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

Schad's photographic work reached an international audience early on and was noticed by no less than Kurt Schwitters, who wrote in an early text on objets trouves (cited in the catalogue): "Without knowing it, he was following the alchemists' maxim that the desired treasure may be found in the dirt.... In Christian Schad's photograms this alchemical principle seems to come into full effect." We also note in works like Schadograph Nr. 5, Transmission Ischiatique (1919) a real ability to conjure up ambiguous forms (is that central lunging shape a dragon or a leaf?) as well as irregular, kitelike formats generated by the collage elements submitted to the cameraless photogram process. (According to Olaf Peters's catalogue essay, Schad was one of the very first to use this technique, with Man Ray and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy arriving independently at similar results only in 1922.)

Schad made seven large, fanciful wood reliefs (two were shown), somewhat in the manner of Jean Arp, yet infused with a more acid sensibility. Composition en M (1920) features zigzagging colored planes, cut by a carpenter to the artist's specifications, a low-relief running line comprising a metal necklace with square links and two pairs of metal balls, presaging the later fetishistic fashion details of his Weimar portraits. Jill Lloyd points out in her catalogue essay that the collage approach of Schad's Dadaist years carries over into the seemingly illogical and frequently pastiched backgrounds and props of the later portraits. A recurring iconographic element is the use of Parisian backgrounds--for instance, the roofs of Montmartre or girders to signify the Eiffel Tower--for subjects that ostensibly have little to do with Paris. (The show included several black-and-white postcards of Parisian views, as well as the artist's own photographs, from which he derived inspiration for his paintings.) All this disembodied Parisian iconography had an odd emotional tug for those viewers seeing the show in Paris. You almost got the feeling Schad had never visited the city, when of course he had, on numerous occasions, beginning as a child.

Returning from Switzerland to Germany in 1920 and seeing the devastation of his country, Schad seems to have had a crisis of conscience about his Dadaist pranks, although he did make some radically abstract "typewriter portraits" that year in Munich (one was in the show). Leaving Germany again, he traveled south, on his father's advice, looking up members of the "Valori Plastici" group and living for a time in Naples and Rome. (In Rome recently I saw an uncharacteristic painting by Schad, a freely rendered reclining female nude, dated 1920, in the show "Incontri ... from the collection of Graziella Buontempo Lonardi" at the Villa Medici, which suggests that he was already capable of working in a relatively traditional figurative style.) In 1923, in the cathedral of Orvieto, he married Marcella Arcangeli, a medical professor's daughter, and the next year had a son, Nikolaus. Both wife and son provided ripe portrait subjects for Schad the nascent realist.