Christian Schad

German painter Christian Schad is best known for his enigmatic portraits of the modern men and women of Weimar Germany. He captured the decadence and erotic freedoms of the volatile 1920s in his portraits of bohemians, intellectuals, and aristocrats. Schad employed a realistic painting technique honed at the traditional art academy in Naples to create what critic Wieland Schmied called the “coldest, sharpest, most precise” paintings of the nascent “Neue Sachlichkeit” movement of which he was a member. As an early affiliate of the anti-art Dada movement, whose members he met when living in Zurich during World War I, Schad also experimented with abstract photograms which he dubbed “Schadographs.”