Huge political and social changes take place in Germany after the First World War, and these have direct effects on artistic output. The energy-charged new beginning of 1914 is answered by a sobered view of reality – and by no means only in Berlin.
In Weimar an art school – the Bauhaus – is founded that sees design as a comprehensive, life-reforming task. Oskar Schlemmer and others attempt to create a new image of the human being here. In the west the Cologne Progressives form around Franz Wilhelm Seiwert, Gerd Arntz and Heinrich Hoerle, whose extremely simplified formal language is an attempt to depict social circumstances and injustices with analytic clarity. In Düsseldorf the Young Rhineland is umbrella to such contrasting artists as Otto Dix, with his sharply detailed, caustic realism, and Jankel Adler, trained at the school of arts and crafts in Wuppertal-Barmen, whose poetic portrayals influenced by cubism deal with questions of Jewish identity.
Finally Carl Grossberg, born in Wuppertal-Elberfeld and trained in painting at the Bauhaus by Lyonel Feininger, devotes himself not to the human being but to the austere forms of modern cityscapes and factories.
