of schad

 
Chris­t­ian Schad (Mies­bach, 1894–Stuttgart, 1982) has gone down in his­to­ry as a painter of Ger­man so­ci­ety por­traits in the in­ter­war pe­ri­od.

 

His style, which came close to the move­ment known as Neue Sach­lichkeit (New Ob­jec­tiv­i­ty), cre­at­ed pic­tures that cap­ture the mood of the period. 

 

As a child, Chris­t­ian Schad re­ceived a rich cul­tur­al and artis­tic up­bring­ing, which fos­tered his in­ter­est in paint­ing and mu­sic. He did not com­plete his high­er sec­ondary ed­u­ca­tion and in 1913 en­rolled at the Akademie der Bilden­den Kün­ste in Mu­nich, where he re­mained for bare­ly a half-year. 

 

Af­ter leav­ing art school, he set­tled in the artists’ dis­trict of Schwabing and pro­duced his first wood­block prints in an Ex­pres­sion­ist style, which crit­i­cised the bour­geois way of life and were pub­lished in mag­a­zines such as Die Ak­tion and Die Weis­sen Blät­ter.

 

Fol­low­ing the out­break of the First World War, Schad ob­tained a med­ical re­port ex­empt­ing him from mil­i­tary ser­vice and moved to Zürich, where he lived un­til 1920.
 

 

There he came into con­tact with the DADAist cir­cles and be­gan to ex­per­i­ment with the col­lage tech­nique and his schado­graphs, pho­tographs pro­duced with­out a cam­era by print­ing ob­jects on pho­to-sen­si­tive paper. 

 

When the war end­ed he went to live in Italy, which marked a turn­ing point in his career. 

His con­tact with the clas­si­cal mas­ters and the pes­simism of the war’s af­ter­math brought about a change in his views on art and he be­gan to paint in a re­al­is­tic, sober style, em­pha­sis­ing man’s alien­ation and iso­la­tion in so­ci­ety. The sub­jects of his still-life paint­ings were giv­en the same treatment. 

 

Af­ter five years in Italy, Schad passed through Vi­en­na, lat­er set­tling in Berlin in 1928. His artis­tic ac­tiv­i­ty pro­gres­sive­ly de­creased when Hitler came to pow­er and he did not take up paint­ing again un­til 1943, when he moved to As­chaf­fen­burg and was com­mis­sioned to copy Matthias Grünewald’s Stup­pach Madon­na.
 

 

He spent the rest of his life there. 

Af­ter the Sec­ond World War he evolved to­wards mag­i­cal re­al­ism and re­turned to the pho­togram tech­nique in the 1960s.

 

 

—juli­ja svetlova

Flom­mist Juli­ja Svet­lo­va is an art his­to­ri­an, free­lance re­searcher and a founder of Neja’s Art Walks, a be­spoke provider of art and his­to­ry-re­lat­ed tours and ex­pe­ri­ences in Lon­don. Juli­ja pre­vi­ous­ly worked as a col­lec­tion re­search as­sis­tant at the Tate. Copy­right © 2023 Juli­ja Svetlova.

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