Original scientific paper
Grotesque between Expressionism and Neue Sachlichkeit
Marija Ramljak Purgar
Abstract
In the article we start from the assumption that for German expressionism the paradigmatic condition is between action and reaction. According to thetheory offered by the American theoretician Donald E. Gordon, the ways of articulation in German Expressionism are “reactive” because they possessthe characteristics of retaining the past and representing the future. We will adhere to this principle in the discussion of Neue Sachlichkeit, the approachthat follows Expressionism. According to some German theoreticians, one of the versions of expressionism – Großstadt Expressionismus – was createdby the activity of expressionist artists in the new environments of big cities in the twenties of the last century, which opens up possibilities for a newinterpretation of Neue Sachlichkeit too. The thesis that we present here is the following: based on the insight into the mentioned Expressionist ambivalence,Neue Sachlichkeit also retains ambivalence towards its source, i.e. “action” – the art of Expressionism. In such an interpretation, we used the theory of thegrotesque, which, with its ambivalences between the ironic, the ghostly, the satirical, the ugly, the surrealist, and the absurd, moves the boundaries in theperception of two seemingly separate artistic “styles”. In addition to the fact that this is a theory that with its structural-aesthetic implications inevitablytouches the “existence” of expressionism, it seems to us that, in accordance with the way in which Gordon defines expressionism (namely, by constitutingform as a consequence of content, so iconography is also a register of potential formal “reactions”), the grotesque as a “reactive” instrument andexpressive constant unites expressionism and Neue Sachlichkeit. As Gordon himself shows, the spaces between the “borders” leave room for differentrefinements: therefore the grotesque, a term that should be applied starting from an idea and not from its alleged “essence” (analogous to Gordon’s approach to expressionism), does not exist as a finished product, it is already specified by contextualizing. In that sense, the term grotesque can be understood as an aesthetic and structural category that mediates meaning through its specific position on the horizon of expectations, and some authors define it precisely from the aspect of the subconscious, “image” and “literary work”. Two members of the Neue Sachlichkeit, Otto Dix and Georg Grosz, reached the “soul of ugliness”; the first with transparent walls, “futuristic simultaneity” and caricature, and the latter with a satirical-ironic montage of the interpictorial events in two realms of reality – the grotesque and by means of classical painting. The German theoretician Paul Vogt analyzes Dix’s “passion for the ugly” sensing less destruction in it than in Grosz, and here we were tempted to parallel the caricature of the former and the montage of different areas of reality to the point of grotesqueness of the latter with Gordon’s iconographic “reactive principles”: the principle of caricature and the principle of thecontradictory opposition of two ideas. However, Dix’s Portrait of the Artist’s Parents – in Gordon’s version an expressionist work – is in this article a paradigmof the Neue Sachlichkeit worldview.
Keywords
Hrčak ID:
305306
URI
Publication date:
30.6.2023.
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