For such a ferocious exhibition, the Metropolitan Museum’s dazzlingly decadent “Glitter and Doom: German Portraits from the 1920s” gets off to an understated start. A dimmed antechamber presents a series of preliminary sketches for various works, including the cartoon for Otto Dix’s monumental triptych “Metropolis” (1927–28). The show is strong on drawings, as befits so graphically inclined a group as the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) artists. But that’s not the reason curator Sabine Rewald’s thematically organized exhibition opens the way it does. The cartoon has a gloomy, other worldly, necrophiliac relationship to its final, painted image. It signifies that we are entering a city of ghosts.

The Weimar Republic was an interlude between German disasters. As the journalist Hans Sahl, who is quoted in the catalogue by historian Ian Buruma, put it: “Germany had lost a war and almost sleepwalked into a republic for which it wasn’t prepared. It was a time of great misery, with legless war veterans riding the sidewalks on rolling planks, with a nation that seemed to consist of nothing but beggars, whores, invalids and fatnecked speculators.”

The painters in this show took ghoulish delight in presenting such a cast of freaks. They also reveled in the extravagance, exoticism, and release of a racy, licentious city in their depiction of nighttime Berlin. In their own perverse way, in scathing portraits of generously thick-skinned patrons, they celebrated the achievements of a progressive bourgeoisie.

The style of artists like Dix and Christian Schad fused the vehemence and brutality of Expressionism with a medieval meticulousness. Neue Sachlichkeit was a term coined by the Mannheim museum director, Gustav Hartlaub, to describe a tendency toward verisimilitude among artists who emerged from the twin shadows of Expressionism and the Great War. A neoclassical “return to order” was concurrently felt across Europe, particularly in France and Italy, but in Germany it took on a character and force of its own. Hartlaub identified two wings of the movement in Germany, roughly corresponding to political orientations. The right appealed to the consolations of the bucolic and the familiar. Meanwhile, the left, which Hartlaub championed and named “Verists,” used realism to confront and satirize a corrupt society.

The artists who fell under this Verist banner were diverse in style and attitude. George Grosz (who had Americanized his name from Georg Gross) was less steeped in tradition than, say, Dix or Schad. While he emulated Hogarth and Daumier, his harsh, explicitly leftist satires of the new republic employed a crudity and cruelty that were unmistakably modern. “I Shall Exterminate Everything Around Me That Restricts Me From Being the Master” (1921) is a grotesque portrayal of a gloating capitalist with a porcine nozzle and a cigar smoldering.

On the other hand, Schad made a self-conscious break with earlier, avantgarde experiment to embrace classicism. His surfaces have a smooth luxury that couldn’t be more of a contrast with Grosz’s abrasive, perfunctory stabs at the page. His modernity had to do with a daring frankness; he dealt with new sexual mores, such as his depiction of nonchalantly masturbating lesbians in”Two Girls” (1928), or his louche selfportrait in 1927. In this painting he wears a see-through shirt and shares a bed with a scarred, naked prostitute while a limp narcissus looks on.

The artist represented in the greatest depth here is Dix. His style made an unabashed appeal to northern Renaissance masters like Dürer and Cranach to produce a kind of grotesque hyperrealism that is at once fastidiously observed and bizarrely inventive. “Three Wenches” (1926) presents a blonde, a brunette, and a redhead cavorting in a brothel. There is an equal spread of body types, from the obese to the anorexic, but the pervading mood is not of lust so much as disgust. The faces are locked in excruciating grimace, the hirsute flesh mercilessly meticulous in its rendering of stretch and sag. These are the graces of an age of disgrace.

The elite of the Weimar republic had venerable, veteran secessionists like Max Liebermann — from 1920 the president of the Prussian Academy of Arts — to paint their portraits. The hapless sitters of Verist portraits by Dix, Schad, or Grosz were professionals with a robust sense of self and an advanced sense of humor. Dix’s portrait of “The Jeweler Karl Krall” (1923) — whose absurdly roseate, grinning head surmounts an hourglass figure, the hands on the shoulder making a clear dig at his sexual orientation — proved too much for Krall, a friend of the artist’s wife. After a month, he donated it to the Nationalgalerie. Now in Wuppertal’s art museum, it was to be one of the 260 Dixes declared degenerate by the Nazis and cleared from German institutions.

Audaciously, Ms. Rewald includes works by Max Beckmann, who was some years older than the other artists in this exhibition, and is usually aligned with first generation Expressionists. She might, therefore, have also included Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s later work, particularly his depictions of Berlin partygoers. But the case for Beckmann is compelling and vindicated: Although his touch and palette have the plastic freedom of Expressionism, an attraction to modernity and the city gives his works a requisite “objectivity.” More acutely than the Verists, however, Beckmann had a unique ability to fuse a symbolic sense of the portrait sitter as a type belonging to his or her time and as an individual with unique psychological and physiognomical traits. Wherever his works hang, they are unkind to neighbors. Schad’s “Count St. Genois d’Anneaucourt” (1927), attired similarly to Beckmann’s “Young Argentine” (1929), suffers in comparison. Schad’s aristocrat seem limps in more ways than his homophobic portrait (posed — and poised — between a mannish woman and a transvestite) intended.

Until February 19 (1000 Fifth Ave. at 82nd Street, 212-879-5500).