The Neue Sachlichkeit was a movement in German art that arose during the 1920s as a reaction against expressionism. The movement’s artists rejected the self-involvement and romantic longings of the expressionists.

Although principally describing a tendency in German painting, the term took a life of its own, and came to characterize the attitude of public life in Weimar Germany as well as the art, literature, music, and architecture created to adapt to it. Rather than some goal of philosophical objectivity, it was meant to imply a turn towards practical engagement with the world—an all-business attitude, understood by Germans as intrinsically American.

Definition adapted from Wikipedia, August 10, 2016.