Mapping the Revolution: Georg Scholz and Placard Politics, 1918-1923

This paper explores the relationship between place and politics in the early 1920s artworks and theoretical writings of the Karlsruhe artist Georg Scholz. Until now, curators and scholars of Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) have cited Scholz’s satirical prints and paintings as mere illustrations of his left-leaning politics, often without providing the kind of critical commentary found in writings about Scholz’s more prominent contemporaries such as George Grosz or John Heartfield. Scholz’s extensive private correspondence and published writings offer a more complicated view of his aesthetic and political commitments. From his home in small-town Baden, in the first years of the 1920s, Scholz developed a formal lexicon and a set of laws for art making that tested the means and methods of a revolutionary art practice deeply engaged with—yet geographically removed from—the political center in Berlin.

My case study examines a word used frequently by the artist and his contemporaries, “Plakatmäßigkeit” (“posterliness,”) to propose a new mode of understanding Neue Sachlichkeit in a post-revolutionary context. For Scholz, “Plakatmäßigkeit” was an expansive term, one that encompassed strategies drawn from his work producing mass cultural products: advertising posters, illustrated novels, and cigar box covers. In this sense, “Plakatmäßigkeit” connoted a fundamental legibility of form and content. For conservative commentators like Oswald Spengler, it was a mark of decline in modern painting. I propose Scholz’s “Plakatmäßigkeit” as both a political stance and a formal operation, one by which the artist intervened in period debates about revolutionary art making.