Portrait of Composer Josef Matthias Hauer

Christian Schad met the Austrian composer Josef Matthias Hauer in Vienna in 1926 yet chose to portray him in front of a cross section of the Eiffel Tower. For Schad, this structure recalled Hauer’s chromatic music—based on the 12-tone scale—through its blend of aesthetics and mathematics. In the late 1920s, Schad quickly emerged as a leading artist of the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) movement. These avant-garde artists introduced portraiture marked by icy precision and razor-sharp detail, making pointed cultural critiques. Their works’ startling clarity stood in stark contrast to the exuberant color and expressiveness that had dominated German painting over the previous two decades.