Georg Scholz’s Posterliness

In June 1920, the German artist Georg Scholz received an urgent dispatch to his home in the small town of Grötzingen, near Karlsruhe—an invitation to show his work in the forthcoming First International Dada Fair in Berlin. This irreverent exhibition featured more than 170 objects that its organizers referred to as “products” (“Erzeugnisse”).[1] Large format text posters and oversized photographic portraits called down from the gallery walls and asserted that Dada was enormous, expansive, and aligned with the goals of recent revolutionary struggles in Germany and Russia.[2] Exhibition organizers George Grosz and John Heartfield scrawled their invitation to Scholz on the back of Grosz’s wedding announcement. Their request? A collage painting titled Bauernbild (Farmer Picture), which the postcard contents implied was still under production (fig. 1). Grosz urged Scholz above all else to finish the Farmer Picture and to send it quickly, writing “or else there’s no point.”[3] The notion that Scholz’s work would have a purpose only if it were shown in the Berlin Dada exhibition is my starting point for an inquiry that examines the aesthetic, political, and regional tensions at play in Germany following the revolutions of 1918–19. My case study recovers the period specificity of a term used frequently in early twentieth-century design commentary—Plakatmäßigkeit or “posterliness”—to propose a new mode of politically engaged, post-revolutionary art making, one that differs from the oft-told avant-garde antics of Berlin Dada.

Farmer Picture is probably the best known of Scholz’s paintings today, but it may have seemed a curious addition to an exhibition proclaiming the end of art and the death of easel painting. On initial viewing, it is a formally posed portrait with a conservative palette, almost Northern European in finish. To the painted surface, Scholz affixed clippings from a conservative regional newspaper, pieces of paper money, an industrial patent, a packaging label, and a miniature photomontage soldier portrait (Doherty, “Berlin,” 90–99). Depicted are a well-to-do farming family in a less than flattering light: notice the mother’s dirty fingernails, the pious father clutching the Bible with money on the brain, or the empty-headed, snot-nosed youngster torturing a toad with a straw. Such tactics aligned Scholz’s Farmer Picture with Berlin Dada strategies of visual and verbal disjunction.[4] Yet when viewing the painting in person, the eye moves rapidly over its shiny, lacquered surface. Pasted collage elements recede alongside the virtuosic trompe l’oeil details of painted yellow fly paper and translucent glass. Indeed, a reviewer who visited the Dada Fair observed that Scholz painted “with a realism that seems to mock the Dadaist stammering of the remaining works on view.”[5]

Curators and scholars of Dada and Neue Sachlichkeit (typically translated as New Objectivity) often cite Scholz’s early 1920s satirical artworks as illustrations of his left-leaning politics without providing the kind of critical commentary found in writings about the artist’s more prominent contemporaries.[6] By contrast, my case study maps the terrain between two paintings by Scholz—Farmer Picture (1920) and Lords of the World (1922)—to question commonly held assumptions about Berlin Dada as the German exemplar of the historical avant-garde: associations with historical rupture, formal disjunction, political stridency, or ideological clarity.[7] For Scholz and fellow artists working outside the Berlin center, the way forward as a revolutionary artist was often anything but clear. In this context, “posterliness” was a positive term that connoted a fundamental legibility of form and content—one anchored in Scholz’s own work producing advertising posters for a local firm. For reactionary commentators such as the historian Oswald Spengler, by contrast, “posterly effects” were the hallmark of a “lying, idiotic” modern art.[8] Spengler’s pessimistic Der Untergang des Abendlandes (The Decline of the West) appeared in two volumes in 1918 and 1922 and generated lively debates amongst German audiences following the losses of World War I.[9] Despite his left-leaning politics, Scholz used Spengler’s text to assert posterliness not as a mark of decline, but as a revolutionary aesthetic strategy, writing to his friend and patron, Dr. Theodor Kiefer, in January 1923:

A modern picture is ultimately the placard for an idea about humanity or a worldview. I consider the poster to be the expression of our time. . . . Spengler uses the word “posterly” to express his contempt [for modern painting]! . . . Yet ultimately the increased significance of my latest pictures depends on this very “posterliness.”[10]

As this paper demonstrates, Scholz’s posterliness served as both a political stance and a formal operation—one by which the artist intervened in period debates about the politics of style and the place of the modern artist.[11]

