Christian Schad

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Born: 1894

Died: 1982

Summary of Christian Schad

Christian Schad was a pioneer of the Dadaists in Zurich and the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) painters in Berlin, both of whom used revolutionary techniques in their work. While socialising with the Dadaists, Schad experimented with photography, creating abstract images by putting various objects on light-sensitive paper, exposing them to light, and capturing their outlines. Man Ray and László Moholy-Nagy were only two of the many photographers to adopt this groundbreaking new method. Despite this significant development, Schad is most known for his later portrait paintings, in which he represented socialites, bohemians, and characters from the world of cabarets. Paintings by Gauguin remained faithful to realism, even in the face of his venture into abstract photography during the interwar years.

After his death, Shad’s image was tarnished by comparisons to his German contemporaries Otto Dix and George Grosz. Though Schad’s contributions to Neue Sachlicheit painting have been revitalised, his pioneering photographic approach is becoming increasingly important in photography’s historical lineage as contemporary photographers explore with cameraless photography.

Prior to Man Ray and László Moholy-Nagy using the photogram technique, Schad had been working with it for three years earlier. Schrad used photography as a way to express himself in the Dadaist tradition. This shows his ambition to break free from the constraints of traditional artistic subject matter, and his abstract compositions have a strange, dreamlike air to them that relates them to Surrealism as well.

Cubism and Futurism had an impact on Schad’s work, but it was the work of Italian Old Masters like Raphael that had the most influence on him. During the interwar period, Schad embraced realism and classicism in order to deal with the traumas of war and the social transformations that occurred following the conflict. This period of Schad’s work went more toward Magical Realism than the sarcastic wit of other artists of the time.

Schad’s topics were shown with an air of calm, exacting realism. Schad: Schad shows people as individuals, but he also tries to capture the role they play in society, most notably the “New Woman,” an androgynous bohemian who was sexually liberated and career-oriented.

Biography of Christian Schad

Childhood

Christian Schad was born in Miesbach (Upper Bavaria), Germany, in 1894, to a wealthy family. Soon after he was born, the family relocated to Munich. His father Carl Schad was a well-known lawyer, while his mother’s family controlled a number of successful breweries in Bavaria. Schad’s family has a long history of creativity and innovation. His mother was linked to the German Romantic painter Carl Philipp Fohr, and his paternal ancestor was credited with bringing the bicycle to Germany. Early on, he was exposed to art and culture through family excursions to Italy and other art centres in the region, where he was encouraged to develop his artistic and musical ability.

Early Life

Having been born into an affluent family, Schad was able to forgo more conventional ambitions and pursue a life as an artist. While attending the Munich Art Academy in 1913, he was inspired by his early exposure to the arts and decided to create his own studio in Munich. Defying the expectations of the time, he began making prints, some of which were displayed at the New Munich Secession Exhibition in 1915 and later published in the Expressionist journal Die Aktion. Prior to World War I, he spent time in the Netherlands and planned to relocate to England, where he was born and raised.

When war broke out in 1914, Schad, a staunch pacifist, had to flee Germany to avoid being sent to the front lines. Faking heart disease and leaving Germany for Switzerland in 1915, he used his family’s connections and the support of an understanding doctor to get out of the country. For Otto Dix, Max Beckmann and George Grosz were all German painters who served in World Military II. Their war experiences shaped their artistic visions for years to come. “A tranquil island in an ocean of arrogant nationalism and nasty idiocy” was Schad’s description of Zurich as he sought safety from the conflict. Hans Arp, Hugo Ball, and Emmy Hennings, three of the most notable expatriate artists of the time, united in Zurich and created the Zurich Dada group. The writer and doctor of law Walter Serner, who had been expelled from Berlin for falsifying a medical certificate for Expressionist Franz Jung, welcomed him right away. Other notable guests at the Café Landolt during these years included Ukrainian sculptor Alexander Archipenko; Flemish painter Frans Masereel; French socialist Henri Guilbeaux; as well as a host of other artists, authors and politicians.

Following his arrival to Geneva, Schad became an adherent of Dadaism, even though he had previously been critical of the movement. As part of the Dada movement in Geneva, he and Serner established a local outpost and took part in various Dada activities, including provocative actions and performances by a particularly cynical Serner. Some of Schad’s paintings was torn from the walls and thrown to the ground after Serner’s long-winded and aggravating speech during an exhibition in Geneva. When he became more involved with the Dada movement, he met fellow Parisian Dadaists Francis Picabia and Tristan Tzara. Sirius, a literature review for which he created monochrome Expressionist woodcuts in black ink, was published at around the same time as his collaboration with Serner.

