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Die Weltbühne, even in its later stages, retained a certain residue of expressionism in its passionate commitments. But in the mid to late Weimar period the reigning style in literature and painting was Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity)—a cool bath of skepticism and sobriety following the effusions of the immediate postwar period. Just as the earlier art and writing had mirrored the chaotic atmosphere of the times, so the new style seemed better suited to the politics of stabilization and accommodation during the second half of the decade.

Writing about the new style in painting, a contemporary critic declared: “The pictures and drawings by the artists of the Neue Sachlichkeit read like an account of events in Berlin during the Weimar period. They depict its desires, ideals, and disappointments, its evasions, conflicts, and shortcomings.” Most of the painters in question had earlier been identified with Dada or expressionism and had focused on the horrors of war, revolution, and inflation; now they turned a critical but somewhat jaded eye to the scene around them in the “era of fulfillment.” In one of his most famous works, Sonnenfinsternis (Solar Eclipse, 1926) Grosz depicted President Hindenburg being offered weapons by arms dealers while prisoners rot in jail, a donkey (symbolizing the public) feeds on a newspaper, and a huge dollar sign, Weimar Germany’s true source of light, blots out the sun. The major painters also focused attention on themselves and their artist friends as observer-shapers of the cultural scene. Rudolf Schichter painted Brecht in his leather jacket with a stogie and rendered Kisch bare-breasted and covered with menacing tattoos; Grosz depicted writer Max Hermann-Neisse looking like a gnarled troll; Otto Dix drew Sylvia Harden as an emancipated woman, bob-haired and smoking; Max Beckmann did himself in a tuxedo, peering back sardonically at his creator. Such works did not radiate grand visions or overarching beliefs. Hope had shifted to smaller, more attainable aims, such as capturing the essence of an object or a person on canvas with the same no-nonsense precision that went into building a fine car or an airplane.

George Grosz, Selbstporträt(Self-portrait), 1928

The young Anglo-Irish painter Francis Bacon arrived in Berlin at this auspicious moment in the city’s cultural history, though it was not the local art scene that initially attracted him. He had been expelled from his home in Ireland by his father for showing signs of incipient homosexuality. First he had gone to London and sampled that city’s extensive but beleaguered homosexual underground. Hoping yet to reclaim him for traditional morality, his father sent him on a visit to Berlin under the care of a manly uncle. The uncle’s virility, however, turned out to be indiscriminate, and young Bacon promptly found himself in bed with his guardian at the Hotel Ad-lon. Outside their opulent suite beckoned the whole world of “decadent” Berlin, which Bacon began exploring on his own once his uncle had returned to England. He recalled later:

There was something extraordinarily open about the whole place. . . . You had this feeling that sexually you could get absolutely anything you wanted. I’d never seen anything like it, of course, having been brought up in Ireland, and it excited me enormously. I felt, well, now I can just drift and follow my instincts. And I remember these streets of clubs where people stood in the front of the entrance miming the perversions that were going on inside. That was very interesting.

Berlin was a revelation to Bacon in other ways as well. He was struck by the luxury of the Adlon cheek by jowl with the poverty of the Scheunenviertel; the Unterwelt of gangsters and their molls; the cinemas playing Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin; the Neue Sachlichkeit exhibition at the Galerie Nierendorf in early 1927; the paintings of Grosz, Pechstein, Beckmann, and Dix, especially the latter’s haunting Big City Triptych. All this made a lasting impression on the young man and helped shape his own work in the coming decades.

The Berlin world with which Bacon became acquainted through his precocious wanderings and the works of its avant-garde painters was also under intense scrutiny by the city’s literary artists, many of whom, like the painters, had passed through Dada and expressionism to the rigors of Neue Sachlichkeit.