Born in 1890 in the northern German city of Wolfenbüttel, Scholz moved to the southwestern city of Karlsruhe in 1908 to begin his studies at the local academy of fine art. Academy professors Hans Thoma and Wilhelm Trübner advocated divergent realist styles that created a classed and political divide between academy students espousing Thoma’s “Heimatkunst” (“homeland art”) and Trübner’s French-inflected modernism. The artist Rudolf Schlichter later described this clash of sensibilities as an “irreconcilable enmity.”[12] Scholz modeled his early painterly aesthetic after Trübner and worked with him as a master student until being called up to military service in 1915.[13] Wounded by a hand grenade in France in summer 1918, Scholz spent several months recovering in a military field hospital and observed Germany’s revolutionary upheavals from a distance. He returned to his wife and young son in Grötzingen in December 1918.[14] The experience of war proved central to his artistic and political formation, yet the transition from embittered soldier to revolutionary artist was far from direct. In spring 1919, Scholz joined several former academy mates in forming the Karlsruhe Gruppe Rih, which operated as a regional arm of the Berlin-based Novembergruppe (November Group), an influential expressionist exhibition society with wide-ranging connections.[15] Although the November Group took its name from the recent German revolutions—espousing a spirit of “liberty, equality, fraternity!” in its November 1918 manifesto—competing and oppositional factions quickly emerged from within the membership.

These tensions played out in private correspondence and published writings that show Scholz struggling to find a place between the southwest and Berlin, to identify a secure political position, and to grapple with problems of form and content.[16] In summer 1920, Scholz exhibited two very different paintings in Berlin: Farmer Picture at the Dada Fair and the cubo-futurist Liebespaar (Lovers) at the November Group summer exhibition.[17] While this type of stylistic hybridity was not uncommon, particularly in the first years after the revolution, Scholz’s artistic self-awareness and theoretical positioning is distinct.[18] In a March 1921 open letter to November Group chairman Hans Siebert von Heister, Scholz explores the space between the end of expressionism and the emergence of a new objectivity—explaining the surface disruptions in works such as Farmer Picture as a resource and a signal to the viewer:

The glued-on photographs in Dada pictures served two functions: first, their stated purpose as a joke, but also—quite unconsciously—as a stop in the image, an additional formal resource working alongside the unfamiliar objective and representational forms of depiction.[19]

In this formulation, Dada’s disruptive tactics collide with smooth surface finish to provide an aid to representation—Scholz used the word “Hilfsmittel,” or “auxiliary device.”[20] Scholz revised the open letter for a 1922 essay published in the Karlsruher Tagblatt, a widely-read regional newspaper with a respected weekly cultural insert, Die Pyramide.[21] Scholz proclaimed that it would be the task of his generation to use the tools of a now outmoded visual language (expressionism) to bridge the gap between “art and kitsch” and thus forge a new objectivity. “With the means inherited from Expressionism,” he wrote,

one should produce new, interesting pictures, ones in which the spaces won through Expressionism can be filled with the objectivity (Sachlichkeit) of the present. . . To reach the widest public it is crucial to use the forms of expression they understand, that have resonance for the people: so-called ‘kitsch’ in the sense of picture postcards and photo-realist painting.[22]

Kitsch arose as an aesthetic concept in the discourse of late nineteenth-century German art and design. Kitsch was a lowbrow style that implied a lack of taste or a frivolous adornment to an object’s fundamental structure.[23] It was not until the 1920s that kitsch emerged as a cudgel for the avant-garde.[24] Scholz developed his theoretical formulation in dialogue with these contemporary debates and in the context of his prior academic and art historical training—forging a distinct position based on his own recent work producing mass cultural products. From 1919 to 1923, he worked from Grötzingen without an academic appointment or gallery representation. Funds were scarce with inflation on the rise, and Scholz aimed to subsidize his painting practice through the production and sale of fine art prints.[25] This work too required startup capital. Posters, cigar box covers, and illustrated novels provided the Scholz family with the basic income necessary to survive, as Scholz described to a friend in October 1921:

Unfortunately, the loathsome money-making always takes precedence. Right now I’m producing posters for big firms like Kornfranck, Pils, and Persil. This work pays the best. Each poster requires two days of work—my wife paints the lettering. Anyway it’s a huge effort, but when potatoes, coal, wood, and winter jackets are paid for—then I can turn my thoughts back to so-called ‘high art’ (die hohe Kunscht).[26]

Scholz invokes a double irony by using the dialect of his adopted home region (“Kunscht”) to mock his peripheral position.[27]