As a member of the small, closed-off Dadaist community, Schad was always seen as an anomaly. There are numerous noteworthy contributions to the Dada movement despite his marginal position: he constructed an abstract sculpture series (in wood); invented a new photographic process called the photogram; and created posters for 1919’s First Dadaist World Congress in New York. Many other avant-garde painters took inspiration from his use of the photogram.

Mid Life

Schad spent a significant amount of time in Italy between 1920 and 1925. When he visited Rome, he met Italian Futurist painter Enrico Prampolini and went to Anton Giulio Bragaglia’s salons, both of which included Futurist photographers. During their time in Naples, Schad began to portray people and scenes with a level of authenticity previously unseen in his work. This period also saw him visit Munich and renew acquaintances with his friend and fellow artist Georg Schrimpf, who had also began working in a realist manner largely influenced by Italian painting. He married Marcella Arcangeli, the daughter of a professor in Rome, in 1923 when he returned to Italy. The following year, they welcomed a son. They spent time in Paris and Munich before returning to Naples and residing there. In 1925, while still in Italy, he was hired to paint Pope Pius XI.

As a society painter for bohemians, nouveau riche, and disillusioned aristocrats from all across the Austro-Hungarian Empire who had lost their fortunes following World War I, Schad became a household name in Vienna, Austria. His marriage ended after two years, and he relocated to Berlin with the support of Serner in 1928. In the city, he found his stride and began his most fruitful phase of artistic output. His work is now connected with New Objectivity painting, but it was not included in the famous 1925 Mannheim Neue Sachlichkeit exhibition, nor did he care about Otto Dix’s and George Grosz’s social critiques or political satire. However, like Dix and photographer August Sander, he was drawn to painting Berlin’s numerous “types.” His art, which drew inspiration from Italian painting, was more in line with Magic Realism and its propensity toward classicism.

Felix Bryk, a Swedish journalist and naturalist, met him not long after he arrived in Berlin. Bryck and he went to late-night pubs, circuses, medical procedures, and Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute of Sexology. They offered Schad with a wide range of characters, including lesbians, transvestites, prostitutes, bankrupt aristocrats and artists who would later appear in his paintings and drawings in the late 1920s.

For all of his famed artistic output in Berlin, he struggled to make a living and support his family. After studying Chinese language and calligraphy at the University of Berlin in the late 1920s and early 1930s, Schad grew increasingly interested in Far Eastern philosophy, particularly Taoism and Zen Buddhism. In the years leading up to the advent of the National Socialists in 1933, he also began to have financial issues and found himself isolated. Due to his father’s financial support, Schad never had to rely on the sale of his paintings to make a living. However, in 1929, when the stock market crashed, he was obliged to start working for himself. He worked at a Bavarian brewery and painted portraits to earn money.

In 1936, he was included in Alfred H. Barr’s New York exhibition of Fantastic Art, Dada, and Surrealism at the Museum of Modern Art. His early Dada work garnered him unexpected acclaim. Many of his Dada and Expressionist colleagues were branded “degenerate” by the Nazis, and Schad himself had a taste for the sensual in his Berlin paintings, but Schad submitted a set of paintings to the Great Exhibition of German Art. The Nazis staged the Great Exhibition of German Art to counter the Degenerate Art exhibition, which opened in Munich in 1937. In addition to the portrait of a woman and the Paris cityscape, he displayed two more paintings. Schad basically vanished from the Berlin art scene with this exhibition. The bombing of Schad’s studio forced him to relocate to Aschaffenburg, Bavaria, in 1943. Many of his works from his bombed studio were saved thanks to his girlfriend, Bettina Mittelstädt. Later that year, the two were united in marriage. During the latter years of World War II, he was able to make a living by copying Matthias Grünewald’s Stuppach Madonna (1518) for the city of Aschaffenburg.

