local Veterans society set amidst a kitsch, toy-town-like German village, which they clearly regarded as their own play-set.
Appearing to show the apparently ordered, model-train-set-type world of a small town in the clear light of day, Kleinstadt bei Tag is riddled with suggestions of the all the sinister and criminal events that are subsequently shown to be taking place within it by night in its companion-painting, Kleinerstadt bei Nacht. From the overt enjoyment that the fat butcher appears to take in his work to the courteous visit of the local undertaker or the old grandma hurrying to the outhouse, something too is clearly rotten in this apparently model town.