Hanna Nagel

1907 Heidelberg – 1975 Heidelberg

Hanna Nagel was an outstanding draftswoman and one of the few female artists associated with the New Objectivity movement. As a gifted student of Karl Hubbuch, she developed a precise and graphically incisive visual language that focused on social injustices—particularly the role and lived reality of women in the Weimar Republic. Hanna Nagel proves to be an observer who, with minimal means, arrives at clear and precise formulations. 

Her art is a visual record of a woman in a completely new era of German history, in which the emergence of the “New Woman” within a transforming society became one of her central themes.

Exhibitions (selection):

1977 Freiburg, Städtischen Museen: Retrospective 

1981 Karlsruhe, Künstlerhaus: Retrospective 

1986 New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Cambridge, Harvard University Art Museums, Stuttgart, Staatsgalerie: German Realist Drawings of the 1920s

2007 Karlsruhe, Städtische Galerie, Berlin, Das Verborgene Museum: Hanna Nagel. Early Works 1926 to 1933

2007 New York, Metropolitan Museum: Made in Germany

2020 Mannheim, Kunsthalle: Upheaval

2022 Paris, Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne: Allemagne / Années 1920 / Nouvelle Objectivité / August Sander

2022 Mannheim, Kunsthalle: Hanna Nagel. Rediscovery of a Pioneer of Feminist Art

2024 Stuttgart, Kunstmuseum, Chemnitz, Kunstsammlungen: Look at the People! The New Objectivity „Type“ Portrait in the Weimar Period