Grossberg’s Realism

Art, Industry, and the New Processes of Life

Abstract

The German artist Carl Grossberg produced pictures of machinery and architecture from the 1910s until his death in 1940. Precise, realist, yet often dreamlike, his pictures – associated with the Neue Sachlichkeit – are presented here as dynamic responses not only to recent artistic developments but also to key questions about manual and intellectual labor in an environment increasingly given to technological rationalization. Because Grossberg’s detailed pictures rarely portray humans, his work has been said to affirm the prerogatives of Weimar-era capital and to simply catalogue its dehumanizing effects. But he instead reveals the inadequacy of such critical analytics, crafting a realism based on an unstable synthesis of old and new techniques, of human and technological capacities.