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

Genre subjects from these years suggest that he might have become one of those Italianized Germans who painted rich expatriates and peasant women from Pozzuoli. Such artists populate the history of 19th-century German art from the Nazarenes (Schad was in fact a descendant of one of these expatriates, Karl Philipp Fohr) to Hans von Marees, the master of strange homoerotic secular trip-tychs. In Rome, through the Franciscan priest Aquilin Reichert, whom he portrayed as a handsome, searching young cleric (Reichert was also a lawyer and father confessor to German penitents in the Vatican), Schad garnered a commission to paint Pope Pius XI in 1925--no mean feat for a lapsed Dadaist. (Was the artist a practicing Roman Catholic? The catalogue is mute on this issue.) He depicted Achille Ratti as a grisaille, erminerobed, bespectacled incarnation of gravitas against a more lively and verdant historiated background, a la Paolo Uccello, ripe with flora and fauna. No slouch when it came to the worldly dissemination of such modern icons, he also procured a reproduction deal for the portrait with a publishing company in Berlin.

Relocating to Vienna in 1926, Schad launched himself as a society painter in a splashy studio, working both the avant-garde and the aristocratic angles. There he painted cosmopolitan subjects, such as the eccentric society figure and performance artist Countess Triangi-Taglioni (1926), who gave libidinal public lectures and whom Schad limned in a caricatural style, grimacing in a tightly cinched, nipple-revealing bodice accompanied by a stem of white lilies and one large white feather. At this point, we begin to notice Schad's proclivity for treating male and female subjects in different pictorial manners, tending toward the heroic, armorial and static for men and the cartoonish, fleshly and awkwardly puppetlike for women. (This is certainly not unique to Schad, as could be observed at the Neue Galerie in Dix's great Self Portrait with Nude Model of 1923, with its self-image as robotic warrior in starched shirt and necktie contrasting with a rendering of the woman as more pliant and ruddy, though just as harshly lit.)

Even more defining is Schad's portrait of Count St. Genois d'Anneaucourt (1927), "a rootless aristocrat" who, according to Peppiatt, "had never openly admitted to his sexual tastes." A well-known figure in Viennese society, St. Genois is appareled in the obligatory black tie and flanked by two modern "women," each rendered in slightly different, caricatural modes. An older manly type at left is identified as Baroness Glasen, depicted as sliced in two, with a radically truncated facial profile, while her full frontal torso sports a single sagging breast visible through a plunging black decollete. (St. Genois, the catalogue tells us, often served as Glasen's cavalier servant, or walker.) More extreme is the dorsal depiction of the spectral, beak-nosed creature at right--something of a cult figure herself in that "she" was a famous transvestite at