In every language there are distinctive terms that transport several levels of meaning in their density and cultural cogency.

In the word objectivity, aesthetic functionality, objectivity and the sober are combined with a possibly cold insensibility, with distance and lifeless rationality.

Heinrich Mann thus names a cultural trait in his ironic novel Der Untertan, published in 1914: "To be objective means to be German," exclaims his opportunistic protagonist Diederich Hessling in the novel Der Untertan.

Behind the actually untranslatable concept of style - objectivity or objectivité only capture part of the meaning - there is more than an aesthetic movement that permeated all artistic domains during the Weimar Republic.

"New Objectivity" expresses a zeitgeist

an attitude to life during almost a decade in which the Bauhaus gained enormous influence.

Even a Berlin comedy revue sang briskly: "There's an objectivity in the air."

A look at the face of time

The claim of the exhibition in the Center Pompidou with nine hundred exhibits is correspondingly comprehensive: in addition to painting and photography, there is also film, design, architecture and numerous documents.

The title, which initially appears awkward, gains meaningfulness through the sober ranking: “Germany/1920s/New Objectivity/August Sander” analyzes an art direction in its interaction with contemporary and cultural history.

The main work "People of the Twentieth Century" by the photographer August Sander (1876 to 1964), which portrays society in the Weimar Republic like a vivisection and categorizes it into sociological types, is interwoven with more than 230 original photographs as an exhibition within the exhibition.

It gives a powerful look at the individual people,

Even Expressionism came to a radical end with the conservative cosiness of the Wilhelmine era.

After the First World War, which ended in disaster, followed by years of Spanish flu and inflation in an insurgent political climate, emotionally charged artistic expression was no longer effective in responding artistically to the traumatic psychological experiences and rapid technological upheavals of modernity.

A cool to illusion-free realism replaced expressionism and is reflected in the paintings of Georges Grosz, Otto Dix, Max Beckmann, Christian Schad and Georg Scholz.

In 1925, the young curator Gustav Friedrich Hartlaub – and this is how the exhibition at the Center Pompidou begins – brought together fifty-two artists in a show at the Mannheim Kunsthalle, whose paintings expressed a newly emerging realistic figuration.

Hartlaub gave it the title "New Objectivity" and hit the mark: he named a style and at the same time the feeling of his time.

The curator of the Center Pompidou's modern collection, Angela Lampe, envisioned the project for this exhibition ten years ago.

Florian Ebner as head of the photography department added the idea of ​​a connection with August Sander.

The monographic Sander exhibition is now pushed into the overview show on objectivity in two diagonal lines.

Passages create visual axes and make it possible to go from the course through eight thematic areas to the Sander rooms again and again.

This creates a dialogue between Sanders frontal portraits of German society, which he tries to frame in his typology in social groups (the farmer, the woman, the estates, the artists, the big city), and the objectivity movement of this almost decade between 1925 and 1933.