Schad's way: preeminent chronicler of Weimar's icy decadence, diligent pasticheur of art-historical idioms and restless spiritual seeker, Christian Schad was the subject of a retrospective shown in Paris and New York - Critical Essay - Biography

Art in America, April, 2004 by Brooks Adams

Christian Schad is best known as an incisive portraitist of Weimar cafe society. Less well known is the fact that he was also a pioneer in Dadaist cameraless photography. Using old-masterish compositional devices for his modern subjects, he caught the soul-sick tenor of Berlin in secular altarpieces depicting the disenchanted, unsmiling, upwardly and downwardly mobile men and women who thronged to the modern Babylon. A collage sensibility cultivated in Dadaist Switzerland and postwar Italy also compelled Schad to dislocate his sitters, landing them in some mythic, melancholic, subtly metaphysical version of Paris. Shiftless aristocrats and their cross-dressing cohorts; preening circus performers and noble freaks; avuncular poets, doctors and ethnologists, together with myriad sloe-eyed flappers, all sat and found themselves transformed into steely icons by Schad, a performative dandy himself and an unflinching serf-portraitist. A partial retrospective seen in Paris and in New York (where it was fleshed out with works by George Grosz and Otto Dix, among other artists in the Berlin milieu) provided a rare opportunity to gauge how Schad forged new iconographic definitions of nobility, using stylistic formulas appropriated from Renaissance icons and aristocratic portraiture, amid the ruins of post-World War I Europe.

As curated by Michael Peppiatt and Jill Lloyd, the show charted a discontinuous trajectory, full of strange volte-faces and unexplained lacunae. In both venues the Cubo-Expressionist, Dadaist and Neue Sachlichkeit production was adequately accounted for. In Paris the show centered around the Weimar portraits, with earlier and later work installed to either side. I immediately noticed a yawning gap between the '30s drawings and the '70s photograms. In New York, the show stopped in 1935, with the later period documented only in the catalogue. Thus the whole venture, while seeming to offer a series of disconnected chapters in the Paris version, and some hint of a broader Neue Sachlichkeit context in New York, could hardly be called a retrospective in the traditional sense.

Looking at the three-decade gap in the work exhibited in Paris, we could justifiably ask: Whatever happened to Christian Schad (1894-1982), and why doesn't his career quite add up? Did the commissions for racy portraits and arcane book illustrations simply evaporate with the rise of the Third Reich? More generally, was Schad an artist of one defining moment, or is there an underlying temperament that makes the other moments as potentially rich, if overlooked until now?

The answers seem to involve a certain disinclination on the curators' part, and perhaps a hesitation from the Schad estate, to treat a prime biographical fact: namely, Schad stayed on in Germany during World War II, though he barely eked out a living. There is no evidence that he specifically collaborated with the Nazis. Although the catalogue is vague on this point, Schad seems to have steered clear of the Third Reich art establishment; he did, however, do commissioned portraits for the German film industry during World War II. Later in life he was prone to some faintly embarrassing pseudo-spiritual enthusiasms, which are reflected in the '50s and '60s Magic Realist paintings (not included in either venue, which was too bad). From the otherwise informative catalogue essays, we learn about Schad's peripatetic personal life, his propensity toward passivity and evasion, his tendency to lay himself at the feet of gurus and confidence men; also evident is his stubborn ability to survive a cosseted upbringing, two world wars and several reversals of fortune.

Schad was born in 1894 in Bavaria to upper-middle-class parents with

aristocratic connections (the brother of the Empress Elizabeth of Austria was a close family friend). With a lawyer father who would support him well into the Depression, Schad was set up as a young bohemian in Schwabing and received a traditional, if short-lived, academic training in 1913 at the Munich Art Academy. In prewar Munich he got an early taste of avant-garde hijinks through his magnetic friend, the lawyer-poet-curator Walter Serner (who had recently organized Oscar Kokoschka's second show in Germany).

With the outbreak of World War I, Schad declared himself a pacifist and spent much of the war in Switzerland with Serner, who was adept at getting dodgy medical waivers for friends. The two mingled with Dadaist circles in Zurich and Geneva. Schad made Cubo-Expressionist paintings and prints; iconographically noteworthy is a small late Symbolist woodcut St. Sebastian (1915) with gothically bending trees. Among the early paintings, the monumental Cubist Descent from the Cross (1916) seems a real art-historical oddity, featuring, as we learn from the catalogue, a barely discernible portrait of Serner in the head of Christ. (Yet Christian subjects were not unusual in avant-garde work of the period; for example, Max Beckmann made a Descent from the Cross in 1917 that reflects his experience as a soldier in World War I.) Schad designed posters for Dadaist balls, contributed to Serner's serious-looking journal Sirius (Alfred Kubin was another regular) and produced his earliest photograms, or "Schadographs," in 1919. One such Schadograph (not in the show) was published by Tristan Tzara in 1920 in the Parisian journal Dada no. 7 with the faux-documentary title ARP et VALSERNER dans le crocadarium royal de Londres.