Late Life

Schad settled in Keilheim, Bavaria, in 1962 after fleeing the Nazis. Some of his most allegoric and symbolic works include his wife Bettina Schad, and they date from the 1950s. Schad returned to cameraless photography in the 1960s, making a new series of “Schadographs” at the insistence of noted photography historian Helmut Gernsheim. Schad participated in various exhibitions on Dada and New Objectivity in the final decades of his life, including a large-scale retrospective in Milan in 1977. He died at the age of 88 in Stuttgart, Germany.

Schad is little known as a painter or photographer, despite his inclusion in the 1936 exhibition Fantastic Art: Dada, Surrealism. Between 1918 and 1929, he made some of his most significant work, initially with Zurich Dada and then with New Objectivity painting. Since the resurgence of interest in early 20th-century photography, Dadaism, and the photogram technique, new light has been shone on his significance.

Contemporary interest in alternative photographic techniques, such as the photogram technique, has also sparked a renewed interest in cameraless photography by artists including Thomas Ruff, Adam Fuss, and Marco Breuer. Because of its ties to Nazi-approved realist painting, his New Objectivity painting was mostly neglected in the initial post-war years. When New Objectivity painting was revived by scholars in recent decades, however, it exposed his 1920s Berlin and Vienna-based cold objective realism to new audiences. There will be a museum in Aschaffenburg, a town southeast of Frankfurt where Schad eventually moved, dedicated to his work in 2019, which will undoubtedly bring more people into contact with his work.

Famous Art by Christian Schad

Descent from the Cross

1916

Early examples of Cubism, Futurism, and Expressionism can be seen in Christian Schad’s 1916 painting Descent from the Cross. Almost entirely monochromatic, the painting’s many interlocking facets make it appear disjointed and abstracted. The vertical figure of Christ, portrayed in softer tones, and the figures that surround him, which appear to be disembodied heads, are clearly apparent upon closer scrutiny. Body parts, such as limbs and other distinguishing characteristics, are reduced to a grid of intersecting planes. Although it’s difficult to tell, the head of Christ is a portrait of Walter Serner, a friend of Walter’s. “The single feasible expression of our full opposition to the war, which only allowed for an either-or approach,” Schad subsequently explained.

No matter what his interests were, Schad was happy to stray from the herd and pursue his own path. Instead, he drew from a variety of sources to create a unique style that combined symbolism and metaphor. The ambiguity of meaning that can be found in many of Schad’s works is on full display in Descent from the Cross. Although it may be classified as a religious or portrait painting, it veers between the two. Religious themes were not uncommon among Expressionist and other avant-garde painters, even though they were uncommon for Schad. Max Beckmann painted the same subject in 1917 as a response to his time fighting in World Conflict I, and Schad’s representation is similarly evocative of his experience of the war.

Onéirodynie en Kova

1919

A photogram known as Onéirodynie en Kova was created by Schad using trash such as rope, paper, and textile pieces. After that, a piece of glass was placed on the window sill of his basement flat to reveal the contents of the crate underneath. In order to “release them from the convention of the square,” he fixed them and cut the photographic paper. When looking at the layers of items and forms in these small-scale cameraless images, it is easy to see how they are inspired by the collages made by Zurich Dada artists. Dada’s iconoclastic approach to art was in line with the cameraless photos’ anti-bourgeois and anti-art use of everyday elements like newsprint and other waste materials.

Schad pioneered the use of cameraless photography as an avant-garde art form, which stretches back to the very beginnings of photography. Man Ray and László Moholy-Nagy, who pioneered cameraless photography a few years later, used the photogram process before he did. The breakthrough exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism at the Museum of Modern Art featured a number of these pieces (1936). Tzara dubbed them “Schadographs” at that point, a play on the artist’s name and the shadowy appearance of the works. Dada pioneered the use of photography without a camera, and his work paved the path for others to follow.

Composition en M

1920

Composition en M, a relief sculpture composed of a sequence of jagged wooden planes, is one of Schad’s most significant Dada creations. Carpenters carved and painted the wood according to the artist’s specifications before it was assembled with various things, including a necklace and several small metal balls.. The wood reliefs were created during Schad’s brief association with Zurich Dada, when his “penchant for anything laying around on the streets, in shop displays, in cafes, even in the rubbish bins was at its height,” according to Schad. Composition en M’s abstracted forms are reminiscent of Hans Arp’s 1917 work Untitled (Forest) and Kurt Schwitters’s Merz collages, among other artists. In the same way, the reliefs go beyond the confines of a single medium by adding everyday things. Schad’s relief sculptures demonstrate the influence of Ukrainian avant-garde sculptor Alexander Archipenko in their use of atypical sculptural materials and polychrome.

Using mass-produced metal hardware, heavy enamel commercial paints, and bits of metallic paper, art historian Leah Dickerman says these pieces were “conceived on the concept of making an item that was neither rarified by materials nor trained artistic technique.” Photographs taken without a camera show Schad’s early interest in abstract art and debris as a source of inspiration. “The entire idea of limitless freedom,” Schad said, “of having the right to do everything, of having the power to do and create without having to feel yourself menaced by the Damoclean sword of dogma,” is reflected in Composition en M.

Maria and Annunziata ‘From the Harbour’

1923

‘From the Harbour,’ a painting by Schad in 1923 features two Neapolitan actresses from the Rossini theatre posing against a theatre box railing.’ The close-up, fragmentary image is reminiscent of a photograph because of its flattened representation of the figures. He shows technical expertise in his manipulation of light, shadows, and colour as well as his attention to minute details while representing clothing and skin in this early realist painting, one of his earliest in the New Objectivity style. Maria and Annunziata was painted in Naples in 1923 by Schad while he was pursuing a more realistic approach to depicting modern culture. To get a sense of Naples’s street life, Schad and his friend and old Dada collaborator Walter Serner went to cafes and theatres, examining the city’s run-down streets and the children and Gypsies who lived there. Naples, in the south of Italy, was not as popular with painters and authors as other Italian cities.

By 1923, Schad had developed a new realist style influenced by the work of Old Masters like Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci, and Antonio del Pollaiuolo, as well as the New Objectivity paintings of his school classmate Georg Schrimpf. He was enamoured with their clean lines and vibrant colour palettes. He subsequently stated, “And so I succeeded… in painting once again in the way all of them painted who are now revered as masterpieces.””

Curator Sabine Rewald points out that these early portraits are “reminiscent of the coolly distant likenesses of the Florentine court painter Bronzino and other Renaissance and Mannerist artists” because they are unapproachable. According to this theory, “Schad utilised the techniques of older aristocratic portraiture to portray the remoteness, and inaccessibility of the modern individual.”

Self-Portrait

1927

A rumpled bed and a transparent green shirt fastened across the breast are the setting for Christian Schad’s 1927 Self-Portrait. It’s hard to tell if this transparency is meant to imply that the man’s interest in the woman next to him is superficial or to demonstrate the artist’s skill. The male subject has his back to the viewer and is staring absently to the left. He is reclining in front of a bikini-clad woman with short, angular hair and features straight from the runway. As Schad discovered while studying in Naples, the vertical scar on her cheek was caused by a jealous husband or lover and displayed as a visual indication of their passion for her. Because of their self-obsessed nature, they have placed an enormous narcissus flower near their bed. The flattened and lifeless individuals are set against a fictitious Parisian cityscape, a motif that appears in many of the artist’s works during this time period. Self-portrait by Schad is reminiscent of Old Master paintings, yet the subject is in keeping with New Objectivity painting and the movement’s harsh and satirical views of current life. The work is meticulously painted.

Schad’s Self-Portrait contains a lot of allegory, which is typical of his style, in which he combines components from several sources to create perplexing new interpretations. “My paintings are seldom illustrative… if anything, they are symbolic,” he subsequently added. As Schad points out, they are made up of both physical and psychic components, together with “things seen and imagined” It’s clear that Walter Serner, one of his closest friends, had a hand in this. To paraphrase the noted art historian Sabine Rewald, Serner’s tales “move in the shadowy borderland between chilling erotica [and] cold crime,” and “find clear echoes in the subject and form of Schad’s best ambiguous, sexual paintings.” Schad’s Self-Portrait, his most famous work from the 1920s, is now a symbol of New Objectivity painting and the cool and distant expressions that characterised his work from this period, despite the fact that Schad was unknown to German curators and critics when New Objectivity painting emerged in 1925.

Sonja

1928

Known as one of the most famous images of Berlin in the 1920s, Sonja depicts a young secretary alone in the Romanisches Café, a popular hangout for artists and authors. An androgynous androgyny is cultivated in her portrayal as a “New Woman” with short hair and stylish clothing. The black dress with sheer sleeves, low neck, and pink flower contrasts beautifully with her fair skin and deep-set eyes, giving her a striking appearance. Schad was able to show off his own style of realism and his meticulous attention to the portrayal of skin and clothing thanks to these meticulously painted details. As she sits at the table, the young woman puffs on her cigarette from an ornate long holder. A pack of Camel cigarettes, a tube of lipstick, and a little black compact are all on the table next to her arm, implying that she is a modern lady in control of her appearance and body image. Her stoic demeanour and blank expression further accentuate her contemporary appearance. She enjoys her alone and is happy to be so. So says Sabine Rewald, “Sonja represents the emancipated and independent women of the time, whose employment in Europe was a consequence of World War I.”

After moving to Berlin in 1928, Schad became friends with Felix Bryk, who introduced him to Sonja. In awe of her apparent androsexuality, he staged her as though she were on a “theatre set,” complete with all the necessary accessories and supporting actors. Despite being flanked by two unnamed figures, she is the picture’s focus. While a piano rests on the right side of the room, behind her is an elderly man who is balding and wears an old black coat. Schrad was familiar with Max Hermann-Neisse, a German poet and cabaret critic, from his stay in Zurich, and the balding figure is him. George Grosz painted at least two portraits of him in the late 1920s, and he was a friend of other New Objectivity artists at the time. It is a good example of Schad’s preference for expressing kinds over people despite the painting’s realism because it was painted from memory rather than from reality. Through Sonja’s character, we can see how modern city life has left her feeling jaded, alone, and unappreciated as compared to Berlin’s caf culture of the 1920s.

Operation

1929

Schad’s portrayal of a surgical procedure has a haunting stillness to it. Schad depicts a patient on a table, surrounded by doctors and nurses, as surgical equipment rest on top of his torso in a 17th-century Dutch artwork. The only blood the viewer sees is the redness of an unidentified organ in the middle of the patient’s body, and a couple of bloody-tipped cotton swabs. Dr. Giorgio Bordin and Dr. Laura Polo D’Ambrosio, both medical professionals, note, “Forceps are spread across a sheet covering the patient’s entire body. It’s hard to tell what the picture is about, but it has a disconcerting effect on the viewer, as if they are seeing a profound conundrum in motion.”

Despite the fact that the surgical team is comprised of many people, each person appears to be self-contained and uninterested in the others around him. She stands out because she’s dressed in blue and has a white habit on top of it. When she places her hands on the patient’s head, his eyes appear to be partially open. Her head is bathed in a halo of gentle pinks, whites, and blues, which emphasises her spiritual role in helping the patient through the operation. As was typical of Schad’s work, the nurse was modelled by his spouse Maika, an entomologist and journalist, while the patient was modelled after Schad’s friend Felix Bryk.

BULLET POINTED (SUMMARISED)

Best for Students and a Huge Time Saver

• Christian Schad was a pioneer of the Dadaists in Zurich and the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) painters in Berlin, both of whom used revolutionary techniques in their work.
• While socialising with the Dadaists, Schad experimented with photography, creating abstract images by putting various objects on light-sensitive paper, exposing them to light, and capturing their outlines.
• Man Ray and László Moholy-Nagy were only two of the many photographers to adopt this groundbreaking new method.
• Despite this significant development, Schad is most known for his later portrait paintings, in which he represented socialites, bohemians, and characters from the world of cabarets.

• Paintings by Gauguin remained faithful to realism, even in the face of his venture into abstract photography during the interwar years.
• After his death, Shad’s image was tarnished by comparisons to his German contemporaries Otto Dix and George Grosz.
• Though Schad’s contributions to Neue Sachlicheit painting have been revitalised, his pioneering photographic approach is becoming increasingly important in photography’s historical lineage as contemporary photographers explore with cameraless photography.
• Prior to Man Ray and László Moholy-Nagy using the photogram technique, Schad had been working with it for three years earlier.
• Schrad used photography as a way to express himself in the Dadaist tradition.
• This shows his ambition to break free from the constraints of traditional artistic subject matter, and his abstract compositions have a strange, dreamlike air to them that relates them to Surrealism as well.
• Cubism and Futurism had an impact on Schad’s work, but it was the work of Italian Old Masters like Raphael that had the most influence on him.
• During the interwar period, Schad embraced realism and classicism in order to deal with the traumas of war and the social transformations that occurred following the conflict.
• This period of Schad’s work went more toward Magical Realism than the sarcastic wit of other artists of the time.

• Schad’s topics were shown with an air of calm, exacting realism.
• Schad: Schad shows people as individuals, but he also tries to capture the role they play in society, most notably the “New Woman,” an androgynous bohemian who was sexually liberated and career-oriented.
• ChildhoodChristian Schad was born in Miesbach (Upper Bavaria), Germany, in 1894, to a wealthy family.
• Soon after he was born, the family relocated to Munich.
• His father Carl Schad was a well-known lawyer, while his mother’s family controlled a number of successful breweries in Bavaria.
• Schad’s family has a long history of creativity and innovation.
• His mother was linked to the German Romantic painter Carl Philipp Fohr, and his paternal ancestor was credited with bringing the bicycle to Germany.

• Early on, he was exposed to art and culture through family excursions to Italy and other art centres in the region, where he was encouraged to develop his artistic and musical ability.
• Early LifeHaving been born into an affluent family, Schad was able to forgo more conventional ambitions and pursue a life as an artist.
• While attending the Munich Art Academy in 1913, he was inspired by his early exposure to the arts and decided to create his own studio in Munich.
• Defying the expectations of the time, he began making prints, some of which were displayed at the New Munich Secession Exhibition in 1915 and later published in the Expressionist journal Die Aktion.
• Prior to World War I, he spent time in the Netherlands and planned to relocate to England, where he was born and raised.
• When war broke out in 1914, Schad, a staunch pacifist, had to flee Germany to avoid being sent to the front lines.
• Faking heart disease and leaving Germany for Switzerland in 1915, he used his family’s connections and the support of an understanding doctor to get out of the country.
• For Otto Dix, Max Beckmann and George Grosz were all German painters who served in World Military II.

• Their war experiences shaped their artistic visions for years to come. “
• A tranquil island in an ocean of arrogant nationalism and nasty idiocy” was Schad’s description of Zurich as he sought safety from the conflict.
• Hans Arp, Hugo Ball, and Emmy Hennings, three of the most notable expatriate artists of the time, united in Zurich and created the Zurich Dada group.
• The writer and doctor of law Walter Serner, who had been expelled from Berlin for falsifying a medical certificate for Expressionist Franz Jung, welcomed him right away.
• Other notable guests at the Café Landolt during these years included Ukrainian sculptor Alexander Archipenko; Flemish painter Frans Masereel; French socialist Henri Guilbeaux; as well as a host of other artists, authors and politicians.
• Following his arrival to Geneva, Schad became an adherent of Dadaism, even though he had previously been critical of the movement.

• As part of the Dada movement in Geneva, he and Serner established a local outpost and took part in various Dada activities, including provocative actions and performances by a particularly cynical Serner.
• Some of Schad’s paintings was torn from the walls and thrown to the ground after Serner’s long-winded and aggravating speech during an exhibition in Geneva.
• When he became more involved with the Dada movement, he met fellow Parisian Dadaists Francis Picabia and Tristan Tzara.
• Sirius, a literature review for which he created monochrome Expressionist woodcuts in black ink, was published at around the same time as his collaboration with Serner.
• As a member of the small, closed-off Dadaist community, Schad was always seen as an anomaly.

• There are numerous noteworthy contributions to the Dada movement despite his marginal position: he constructed an abstract sculpture series (in wood); invented a new photographic process called the photogram; and created posters for 1919’s First Dadaist World Congress in New York.
• Mid LifeSchad spent a significant amount of time in Italy between 1920 and 1925.
• When he visited Rome, he met Italian Futurist painter Enrico Prampolini and went to Anton Giulio Bragaglia’s salons, both of which included Futurist photographers.
• During their time in Naples, Schad began to portray people and scenes with a level of authenticity previously unseen in his work.
• This period also saw him visit Munich and renew acquaintances with his friend and fellow artist Georg Schrimpf, who had also began working in a realist manner largely influenced by Italian painting.
• He married Marcella Arcangeli, the daughter of a professor in Rome, in 1923 when he returned to Italy.

• The following year, they welcomed a son.
• They spent time in Paris and Munich before returning to Naples and residing there.
• In 1925, while still in Italy, he was hired to paint Pope Pius XI.As a society painter for bohemians, nouveau riche, and disillusioned aristocrats from all across the Austro-Hungarian Empire who had lost their fortunes following World War I, Schad became a household name in Vienna, Austria.
• His marriage ended after two years, and he relocated to Berlin with the support of Serner in 1928.
• In the city, he found his stride and began his most fruitful phase of artistic output.
• His work is now connected with New Objectivity painting, but it was not included in the famous 1925 Mannheim Neue Sachlichkeit exhibition, nor did he care about Otto Dix’s and George Grosz’s social critiques or political satire.
• However, like Dix and photographer August Sander, he was drawn to painting Berlin’s numerous “types.”
• His art, which drew inspiration from Italian painting, was more in line with Magic Realism and its propensity toward classicism.
• Felix Bryk, a Swedish journalist and naturalist, met him not long after he arrived in Berlin.

• Bryck and he went to late-night pubs, circuses, medical procedures, and Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute of Sexology.
• They offered Schad with a wide range of characters, including lesbians, transvestites, prostitutes, bankrupt aristocrats and artists who would later appear in his paintings and drawings in the late 1920s.
• For all of his famed artistic output in Berlin, he struggled to make a living and support his family.

After studying Chinese language and calligraphy at the University of Berlin in the late 1920s and early 1930s, Schad grew increasingly interested in Far Eastern philosophy, particularly Taoism and Zen Buddhism.

• In the years leading up to the advent of the National Socialists in 1933, he also began to have financial issues and found himself isolated.
• Due to his father’s financial support, Schad never had to rely on the sale of his paintings to make a living.
• However, in 1929, when the stock market crashed, he was obliged to start working for himself.
• He worked at a Bavarian brewery and painted portraits to earn money.
• In 1936, he was included in Alfred H. Barr’s New York exhibition of Fantastic Art, Dada, and Surrealism at the Museum of Modern Art.
• His early Dada work garnered him unexpected acclaim.
• Many of his Dada and Expressionist colleagues were branded “degenerate” by the Nazis, and Schad himself had a taste for the sensual in his Berlin paintings, but Schad submitted a set of paintings to the Great Exhibition of German Art.

• The Nazis staged the Great Exhibition of German Art to counter the Degenerate Art exhibition, which opened in Munich in 1937.
• In addition to the portrait of a woman and the Paris cityscape, he displayed two more paintings.
• Schad basically vanished from the Berlin art scene with this exhibition.
• The bombing of Schad’s studio forced him to relocate to Aschaffenburg, Bavaria, in 1943.
• Many of his works from his bombed studio were saved thanks to his girlfriend, Bettina Mittelstädt.
• Later that year, the two were united in marriage.
• During the latter years of World War II, he was able to make a living by copying Matthias Grünewald’s Stuppach Madonna (1518) for the city of Aschaffenburg.
• Late LifeSchad settled in Keilheim, Bavaria, in 1962 after fleeing the Nazis.
• Some of his most allegoric and symbolic works include his wife Bettina Schad, and they date from the 1950s.
• Schad returned to cameraless photography in the 1960s, making a new series of “Schadographs” at the insistence of noted photography historian Helmut Gernsheim.
• Schad participated in various exhibitions on Dada and New Objectivity in the final decades of his life, including a large-scale retrospective in Milan in 1977.

• He died at the age of 88 in Stuttgart, Germany.
• Schad is little known as a painter or photographer, despite his inclusion in the 1936 exhibition Fantastic Art: Dada, Surrealism.
• Between 1918 and 1929, he made some of his most significant work, initially with Zurich Dada and then with New Objectivity painting.
• Since the resurgence of interest in early 20th-century photography, Dadaism, and the photogram technique, new light has been shone on his significance.
• Contemporary interest in alternative photographic techniques, such as the photogram technique, has also sparked a renewed interest in cameraless photography by artists including Thomas Ruff, Adam Fuss, and Marco Breuer.
• Because of its ties to Nazi-approved realist painting, his New Objectivity painting was mostly neglected in the initial post-war years.
• When New Objectivity painting was revived by scholars in recent decades, however, it exposed his 1920s Berlin and Vienna-based cold objective realism to new audiences.
• There will be a museum in Aschaffenburg, a town southeast of Frankfurt where Schad eventually moved, dedicated to his work in 2019, which will undoubtedly bring more people into contact with his work.

Information Citations

En.wikipedia.org, https://en.wikipedia.org/.

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