Angela Lampe: The Cold Order: A Review of Exhibition Germany/1920s/ New Objectivity/August Sander - Sociological Aspects of the Interwar Years

In summer 2022, the Centre Pompidou devoted a major exhibition to the art and culture of the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) in Germany, with the aim of re-reading the history of cultural production in the Weimar Republic, under the keyword “sachlich”, whose difficult translation into other languages points to the special nature of the concept. In addition to painting and photography, the project brought together architecture, design, film, theater, literature and music. Photographer August Sander’s masterpiece, Menschen des 20. Jahrhunderts (People of the 20th Century), established the motif of a cross-section through a society as a structural principle, as an “exhibition within an exhibition”. Together, these two perspectives opened up a broad panorama of German art, focusing in particular on the years 1925–1929, when Germany enjoyed a degree of economic stability. An aim was to highlight the dialectic between, on the one hand, a fascination with the achievements of the modern age (technological progress, standardization, etc.), and, on the other, a critique of cold, alienating functionalization. For the Hungarian film theorist Béla Balázs, who lived in Berlin between 1926 and 1931, the dispossessed human being had become a mechanized part of a system hostile to life. In a society increasingly under the sway of the capitalist imperative of rationalization, the transformation of man into a passive thing, his reification, became an essential feature of this new world, indeed a prerequisite for its existence. Based on the artworks in the exhibition and its two-part structure, this lecture seeks to shed light on the ambiguities of this new cold order, which, in the interwar years, particularly conditioned life in German metropolises. As Robert Musil summed up in 1930 in his great novel Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (The Man Without Qualities), “One has gained reality and lost dreams.”

Angela Lampe began her career at the Kunsthalle Bielefeld in Germany after a PhD in art history at the Sorbonne University Paris. Since 2005 she is a curator of the modern art collections at the Musée National d’Art Moderne/ Centre Pompidou where she organized a large number of international exhibitions, including “Art and Nature. A century of biomorphism” (Foundation La Caixa, Spain, 2023-2025) Alice Neel, Un regard engagé (2022); Allemagne / Années 1920 / Nouvelle Objectivité / August Sander (with Florian Ebner 2022); Chagall, Lissitzky, Malévitch - the Russian Avant-Garde at Vitebsk 1918-1922 (Centre Pompidou, Jewish Museum New York, 2018); Paul Klee. L’ironie à l’œuvre (2016); Robert Delaunay. Rhythmes sans fin (2014); Vues d’en haut (Centre PompidouMetz, 2013); Edvard Munch, Modern Eye (with Clément Chéroux, Centre Pompidou, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, Tate Modern 2011-2012) ; Marc Chagall et l’avant-garde russe (Japan, Grenoble, Toronto, 2011). She regularly contributes to international catalogues and symposia and is the author of three artist monographs (Kandinsky, Chagall, Rouault). She is currently preparing two exhibitions on Kandinsky, focused on music for the Musée de la Musique, Philharmonie, Paris (2025) and on his iconographic sources for the Lille Métropole Musée d’art moderne (2026).