Christian Schad (1894 - 1982). Christian Schad was a German painter and photographer. He was associated with the Dada and the New Objectivity movements. Considered as a group, Schad's portraits form an extraordinary record of life in Vienna and Berlin in the years following World War I. Schad was born in Miesbach, Upper Bavaria, to a prosperous lawyer who supported him for nearly half his life. He studied at the art academy in Munich in 1913. A self-inflicted heart defect allowed the pacifist to flee to Switzerland in 1915 to avoid service in World War I, settling first in Zürich sharing his apartment with Walter Serner, with whom he launched Sirius, a literary review. He was witness of the foundation of Dada at the Cabaret Voltaire in 1916. But he did show little interest in Dada, which he conceived as a child of expressionism, and moved to Geneva in the very same year. In 1919 he created early photograms on printing-out-paper later called Schadographs. From 1920 to 1925, he spent some years in Naples. Having married Marcella Arcangeli, the daughter of a Roman professor, he settled in Naples where he attended painting and drawing courses at the art academy. In 1927 the family emigrated to Vienna. His paintings of this period are closely associated with the New Objectivity movement. In the late twenties, he returned to Berlin and settled there. Schad became interested in Eastern philosophy around 1930, and his artistic production declined precipitously. After the crash of the New York stock market in 1929, Schad could no longer rely on his father's financial support, and he largely stopped painting in the early 1930s Schad's art was not condemned by the Nazis in the same way that the work of Otto Dix, George Grosz, Max Beckmann, and many other artists of the New Objectivity movement was. In 1937, the Nazis included Schad in the Great German Art exhibition, their antidote to the Degenerate Art show. Recent research revealed that Christian Schad arranged with the Nazi in his own way entering the National Socialist German Workers' Party in 1933. Schad lived in obscurity in Germany through the war and after it. After the destruction of his studio in 1943 Schad moved to Aschaffenburg. The city commissioned him to copy Matthias Grünewald's Virgin and Child, a project on which he worked until 1947. When his Berlin studio was destroyed in aerial bombing, his future wife Bettina saved the artworks in a spectacular action and brought them to him to Aschaffenburg. An initially provisional arrangement turned into a stay of four decades.