Posters had become a popular collector’s item and topic of aesthetic interest in Germany beginning in the early twentieth century. Dr. Hans Sachs, a Berlin-based dentist and poster enthusiast, was one of the primary proponents of the poster as a fine art form, establishing the Association of Poster Enthusiasts in Berlin in 1905. Through this association and its related journal, Das Plakat, Sachs fostered connections between poster collectors and connoisseurs, reviewed the work of individual poster artists, and published tips on poster collecting, preservation, and storage.[28] Thematic issues on the machine industry, contemporary film, or travel featured the work of well-known poster designers such as Lucian Bernhard and Julius Klinger who were pioneers of the prevailing Plakatstil (posterly style) and its visual hallmark, the Sachplakat (object poster). These works typically featured bold colors and singular text that focused the viewer’s attention on the object-commodity. While Scholz bemoaned the financial difficulties that required him to devote time to commercial poster design, he recognized the visual and verbal impact inherent in this popular medium. He also realized that using design strategies drawn from poster making would resonate with a broader public—connecting his practice to audiences and networks in Berlin and beyond.

In a 1922 essay, Paul Westheim, the influential editor of Das Kunstblatt (The Art Paper) and a prolific collector of posters, called for artists to embrace mass cultural forms as a means to refresh their production and sharpen its political impact.[29] Westheim named Scholz as one of seven contemporary German artists best poised to deploy popular forms such as posters, postcards, and cheap oil prints to “enact a political influence on the masses” (Westheim, “Der ‘arrivierte Öldruck,’” 348). Westheim illustrated the essay with Scholz’s 1921 lithograph, Apotheose des Kriegervereins (Apotheosis of the War Veterans’ Association). The classically composed image shows three aged veterans of the Franco-Prussian War standing firmly in the earthly realm while three allegorical figures of king, war, and god float in the skies above (fig. 2). In a nod to Raphael’s Sistine Madonna, two cherubs hover just below the clouds with the faces of Emperor Wilhelm I and Otto von Bismarck, the central figure in the foundation of Germany in 1871. A host of angels sport the distinctive spiked helmets of the Prussian army. The God figure is a portly, provincial southern burgher with a large bushy beard who wears a cozy night shirt and slippers as he puffs on a water pipe. The telephone cradled to his left ear runs a direct line to the spire of a country church, below. Scholz was delighted by the attention in Westheim’s important, Berlin-based art journal, which appeared monthly from 1917 until 1933.[30] Yet there is a contradiction between the critic’s appeal to make kitschy work for a broad audience and the connoisseur’s interest in the fine art market for posters: on the one hand, a genuine concern with revolutionary “world-building” and on the other, an implicit elitism.

For Scholz, this contradiction was complicated by the pressure of art market forces and the problem of reaching a broader audience from his peripheral perch in Grötzingen. Das Kunstblatt was a fine art journal read by German-speaking collectors, dealers, and artists across Western Europe. But it was hardly a mouthpiece for the revolution. Other publications targeted a different audience in support of proletarian aims. For example, Scholz’s Apotheosis appeared as the cover image to the Berlin journal Der Gegner (The Opponent) in March 1922.[31] Gegner was a successor to the banned magazine, Die Pleite, in which George Grosz and his Dada comrades published biting visual and verbal critiques of despised politicians, military leaders, and titans of industry.[32] Scholz published a short literary work in Der Gegner in 1920 and several lithographs between 1921 and 1923.[33] These satirical prints featured pig-headed capitalists and depraved burghers paired with biting captions; their meaning was immediately legible and their audience well defined. Yet Scholz sought a broader impact than his print production could provide—and he aimed to do so using the medium of easel painting. To that end, while asserting his position on “art and kitsch” in private letters and published essays, Scholz worked toward a painting that he framed as the culmination of his posterly efforts: a work he referred to as “my Stinnes” and now known as Herren der Welt (Lords of the World).

Writing to his friend and patron Theodor Kiefer in April 1922, Scholz positioned the work in stark contrast to his 1920 Farmer Picture: “I’m often embarrassed by my own courage to make kitsch. There is an enormous difference between [Lords of the World] and the Farmer Picture. The two almost can’t be compared.”[34] Lords of the World realizes the revolutionary potential of one kitsch tactic—posterliness—through a reduction of form and dynamic coloration (fig. 3). The German steel tycoon Hugo Stinnes stands on the right flank of this triad; he wears a brown three-piece suit with hands stuffed deep in his pockets, trademark cigar held loosely between his lips.[35] An ample belly swells under his natty buttoned vest. To the left of Stinnes is the author, liberal politician, and corporate scion, Walther Rathenau, a frequent participant with Stinnes in war reparations negotiations who had recently become Germany’s foreign minister.[36] Rathenau smokes a cigarette while his eyes—two lozenges of chalky white covering paint—appear to roll back in his head. In plaid trousers is Frank Vanderlip, a New York banking mogul who had served as an early reparations advisor to the United States government.[37] We find these “lords of the world” in a fictional negotiation—one in which the American participant wields a sharpened drafting pencil that seems to slice a black trail into the purply-white painted ground.

