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How this Modern Artist Captured the Wounded Truth of his Age
The razor-sharp paintings of Christian Schad
Christian Schad has long been one of my favourite artists. Working mainly in the 1920s, his superb ability to generate ambivalence in his images has always struck me as prescient and prophetic given what happened in Germany in the following decade.
Take this painting, Self-Portrait, made in 1927, in which the artist shows himself gazing out of the canvas whilst in the company of a prostitute. What word sums up the expression in his eyes? Detached, bitter, mistrustful?
Whilst her gaze is averted elsewhere, his exchange of glances with the viewer is both collaborative and uncomfortable — perhaps ready to receive the viewer’s judgement, knowing he has been caught in a compromised situation. Or is he trying to tell us something?
Other details of the painting lend it an uneasy quality. The flower in the background for instance is a narcissus, symbolic of vanity — seeming to rear up like a warning sign.
His transparent greenish shirt is both peculiar in its style and also lends itself to a literal reading…
