New Objectivity: Modern German Art in the Weimar Republic 1919-1933, Museo Correr, Venice - review

Two women pass each other on a sunless beach. One is veiled, the other is concealed beneath a white cloche hat and a cape witha jester's jagged red fringe. Behindthem, the limbs, heads, hands of bathers, chunky, disproportioned, ill-co-ordinated, jut out of green waves at odd angles. Composed in the colours of the Italian flag, Max Beckmann's giddy, disquieting "Lido" returns to Venice 90 years after it was painted on an Adriatic holiday during the early rule of Mussolini. Beckmann said he wanted to depict "beautiful women and grotesque monsters". Is "Lido" a carnival, an apocalypse or, as Berlin collector Curt Glaser wrote at the time, "a fantasy of the real"?

Among an unprecedented number of ambitious museum exhibitions opening to coincide with this year's Venice Biennale (from May 9), none resonates more eloquently with 21st-century concerns than the Museo Correr's New Objectivity: Modern German Art in the Weimar Republic 1919-1933, which launched on Friday. As biennale director Okwui Enwezor prepares to stage live recitations of Das Kapital and invites us "to read the Giardini with its ramshackle assemblage of pavilions as the ultimate site of a disordered world, of national conflicts, as well as territorial and geopolitical disfigurations", the Correr offers a historical mirror: a panorama of the modernist movement that most violently challenged the capitalist status quo.

Many of the Correr's star turns have long been icons of social breakdown, disillusion and political rage. These range from the public - George Grosz's "Street Scene (Kurfurstendamm)", with its contrasting razor-sharp figures of gaunt war cripple and obese, cigar-puffing profiteer - to the private: Christian Schad's anatomy of narcissism "Self-portrait with Model", where the artist in transparent green shirt sits sullenly indifferent to the nude sharing his bed. Schad draws attention to her spidery fingers, dirty pink-polished nails, scarred face; at her shoulder, the single stalk of a large narcissus indicates both figures' self-containment.

Schad's sumptuous frozen realism; what Grosz called his "knife-hard drawing style which enabled me to communicate my observations which were dictated by an absolute hatred of man"; Beckmann's enigmatic dramas cramped into dense pictorial space. All these were responses to a brand new, mad new 1920s world of sexual licence, moral ambivalence, excessive poverty, staggering unemployment, and the lengthening shadow of fascism. "I experienced that time as provisional, as something unreal. Germany had lost a war and almost sleepwalked into a republic," wrote Weimar journalist Hans Sahl. In times which seem unreal, artists either flee into abstraction - as happened during the Russian Revolution - or seek innovative ways to depict extreme, hard-to-grasp realities.

The Correr's catalogue cover features Heinrich Maria Davringhausen's "The Profiteer", portraying with smooth photographic clarity and acid colours a Weimar stereotype: the businessman fattened on hyperinflation. It is the classic pictorial symbol of Weimar economic catastrophe: avoiding our gaze, the profiteer stares dispassionately from his top-floor office giving on to skyscrapers, all grids, angles, rows, while accoutrements of smouldering cigar, wineglass, compass and telephone denote wealth, calculated profit, networking. Only a dripping ink pen, injecting flow, smudge, quivering gesture, disturbs the sealed, methodically organised capitalist environment.

But the story does not end there, for Davringhausen's entire composition references another of his works, "The Dreamer", shown alongside. Here a similarly stolid figure, this time in crimson, is also frontally perched within a rooftop room. He too leans over a smoking cigar and - imitating the leaking pen - a bloody razor. The background is so busy with representations of his dreams - lunar walk, nocturnal cityscape, sunlit morning - that at first you miss the victim: a wilting, seeping nude in the corner. Dreamer and profiteer alike are murderers; Davringhausen slashes his cold mechanised surfaces with the force of narrative, making psychological and physical space inextricable. This is an uncanny naturalism and incongruous narrative which strikes a contemporary chord, anticipating attempts by artists today to freshly document the real in what biennale president Paolo Baratta describes as our "age of anxiety", and for a generation in which real and virtual increasingly converge.

New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit) acquired its name from a 1925 exhibition in Mannheim, but photographer Franz Roh coined a competing term, "magic realism" - later appropriated for Latin American literature - which is more appropriate for Davringhausen and many other lesser-known Weimar artists whose highly detailed depictions of the material world are infused with strangeness. Their rediscovery here is a joy: Max Radler's eerie, deserted "Station SD/2", Anton Raderscheidt's "House No 9", a terraced town house with blank door and window, uprooted into a bare landscape - Rachel Whiteread's "House" (1993) came to my mind - and with its owners abstracted into alienated geometric robots. Menace and the allure of artifice dovetail too in an array of portraits of outsize house plants in claustrophobic settings: Alexander Kanoldt's "Still Life with Green Curtain", Georg Scholz's "Cacti and Semaphore", Franz Lenk's "Flowering Cactus".

The Correr's other innovation is to show painting with photography, emphasising how the cool, clinical, crystalline stylisation of the former is indebted to the latter. "Line has become a photographic and not a personal fact," wrote Grosz; his portraits of Weimar types here - "The Boss", "The Boxer" - parallel August Sander's project to "provide a true psychology of our time" through pristine, neutral, stoically reserved depictions of individuals ordered by profession - "Bricklayer", "Coal Carrier", "Architect" - in "People of the 20th century".

Juxtaposing these images forms a potent commentary on Weimar's class and gender boundaries and on formal pictorial concerns. In Sander's "The Painter", Raderscheidt is silhouetted against Cologne's empty, receding Bismarckstrasse in grey morning light - a composition mimicking the dissonance of Raderscheidt's own canvas "House". The tilted sinuous posture and provocative gaze of Sander's androgynous "Secretary at West German Radio in Cologne" parallels precisely those of the wily advocate engaging us with gesturing hands and alert eyes in Otto Dix's "The Lawyer Hugo Simons". But the placement also highlights painterliness: Dix's meticulous rendering - skin tone, locks of hair, buttons on Simons' burgundy wool jacket - in tempera and oil on wood looks back to the intense scrutiny of northern Renaissance portraiture.

This show is organised with the Los Angeles Museum, where it travels in the autumn; both venues add a dimension to our understanding of Weimar art. As cities, Berlin, an insecure late-comer among Europe's capitals, and Venice and Los Angeles, on the geographical fringes of their countries, all share a gaudy brilliance and an obsession with display that sets them apart from the ancient pedigree and gravitas of Paris, Rome or New York. Weimar told truths through modern pageants which marvellously echo the theatrical arenas of today's Venice Biennale.

To August 30, correr.visitmuve.it

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