By the early 1920s, Stinnes had become a favorite target of attack in media ranging from fine art print portfolios to popular satirical journals. Depictions of Stinnes as a dealmaker and captain of industry, set against a backdrop of puffing smokestacks, were extremely common in the Weimar illustrated press. One example by Thomas Theodor Heine shows Rathenau and Stinnes as “the world overseers” seated atop two tall towers (fig. 4). In a 1920 drawing, George Grosz presented Stinnes as a diabolical puppet master controlling the strings of Weimar Germany’s fragile post-revolutionary government.[38] Bags of money and human bones litter the ground at Stinnes’ feet. Smokestacks puff ominously in the distance. Scholz’s painting draws on these contemporary visual resources, presenting corpulent, capitalist bodies ripe for satire. The three men puff and smoke in solid formation, echoing the line of factories on the horizon—reduced, one might argue, to the visual shorthand of a corporate trademark. Yet the picture diverts in critical ways from a satirical illustration in Simplicissimus or a mordant caricature by Grosz—Scholz remains fiercely invested in problems of painterly form and technique.[39] Local art critics, curators, and dealers soon recognized the potential of this new direction. Scholz sold Lords of the World in May 1922 to the Mannheim collectors Paul and Martha Landmann for 15,000 marks, “a very good price for an oil painting in Baden.”[40]

This sale ushered in a period of increased art market success and financial stability, with Scholz accepting a position as head of the lithography workshop at the local art academy in February 1923. When an academic colleague criticized the so-called “posterly quality” of his most recent paintings, Scholz issued a strident defense, asserting that “a modern picture is ultimately the poster for an idea about humanity or a worldview.”[41] To that end, the 1922 painting Kriegerverein (War Veterans’ Association) serves as a final example of this kitsch strategy, one that gestures toward a new objectivity comprised of close reading and posterly effects. Small-town Grötzingen provides a backdrop for three war veterans who appear clueless and out of time (fig. 5).[42] The corpulent trio stands proudly bearing their war medals referencing not the world war recently lost, but the battles won in 1871. As in the earlier lithograph, posters advertise Continental Pneumatik tires, Sunlight soap, and the Frankfurt Trade Fair. But there is a new addition to this painted surface: two steel towers ferry electrical lines toward a red brick factory that bears a large sign reading “HUGO STINNES” in white lights. Scholz’s painterly satire no longer attacks the body of Stinnes but transforms it into the very material of modernity.

In the 2014 exhibition catalog, New Objectivity: Modern German Art in the Weimar Republic, scholar Sabine Eckman suggests that the regional specificity in works such as Scholz’s War Veterans’ Association creates an ironic distance—a “lack of empathy” that Eckman posits as typical of realism under the 1920s New Objectivity.[43] While I embrace this focus on the regional, my trajectory differs. How do we reconcile the opposing poles of Germany’s complex interwar modernisms: the rupture, clarity, and deep engagement of Dada and the cold, calculating distance of the New Objectivity? For Scholz, the possibilities of post-revolutionary world building arose in the space between art and kitsch. From his home in small-town Baden, Scholz developed a theory of art making that complicates the strict periodization and stylistic boundaries typically drawn between nineteenth-century Realism, German Expressionism, Dada, and New Objectivity. This paper demonstrates how “posterliness” emerged as a powerful strategy for negotiating the terrain between revolution and retreat between 1918 and 1923. Electric lights and smokestacks; the flat surfaces and dynamic colors of an advertising poster; the tranquil, airless atmosphere of a souvenir postcard: such effects represented, for Scholz, an effort to draw closer to his material, to speak form to politics in a language that would resonate for a public attuned to reading posters plastered on advertising columns. This tactic—Scholz’s posterliness—was a strategy of legibility and connection, an objectivity that collapses distance. To that end, the ideas and artworks Scholz produced in small-town Germany offer a new way of understanding the material practices of post-revolutionary world building. They demonstrate a continuity between modernist modes of vision and the contemporary developments in mass culture to which they responded.

Notes