Exhibition Of The Week Portraying A Nation: Germany 1919-1933

Tate Liverpool, Albert Dock, Liverpool (0151-702 7400, www.tate.org.uk). Until 15 October

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“Interwar Germany is a historical moment that we all feel we know,” said Mark Hudson in The Daily Telegraph. The short-lived Weimar Republic (1919-33) has been the subject of endless documentaries and fictional treatments chronicling its “rampant inflation” and “decadent atmosphere”, not to mention the turbulent politics that ultimately led to the rise of Hitler. All of that may seem part of another age, yet the imagery of the period – as this new exhibition at Tate Liverpool devoted to two of Weimar Germany’s most distinctive artists powerfully demonstrates – is “still capable of delivering a sharp jab to the solar plexus”. The painter Otto Dix (1891-1969) and the photographer August Sander (1876-1964) could not be more different as artists but, seen together, their work delivers an un