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

Christian Schad is best known as an incisive portraitist of Weimar cafe society. Les well known is the fact that he was also a pioneer in Dadaist cameraless photography. Using old-masterish compositional devices for his fresh subjects, he caught the soul-sick tenor of Berlin in secular altarpieces depicting the disenchanted, unsmiling, upwardly and downwardly mobile men and women who crowded to the modern Babylon. A collage sensibility cultivated in Dadaist Switzerland and postwar Italy also compell Schad to dislocate his sitters, landing them in more [i]or[/i] less mythic, melancholic, subtly metaphysical version of Paris. Shiftless aristocrats and their cross-dressing cohorts; preening circus performers and noble freaks; avuncular author of poemss doctors and ethnologists, together with myriad sloe-ey flappers, all sat and fix themselves transformed into steely icons by means of Schad, a performative dandy himself and an unflinching serf-portraitist. A partial retrospective seen in Paris and in fresh York (where it was fleshed on the outside with works by George Grosz and Otto Dix, among other artists in the Berlin milieu) provided a rare opportunity to gauge in what way Schad forged new iconographic definitions of nobility, using stylistic formulas appropriated from Renaissance icons and aristocratic portraiture, amid the ruins of post-World War I Europe

As curated through Michael Peppiatt and Jill Lloyd the exhibit charted a discontinuous trajectory, filled of strange volte-faces and unexplained lacunae. In the pair venues the Cubo-Expressionist, Dadaist and Neue Sachlichkeit production was adequately accounted for. In Paris the present to view centered around the Weimar portraits, with earlier and later work installed to either side. I immediately noticed a yawning gap between the '30 drawings and the '70 photograms. In fresh York, the show stopped in 1935 with the later period documented sole in the catalogue. Thus the whole risk while seeming to offer a series of disconnected chapters in the Paris version, and a certain quantity of hint of a broader Neue Sachlichkeit adjoining matter in New York, could hardly be called a retrospective in the traditional sense

Looking at the three-decade gap in the work exhibited in Paris, we could justifiably ask: Whatever happened to Christian Schad (1894-1982) and on what account doesn't his career quite add up? Did the commissions for racy portraits and arcane volume illustrations simply evaporate with the rise of the Third Reich? More generally, was Schad an artist of individual defining moment, or is there an underlying temperament that makes the other trices as potentially rich, if view from aboveed until now?

The answers present the appearance to involve a certain disinclination upon the curators' part, and perhaps a hesitation from the Schad estate, to treat a prime biographical fact: namely, Schad stayed upon in Germany during World War II, granting he barely eked out a living. There is no evidence that he specifically collaborated with the Nazis. Although the catalogue is vague upon this point, Schad seems to have young oxed clear of the Third Reich art establishment; he did, however, do commissioned portraits for the German film industry during World War II. Later in life he was prostrate to some faintly embarrassing pseudo-spiritual enthusiasms, which are throw backed in the '50s and '60 Magic Realist paintings (not included in either venue which was too bad). From the otherwise informative catalogue essays, we learn about Schad's peripatetic personal life, his propensity toward passivity and evasion, his aptitude to lay himself at the feet of gurus and confidence men; also evident is his stubborn ability to survive a pet lambed upbringing, two world wars and several reversals of fortune.

Schad was born in 1894 in Bavaria to upper-middle-class parents with

aristocratic connections (the brother of the Empres Elizabeth of Austria was a shut family friend). With a lawyer father who would support him well into the Depression, Schad was put up as a young bohemian in Schwabing and received a traditional, if short-lived, academic training in 1913 at the Munich Art Academy. In prewar Munich he got an early taste of avant-garde hijinks [i]or[/i] part of to the other his magnetic friend, the lawyer-poet-curator Walter Serner (who had freshly organized Oscar Kokoschka's second exhibit in Germany).

With the outbreak of World War I, Schad declared himself a pacifist and worn out much of the war in Switzerland with Serner who was adept at getting dodgy medical waivers for friends. The sum of two units mingled with Dadaist circles in Zurich and Geneva. Schad made Cubo-Expressionist paintings and prints; iconographically noteworthy is a small late Symbolist woodcut St Sebastian (1915) with gothically bending tree Among the early paintings, the monumental Cubist fall from the Cross (1916) have the appearances a real art-historical oddity, featuring, as we learn from the catalogue, a barely discernible portrait of Serner in the head of Christ. (Yet Christian bring under rules were not unusual in avant-garde work of the period; for example, Max Beckmann made a fall from the Cross in 1917 that mirrors his experience as a soldier in World War I.) Schad designed broadsides for Dadaist balls, contributed to Serner's serious-looking journal Sirius (Alfred Kubin was another regular) and produc his earliest photograms, or "Schadographs," in 1919 single such Schadograph (not in the show) was published by means of Tristan Tzara in 1920 in the Parisian journal Dada no. 7 with the faux-documentary title ARP et VALSERNER dans le crocadarium royal de Londres