Christian Schad (1894–1982) — German avant-garde artist, graphic artist, photographer, representative of the new materiality - an artistic movement that became especially popular in 1920s in Germany, and opposed to the seemingly hopelessly outdated and naive romanticism and expressionism, which was not accepted by everyone. At that time, many Germans deeply experienced the defeat in World War I, felt themselves a “lost generation”, who lost faith in the highest achievements and spiritual guidelines. Artists of this direction tried to avoid romanticism and idealization of reality, to show things and phenomena as they really were, but at the same time rejected the “crude naturalism” inherent in many realistic works of the past and looked for new ways of depicting reality.
Two female friends
Shad's signature style was the indifferent and completely impartial faces of the characters in his paintings, as if the person depicted is just a gear, a component part of the picture, not its basis, and his emotions and psychological state can be neglected. Even the women in Shad's paintings, whether clothed or nude, almost never smile, as if they were in a passport photo.
Lotte
But this emotionlessness and quiet contemplation has its own unusual appeal, the artist's talent is felt immediately, and some paintings, such as the famous “Maika”, resemble outstanding acting, when the image is revealed through the inner tension and some little-noticed at first glance details, rather than through the rapid display of emotions and expressiveness.
Maika
Schad was born into a fairly prosperous family: his father was a prominent lawyer, and among his relatives was one of the prominent representatives of German Romanticism, the painter Carl Faure, who noticed a certain artistic ability in his grandnephew and advised him to take up painting. Schad entered the Munich Art Academy, but the First World War broke out, and Schad was not too eager to die in the trenches for purposes alien to him and to avoid mobilization moved to the Swiss Zurich.
There, Schad began painting in the direction of the then fashionable cubism, such as a portrait of Walter Serner, a popular avant-garde artist.
Portrait of Walter Serner
Serner generally liked the portrait, but after playing with Cubism, Schade decided to return to more traditional figurative painting. This may have been due to his joining the circle of Dadaists Hans Arp, Walter Serner, Tristan Tzar and other writers and poets who, like Schad, were fleeing the horrors of the First World War in quiet Switzerland and creating works that were deliberately meaningless and ideologically devoid in opposition to the then prevailing official viewpoint on the tasks of art.
In addition to painting, Schad was also interested in photography, in particular, he developed the technique of special photograms, when the image is obtained by photochemical means without the use of a camera. However, his main occupation was painting portraits in the style of magic realism. In them he paid special attention to the eyes of his characters, which were central to the picture and compensate for the emotional paucity of the depicted people. But their gaze was often empty and absent, immersed in themselves, perhaps as Schade wanted to convey the desolation that engulfed many Germans after the defeat in the First World War.
Sonya
Gradually his artworks became more and more sensual, if not outright obscene.
Lying nude
There was also the typical German attitude to bodily intimacy as a routine procedure necessary for health, like brushing one's teeth, and the typical Dadaist desire to contrast their creations with official notions of propriety.
Self-portrait with a model
His artwork became so popular that Schad was even commissioned to paint a portrait of Pope Pius XI.
Portrait of Pope Pius XI
But in 1930 his father stopped financing Shad, and earning enough only with portraits did not work out for the artist. He had to change a lot of artwork, at one time he was even the director of a brewery. For Shad began a black streak: he separated from his wife Marcella, and although he continued to be friends with her, in 1931 Marcella drowned while swimming in the sea.
Portrait of the artist's wife
In 1943, a bombing raid destroyed his studio, many of his paintings were lost, his father died, and to top it all off, a bomb hit the family mansion, leaving Shad homeless and destitute. Fortunately, he received an order to paint a few paintings, but in general, the post-war years for Shad can hardly be called particularly successful, and the best of his creations he created in the 1920s, when he was young, full of energy, not disappointed in life and could create as he wanted, not just to earn money and at the request of the customer.
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