Material Modernity explores creative innovation in German art, design,
and architecture during the Weimar Republic, charting both the rise of
new media and the re-fashioning of old media. Weimar became famous for
the explosion of creative ingenuity across the arts in Germany, due to
experiments with new techniques (including the move towards abstraction
in painting and sculpture) and inventive work in such new media as paper
and plastic, which utilized both new and old methods of art production.
Individual chapters in this book consider inventions such as the camera
and materials like celluloid, examine the role of new materials
including concrete composites in opening up fresh avenues in the plastic
arts, and relate advances in the understanding of color perception and
psychology to an increased interest in visual perception and the latent
potential of color as both architectural ornament and carrier of
emotional force in space.
While art historians usually argue that experimentation in the Weimar
Republic was the result of an intentional rejection of traditional modes
of expression in the conscious attempt to invent a modern art and
architecture unshackled from historic media and methods, this volume
shows that the drivers for innovation were often far more complex and
nuanced. It first of all describes how the material shortages
precipitated by the First World War, along with the devastation to
industrial infrastructure and disruption of historic trade routes,
affected art, as did a spirit of experimentation that permeated interwar
German culture. It then analyzes new challenges in the 1920s to artistic
conventions in traditional art modes like painting, sculpture, drawing,
architecture, textiles, and print-making and simultaneously probes the
likely causes of innovative new methods of artistic production that
appeared, such as photomontage, assemblage, mechanical art, and
multi-media art. In doing so, Material Modernity fills a significant
gap in Weimar scholarship and art history literature.