As a founder of the Zurich Dada group and “inventor” of the Schadograph (a negativeless photographic positive comparable to a photogram), Christian Schad established a reputation as a vanguard 20th-century artist. This retrospective traces the 86-year-old artist’s career from 1913 to the present day. Curiously, the complete range of this German artist’s work has until now remained relatively undisclosed.
Schad’s early years, spent in Munich and Zurich, make evident several styles of painting and a receptivity to new or untried materials. His Dada period culminated with polychrome reliefs in which small, random metal forms (clock parts, metal rings etc.) are set off against jagged wood cutouts. Similar shapes appear in the diminutive Schadograph—arrangements of light-induced, fluid forms juxtaposed to geometric shapes. Paintings from this period attempt stylistic synthesis, a predominately Expressionistic sensibility overlayed with Cubist and Futurist motifs. While these paintings are somewhat diluted by formal uncertainties, Schad’s woodcuts reveal a sharp social critic whose renditions of café life and street scenes vibrate with desolation and angst.
In the 1920s Schad became a Neue Sachlichkeit painter, concentrating on portraits of friends and commission sittings. Painted in Munich, Vienna and finally Berlin, where he lived from 1928 to 1942, these works form the nucleus of the retrospective, and display a unique, personalized realism. His subjects—wide-eyed and confrontational, often seem to crowd the muted canvases, dominating the nocturnal landscapes, street scenes and café interiors in which they are posed. The air of detachment which permeates these portraits emanates not only from the sitters’ frozen solitude, but also from a distancing whereby the figures appear related to, yet apart from their surroundings. Backgrounds of faceless, tuxedo-clad men, transparently gowned women, and silent avenues, imbue these compositions with an ominous unreality.
While Schad’s paintings portray life in an alienated psychological arena, his graphic works describe social intercourse in a raucous, blatantly satirical fashion. Peopled with old men leering at young boys, street flashers, amorous lesbians, aging whores and hustling Adonises, his graphic art lasciviously records an urban ensemble vividly in pursuit of pleasure.
Schad continued painting into the ’30s, but was frequently forced to work as a tradesman to support himself. Although the retrospective sparsely represents the period from 1930 to 1960, in the two decades following, Schad is again prolific, pursuing portraiture in a style similar to that of his Berlin work, and producing more Schadographs as well.
Despite the considerable range of his work and the time period covered, it is Schad’s late ’20s period that really shows the artist in his prime. The painting and graphic work from this Berlin era form a fascinating social commentary, offering insights into both the appearance and the emotional tenor of the time. Perhaps this retrospective suggests a bit of revisionism as well: Schad the Berliner artist is ultimately more provocative than Schad the vanguard Dadaist.
—Hal Fischer
