Grossberg’s Realism
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: The German artist Carl Grossberg produced pictures of machinery and architecture from the 1910s until his death in 1940. Precise, realist, yet often dreamlike, his pictures – associated with the Neue Sachlichkeit – are presented here as dynamic responses not only to recent artistic developments but also to key questions about manual and intellectual labor in an environment increasingly given to technological rationalization. Because Grossberg’s detailed pictures rarely portray humans, his work has been said to affirm the prerogatives of Weimar-era capital and to simply catalogue its dehumanizing effects. But he instead reveals the inadequacy of such critical analytics, crafting a realism based on an unstable synthesis of old and new techniques, of human and technological capacities.
Author: Bucciero, Joe
Language: English
Subfield: Visual Arts and Performing Arts
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7115683441
FWCI:
Cites:
Cited by:
Related to: