“Unreal, Purely Formal Relations”: Realism in Christian Schad’s Drawings of Queer Nightspots for Ein Führer durch das ‘lasterhafte’ Berlin (1931)
2022, 32, Numer 32
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Art historian Benjamin Buchloh influentially framed the career of German artist Christian Schad (1894–1982) as exemplifying the “return to realism” undertaken by many formerly avant-garde European artists post-World War I. In 1917, as an adherent of Zürich Dada, Schad created the first intentionally abstract photograms. However, by the 1920s, the newly Berlin-based Schad turned to copiously realistic paintings of urban modernity’s paradigmatic figures – including, uniquely among his fellow Neue Sachlichkeit painters, denizens of the German capital’s then-burgeoning queer social spaces. By analysing in-depth Schad’s pen-and-ink illustrations of Berlin’s queer nightspots for Curt Moreck’s sensationalistic 1931 tour-guide Führer durch das ‘lasterhafte’ Berlin, this paper will, for the first time, connect Schad’s return to illusionistic pictorial representation to his representation of queer communities. Positioning Schad’s figuration not as regressive or reactionary but as defined by the hollowing out of realist mimetic conventions and their humanist ideological underpinnings, I propose Schad’s ink lines both denied and asserted their capacity for spatial illusion. Historicising this self-negating realism through Siegfried Kracauer and Georg Simmel’s writings on urban spatial alienation, I argue Schad pictured these nightspots as paragons of the general impossibility of intimate connection under Weimar modernity, popularly attributed to sexual desire’s perceived rampant commodification and dramatised in his drawings through the insistently non-reciprocal play of gazes between their figures. Ultimately, I contend Schad’s portrayal of queer nightspots as privileged sites of a generalised sexual alienation neither indicted nor celebrated Weimar Berlin’s sexual and gender minorities. Rather, their alienated atmosphere reflected Schad’s incapacity, in a fundamentally incoherent society, to forge a self-contained aesthetic whole from the dizzying array of social and sexual experience in Weimar Berlin, that “city of many possibilities and impossibilities.”
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