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

Many of Schad's dandified icons are clear-eyed documentations of daring subjects, such as masturbation and homosexuality. The prints and drawings in the show were particularly indicative of this new iconographic diversity. His silverpoint Boys in Love (1929), with its unapologetic depiction of two young men kissing, has a salubrious nudity that could be compared to contemporaneous photographic depictions of German boy scouts. His lithographic-crayon renderings of a disembodied female hand pleasuring a clitoris in a suite of allegories of the five humors (1931) have a similar clinical appeal, if a greater deadpan wit. Schad's graphic work, often anecdotal and illustrational, is evocative of George Grosz but without the muscle. Schad's taut style feeds directly into Lucian Freud's early draftsmanship. Peppiatt does not make this point, though.

The piece de resistance of the Neue Galerie show was the monumental Two Girls (1928), with its explicit lesbian imagery of nearly life-size women masturbating. Here we sense clearly what was only implicit in works like Self-Portrait or Agosta, the Winged Man: multifigured compositions were a problem for Schad, and he tended to go for archaistic, stacked, top-to-bottom solutions. Two Girls manages to be an ungainly triumph, and its hieratic composition of crossed figures recalls a whole repertory of earlier Depositions and Fails of the Titans. (Schad himself had practiced such a scheme with his Cubist Descent from the Cross.) Seeing Two Girls in New York was a shock; indeed, I would not have thought it possible that it would be presented in an American museum, given the prudery and expurgation that has attended such works as Balthus's Guitar Lesson, with its similar archaism and lesbian theme. In Paris, with its less puritanical atmosphere, I tended to see the work iconographically, and it produced only a mild frisson. In New York, riveted by the image, I gave it more time formally, and could feel the work's ambition, its attempt to get beyond mere caricature and old-masterish formulas, and its extreme refinement of coloration. Those burnt-pink stockings; the front girl's slip with its turned-over, lacy white lining both revealing and concealing a breast; the sea of rumpled rose bedclothes; and those pale grisaille fingers against the large, inflamed labia are all calculated to produce a horror vacui tonalist effect. Storr maintains that the bit of dangling leather and buckle, set off against a white pillow at top center, signifies a male presence and implies a heterosexual three-way encounter. This more conventional, male-dominated reading is nevertheless subverted by each woman's narcissistic self-absorption. And yet the belt might belong to one of the women, and be part of some faintly S&M punishment scenario. At once derivative of French postcard porn and anticipatory of Rainer Maria Fassbinder's '70s lesbian psychodrama, The Bitter Tears of Petra Van Kant (not to mention Helmut Newton's kinkier fashion photos), Christian Schad's painting is both radical and retardataire, as rewarding for its new subject matter as for its old-fashioned facture.