Artists

While the political situation in the Weimar Republic was rather dull, art was breaking almost all boundaries, with artists depicting the eccentric bustle of the city’s changing dynamics.

The avant-garde was beginning to gain wider public recognition in the early 20s. In numerous exhibitions and museums, paintings by contemporary surreallist and dadaist artists such as Max Ernst, Paul Klee and Jean Arp, were available to a growing audience.

Richard Huelsenbeck and Raoul Hausmann were the most important founders of the Dada movement in Berlin, where they also co-organized the first International Dada Fair in 1920. Many artists, whose creations were later banned, provocatively fought what remained of the old order. Painters like George Grosz, Otto Dix and Christian Schad ruthlessly analysed their subjects and laid bare what they found in their paintings.

Artists and intellectuals such as Ernst Toller and John Heartfield sympathized with communist ideology, while Käthe Kollwitz used her work as a medium to express her beliefs in pacifism and revolutionary proletarian ideals.

It was a time in which politics and art were very closely linked.