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 became known in America only in the 1930s, and not as a Weimar decadent but as an experimental Dadaist, through the inclusion of seven Schadographs from the teens lent by Tzara to Alfred Barr's 1936-37 exhibition "Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism" at the Museum of Modern Art. In the catalogue for Barr's exhibition, Schad's work was reproduced opposite that of Schwitters. At the time Schad was not even aware of his inclusion, so fragmented had his contacts with the international art world become. The museum bought three of these works from Tzara, who, as we learn from Ingrid Jenderko-Sichelschimdt's essay in the Neue Galerie catalogue, had invented the moniker "Schadograph," probably at that time, without the artist's knowledge.

Robert Storr points out in his catalogue essay that in July 1937, by strange coincidence, Schad was also represented by two paintings in the Third Reich's "Grosse Deutsche Ausstellung" in Munich. (Which paintings were shown is not specified.) The Schad catalogue reproduces no documentary evidence of the exhibition--neither its catalogue nor installation shots, which is a pity. Even more problematic, at least for posterity, Storr argues, is the fact that Schad's work was not included in the simultaneous exhibition of "Entartete Kunst" that opened a few days later in Munich. Although surely some of Schad's more out-there subjects might have qualified as "degenerate," the paintings' neo-Renaissance facture evidently allowed them to slip through the cracks and win Nazi approval--a fact that according to Storr has consigned Schad to "art historical purgatory ever since."

At this point, the Neue Galerie show ended (with two versions of Zacharias, a grimacing self-portrait from 1935), but the artist's life and work went on, as the catalogue indicates. During the 1930s and early '40s, as Schad stayed hunkered down in Berlin (travel subsiding with his waning fortunes, the death of his father and the accidental drowning of his former wife), another side of his personality--a more religious, contemplative streak--came to the fore. Perhaps this is consistent with his earnest but detached view of Roman Catholicism. He became interested in Far Eastern philosophy and the esoteric arts, taking Chinese language courses at the university. To support himself, he worked as the local commercial director for a Bavarian brewery and painted commissioned portraits of Berlin film stars. What do these works look like? None was exhibited or reproduced in the catalogue. Might they be anything like Man Ray's '408 traditional, slightly saccharine, Hollywood oil portraits? In 1942 Schad met the fledgling actress Bettina Mittelstadt, with whom he fled to Aschaffenburg in '43, after his Berlin studio was destroyed by bombing; together they managed to save much of his work. He would later marry Bettina, and she would become his last muse in countless 1960s and '70s Magic Realist portraits that are reproduced in the 1999 catalogue for an exhibition in Miesbach, Germany, where they look psychedelic and promising, full of arcane symbolism and reflected mirror views.