Unheimlich schön. Geschlechterstereotype um 1900 bei Sascha Schneider

In the organizer's words:

Naked bodies of vigorous men, beautiful young men and seductive women dominate the painterly and graphic oeuvre of Sascha Schneider (1870-1927). His boldly combined symbolist and religious motifs were replaced after 1900 by athletic figures that reveal Schneider's confrontation with existing social power relations and his ideas about the New Man. The latter manifest themselves in 1919 in the opening of the Kraft-Kunst-Institut for physical and aesthetic education. This is also where his interest in the male nude, which earned him a professorship for nude painting at the Grand Ducal School of Art in Weimar in 1904, finds expression.

The exhibition at the MKK shows Schneider's stagings of male and female bodies, which are influenced by gender stereotypes of the late 19th century as well as the reform movement and youth culture around 1900. The exhibition concludes with photographic works from the series Men are made to reproduce (2022) by Milena Schilling and Fiona Mentzel, which question our current viewing habits and gender stereotypes.

Figure: Sascha Schneider, The Feeling of Dependence (II) 1920