Maria Makela | California College of the Arts (original) (raw)
Maria Makela is an art historian whose particular focus is on the visual and material culture of Weimar Germany. Author of The Munich Secession: Art and Artists in Turn-of-the-Century Munich (Princeton, 1990) and coeditor of Of Truths Impossible to Put in Words: Max Beckmann Contextualized (Peter Lang, 2009), she co-curated for the Walker Art Center a retrospective on Hannah Höch in 1997 and co-authored the accompanying catalog, The Photomontages of Hannah Höch (Walker Art Center, 1996). Her essays on individual artists and on topics as diverse as fashion, rayon, New Objectivity, Dada, Expressionism, film, nationalism, sexology, and typology have been published both nationally and internationally, and have been included in exhibition catalogues, anthologies and periodicals. Makela's research has been supported by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the American Philosophical Society, the Fulbright Foundation, the DAAD, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She is professor emerita of Visual Studies at the California College of the Arts.
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Papers by Maria Makela
New Objectivity: Modern German Art in the Weimar Republic 1919–1933, 2015
Be it in images of working women who blurred clear-cut gender boundaries merely because they were... more Be it in images of working women who blurred clear-cut gender boundaries merely because they were employed outside the home, of masculine women and feminine men, or of homosexuals, time and again New Objectivity artists commented from a variety of perspectives on sex, sexual difference, and gender ambiguity. Notably, their colleagues elsewhere were typically less interested in such subjects, despite the fact that there too clear-cut gender boundaries were also being eroded by working women, new dress codes, and visible homosexual subcultures. This essay will probe how specific socioeconomic and scientific developments in 1920s Germany uniquely informed New Objectivity, which differed from contemporaneous representational styles elsewhere in part because of its focus on gender effacement and alternative sexualities.
The New Woman International: Representations in Photography and Film from the 1870s through the 1960s, 2011
This essay relates Fritz Lang's canonical film "Metropolis" to deep-seated anxieties in Weimar-er... more This essay relates Fritz Lang's canonical film "Metropolis" to deep-seated anxieties in Weimar-era Germany about the supposed opacity of identity, especially, though not only, the identity of women. Developing in tandem with a number of highly publicized medical and technological developments that were pioneered in German-speaking Europe and were believed to disguise class, ethnicity, age, and sexual orientation, these anxieties were exacerbated by the rise of the emancipated New Woman, who blurred gender boundaries in the aftermath of the First World War. The chaos that ensued in the film's fictional city of Metropolis expressed pervasive fears about what might happen in a real world where traditional markers of class, ethnicity, age, and gender are effaced.
German Studies Review, 2015
The 1920s saw the publication of considerable scientific research on hormones and their impact on... more The 1920s saw the publication of considerable scientific research on hormones and their impact on gender and aging. Interest in Germany was especially intense, in part due to the blockbuster feature-length movie, Der Steinachfilm, that premiered in Berlin in January 1923 at the Ufa Palast am Zoo and then toured the country for months afterwards. Introducing its viewing public to the work of pioneering endocrinologist Eugen Steinach, the sensational film helped to spawn a widespread fascination with the sex glands that is reflected in the visual and literary culture of the era.
Art History, 2019
Kurt Schwitters is known for ‘Merz’, a term he used to describe the collages and assemblages he b... more Kurt Schwitters is known for ‘Merz’, a term he used to describe the collages and assemblages he began to make sometime around 1918. With supports of paper, cardboard or wood¬ but not of cotton or linen canvas, these are composed of detritus that he scavenged from the streets. His early Merz pictures in particular make liberal use of cloth, especially cloth that is soiled and frayed. This essay relates the unexpected lack of cloth as ground and its tawdry presence as figure to the extreme material shortages in Germany during the war and in the early Weimar era. It also considers how the reception of Merz can be productively contextualized by way of reference to the exigencies of the times, in particular to the Ersatzkultur (culture of substitute materials) that held sway. The political dimensions of Schwitters’ work are thereby brought to the fore.
New Objectivity: Modern German Art in the Weimar Republic 1919–1933, 2015
Be it in images of working women who blurred clear-cut gender boundaries merely because they were... more Be it in images of working women who blurred clear-cut gender boundaries merely because they were employed outside the home, of masculine women and feminine men, or of homosexuals, time and again New Objectivity artists commented from a variety of perspectives on sex, sexual difference, and gender ambiguity. Notably, their colleagues elsewhere were typically less interested in such subjects, despite the fact that there too clear-cut gender boundaries were also being eroded by working women, new dress codes, and visible homosexual subcultures. This essay will probe how specific socioeconomic and scientific developments in 1920s Germany uniquely informed New Objectivity, which differed from contemporaneous representational styles elsewhere in part because of its focus on gender effacement and alternative sexualities.
The New Woman International: Representations in Photography and Film from the 1870s through the 1960s, 2011
This essay relates Fritz Lang's canonical film "Metropolis" to deep-seated anxieties in Weimar-er... more This essay relates Fritz Lang's canonical film "Metropolis" to deep-seated anxieties in Weimar-era Germany about the supposed opacity of identity, especially, though not only, the identity of women. Developing in tandem with a number of highly publicized medical and technological developments that were pioneered in German-speaking Europe and were believed to disguise class, ethnicity, age, and sexual orientation, these anxieties were exacerbated by the rise of the emancipated New Woman, who blurred gender boundaries in the aftermath of the First World War. The chaos that ensued in the film's fictional city of Metropolis expressed pervasive fears about what might happen in a real world where traditional markers of class, ethnicity, age, and gender are effaced.
German Studies Review, 2015
The 1920s saw the publication of considerable scientific research on hormones and their impact on... more The 1920s saw the publication of considerable scientific research on hormones and their impact on gender and aging. Interest in Germany was especially intense, in part due to the blockbuster feature-length movie, Der Steinachfilm, that premiered in Berlin in January 1923 at the Ufa Palast am Zoo and then toured the country for months afterwards. Introducing its viewing public to the work of pioneering endocrinologist Eugen Steinach, the sensational film helped to spawn a widespread fascination with the sex glands that is reflected in the visual and literary culture of the era.
Art History, 2019
Kurt Schwitters is known for ‘Merz’, a term he used to describe the collages and assemblages he b... more Kurt Schwitters is known for ‘Merz’, a term he used to describe the collages and assemblages he began to make sometime around 1918. With supports of paper, cardboard or wood¬ but not of cotton or linen canvas, these are composed of detritus that he scavenged from the streets. His early Merz pictures in particular make liberal use of cloth, especially cloth that is soiled and frayed. This essay relates the unexpected lack of cloth as ground and its tawdry presence as figure to the extreme material shortages in Germany during the war and in the early Weimar era. It also considers how the reception of Merz can be productively contextualized by way of reference to the exigencies of the times, in particular to the Ersatzkultur (culture of substitute materials) that held sway. The political dimensions of Schwitters’ work are thereby brought to the fore.