How German Is It?

By Michael Duncan 6/16/09

In his provocative book The Germans and Their Art: A Troublesome Relationship (1998), art historian Hans Belting considers the uneasy role visual art has played in German culture since the Renaissance. Belting describes the constant derailment of German art by neurotic self-doubt, ponderous theorizing, Lutheran restraint and compensatory nationalistic fervor. The devastations of the Third Reich, World War II and the Cold War complicated the formation of a coherent artistic identity in the second half of the 20th century. Today, in a reunited Germany, Nazi-sanctioned art is still taboo, and the Socialist Realism promoted by the former East Germany (German Democratic Republic, or GDR) problematic. Since reunification, there have been few attempts to broaden the perspective on postwar German art. Backed by longtime market interests, art stars of the former West Germany (Federal Republic of Germany, or FRG) have continued to claim the lion’s share of attention.

View Slideshow Herbert List: Plaster Casts in the Academy I, Munich, 1946, gelatin silver print, 113⁄8 by 9 inches. Herbert List Estate, M. Scheler, Hamburg.; Lutz Dammbeck: Nibelung (detail), 1986-88, photocollage triptych, 431⁄4 by 59 inches overall. © Artists Rights Society, New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.;

The complex development of German art from the end of the war in 1945 to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 is the subject of “Art of Two Germanys/Cold War Cultures,” organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in cooperation with Kulturprojekte Berlin. This is the first major exhibition to bring together the art of the two countries in a comprehensive manner.1 LACMA curator Stephanie Barron and Eckhart Gillen of Kulturprojekte have selected nearly 300 artworks by 120 artists, presenting a wild mix of styles and densely installed earlier this year at LACMA’s Broad Contemporary Art Museum.

After the rigid control that the Nazi regime exercised over the arts, and the disaster of World War II, artists could hardly pick up where Weimar culture had left off. Many had fled the country. Those who returned or had remained felt awkward about continuing the expressionist styles of the past, or about making work that dealt in any way with Teutonic culture, identity or mythos. Each side in the burgeoning Cold War encouraged styles—in East Germany, government-sanctioned Socialist Realism, in West Germany, market-sanctioned abstraction—that fostered esthetic subterfuge. Both nations also produced artists who refused to adhere to party lines—official or otherwise. Politically and socially enforced strictures quickly eroded, in the West openly and in the East underground.

“Two Germanys” tracks developments in art on both sides of the divide before and after the erection of the Berlin Wall in 1961-62, chronicling as well an ongoing cultural identity crisis marked by denial, anger, satire, earnestness, displacement, remorse, bitterness, emotional remove and self-loathing. Works were chosen for their relevance, as Barron puts it, to “the complex connections between art and ideology” and for their ability to “visually embody the dialogue between East and West, which at times became charged and confrontational.”

In this intellectually engaging exhibition, Barron and Gillen seem unafraid of challenging conventional art-historical wisdom. They have included many artists largely unknown outside Germany and place a special emphasis on those who were active in the East, such as Werner Heldt (1904-1954), Werner Tübke (1929-2004), Bernhard Heisig (b. 1925) and Hermann Glöckner (1889-1987). East German artists animate each section of the exhibition, throwing new light on works by such familiar Westerners as Gerhard Richter, Dieter Roth, Anselm Kiefer, Sigmar Polke, and Bernd and Hilla Becher. At LACMA, throughout most of the exhibition, works made in the FRG and GDR were integrated. For non-German viewers, preconceptions about the art of East and West quickly dissipated.

The result is a radical reevaluation of German art that is sure to cause controversy, especially in Nuremberg, where it is presently on view, and later in Berlin (LACMA was its only U.S. venue).3 Because the exhibition focuses on a sociopolitical reading of German art, the inclusion of several East German Socialist Realist paintings, with their pointed utopian slant, proposes a fascinating point of comparison for the consciousness-raising and social rehabilitation promoted by later, more conceptual and experimental artists such as Joseph Beuys and Hans Haacke. The inclusion of so many lesser known East German artists puts a fresh spin on West German-dominated movements such as Neo-Expressionism and the “objective” school of photography founded by the Bechers at the Düsseldorfer Kunstakademie. As a result, German painting and photography seem like new terrain.

At LACMA, the exhibition was divided into four sections (as in the catalogue, though with different titles). Beginning with documentary film footage of the ruins of postwar Dresden and Berlin, the first, “1945-49: Mourning, Melancholy, and the Search for National Identity,” presented artists’ stunned reactions to the cataclysmic denouement of the war. Black ink drawings by Wilhelm Rudolph (1889-1982) of ashen, bombed-out Dresden streetscapes, and chilly black-and-white photographs by Herbert List (1903-1975) of rotting corpses and ruined Nazi-approved artworks are grimly effective reportage. In this context, competent abstract works by the West Germans Willi Bauermeister (1889-1955) and Ernst Wilhelm Nay (1902-1968) seem to be sublimated diversions from reality.

Much more gripping from today’s vantage point, the figurative painting To the Victims of Fascism (Second Version), 1946/49, a directly emotive, expressionist work by the East German Hans Grundig, portrays two murdered friends who had been incarcerated with him in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. In a narrow open grave, their stiff foregrounded corpses fill the frame beneath a blood-red sky arrayed with swooping, bomberlike vultures. Similarly visceral is the chillingly gothic Ecce Homo I (Dying Warrior), 1949, by Gerhard Altenbourg (1926-1989). A large-scale drawing (over 4 feet tall), it features a lurching, claw-handed Nosferatu-type figure rendered in twitching black crayon over the East German artist’s own childhood sketches (preserved on two glued-together sheets) of skirmishing soldiers and tank-filled battlefields.

The second section of the exhibition, “1950s: National Aesthetics Defined by the Cold War,” presented the clash of radically different styles that coexisted during that decade. Violent brushstrokes and charred-looking surfaces characterize the abstract art made in West Germany by Karl Otto Götz (b. 1914), Gerhard Hoehme (1920-1989) and Emil Schumacher (1912-1999), similar to paintings with the existential themes common in the rest of Europe and in the United States. The abstract, formally inventive members of the trans-European Zero group, founded in 1957 in Düsseldorf by Heinz Mack, Otto Piene and Günther Uecker [see article, this issue], also generated art with no overt sociopolitical referents. One of the exhibition highlights is the re-creation of Mack’s 1960 Relief Wall, an installation originally at Berlin’s Galerie Diogenes of over 20 wall works and freestanding sculptures composed of gleaming chrome, aluminum, glass, steel and Lucite. Toying with pattern, geometry, kinesis and surface illusion, they present a chic, midcentury-modern gloss.