Realism After Modernism ─ The Rehumanization of Art and Literature

The human figure made a spectacular return in visual art and literature in the 1920s.Following modernism's withdrawal, nonobjective painting gave way to realistic depictions of the bodyand experimental literary techniques were abandoned for novels with powerfully individuatedcharacters. But the celebrated return of the human in the interwar years was not as straightforwardas it may seem. In Realism after Modernism, Devin Fore challenges the widelyaccepted view that this period represented a return to traditional realist representation and itshumanist postulates. Interwar realism, he argues, did not reinstate its nineteenth-centurypredecessor but invoked realism as a strategy of mimicry that anticipates postmodernist pastiche.Through close readings of a series of works by German artists and writers of the period, Foreinvestigates five artistic devices that were central to interwar realism. He analyzes Bauhauspolymath Laszlo Moholy-Nagy's use of linear perspective; three industrial novels riven by theconflict between the temporality of capital and that of labor; Brecht's socialist realist plays,which explore new dramaturgical principles for depicting a collective subject; a memoir by CarlEinstein that oscillates between recollection and self-erasure; and the idiom of physiognomy in thephotomontages of John Heartfield. Fore's readings reveal that each of these "rehumanized"works in fact calls into question the very categories of the human upon which realist figuration isbased. Paradoxically, even as the human seemed to make a triumphal return in the culture of theinterwar period, the definition of the human and the integrity of the body were becoming moretenuous than ever before. Interwar realism did not hearken back to earlier artistic modes butposited new and unfamiliar syntaxes of aesthetic encounter, revealing the emergence of a humansubject quite unlike anything that had come before.

Devin Fore is Associate Professor in the Department of German at Princeton University.