Description: "Offering a fresh perspective on the cultural transition between Weimar- and National Socialist-era Germany, this interdisciplinary volume explores the fate of modernism following the censorship of the Nazi years. Presenting essays on architecture, painting, cabaret, typography, and commercial design, the volume explores how modern styles like New Vision photography, Dada, and Neue Sachlichkeit coexisted with established artistic modes and generated a productive tension that persisted during the Nazi era. Bridging photography, moving image, and painting, Aesthetics in Transition provides a deeper understanding of the complex interplay between tradition and modernity in early-20th-century Germany"--
Brief description: Deborah Ascher Barnstone is Professor and Head of Architecture at the University of Sydney, Australia. Barnstone is a licensed architect in Germany, holds a Master of Architecture degree from Columbia University, and holds a PhD from TU Delft. Her recent monograph works include Beyond the Bauhaus: Cultural Modernity in Breslau, 1918-1933 (2016), Art and Resistance in Germany (2018), and The Break with the Past: Avant-garde Architecture in Germany, 1910-1925 (2019). She co-edits Bloomsbury's Visual Cultures and German Contexts book series.
Review Quotes:
"Uniting leading scholars in the Weimar avant-garde and Nazi modernism, this timely collection helps us better understand the continuities as much as the disruptions between the periods' aesthetic styles and schools. Such precise analyses of celebrated works and forgotten resistance require us to challenge many long-held assumptions about artists caught in turbulent political times." --Randall Halle, Klaus Jonas Professor of German Film and Cultural Studies, University of Pittsburgh, USA
"This marvellous anthology counters conventional wisdom that cultural production in the Weimar and Nazi eras was either traditional and conservative or radically modernist. A must-read for all scholars of German history and visual culture in the 1920s and 1930s, it proves that there were often significant aesthetic overlaps between old and new forms of art in these turbulent times." --Maria Makela, Professor Emerita of History of Art and Visual Culture, California College of the Arts, USA "Germany's transition from the Weimar Republic to National Socialism is too often posited as a total break with the past. With its stellar contributions from a global cast of scholars, this book offers a new narrative through outstanding, in-depth case studies drawn from diverse spheres including art, architecture, film, sculpture, cabaret, erotic photography, and colour theory." --Elizabeth Otto, Professor, Modern and Contemporary Art History, The University at Buffalo, USA