How German Is It?

Likewise turning away from the past—now, in the politically encouraged anticipation of a utopian future—are Socialist Realist paintings from East Germany by Heinz Löffler (b. 1913), Heinz Drache (1929-1989) and others that crisply articulate the GDR’s reconstruction. The exhibition proves that their efforts are not devoid of interest. Without overt sentimentality or preaching platitudes, the paintings are instances of vibrant if standard-issue realism, not unlike, say, American works from the WPA era or Saturday Evening Post covers by Norman Rockwell. Depicting a friendly political meeting of earnest men and women in an intimate dining room, House Peace Committee (1952) by Rudolf Bergander (1919-1970) is the most sensitively rendered of the lot; it could be a lost painting by Raphael Soyer.

A surprising group of 20 tabletop constructions (1958-77) by the Dresdener Glöckner contradicts in its free inventiveness all stereotypes about art made behind the Iron Curtain. Folding, slicing, stacking and disassembling detritus, from commercial packaging to bits of discarded paper and wood, Glöckner made playful constructivist sculptures in secret, following formal interests that he had pursued since the 1920s. Barron spotted these Dada-inspired works in Glöckner’s studio, and this is their first public appearance. In conversation, Barron speculated that Glöckner’s works may have been seen by A.R. Penck, who was still living in East Germany in the mid-’70s (he left in 1980), and whose “Standart Modell” sculptures (1972-75), four examples of which are included in the exhibition, take Glöckner’s experimentation with household objects and found materials in a funkier direction.

Also anomalous are the allegorical paintings of common objects by Konrad Klapheck (b. 1935), with their gleaming, somber-toned surfaces. The Offended Bride (1957), an image of a sewing machine, offers in its crisp, austere and ominous-looking style a sly critique of technology. The Will to Power (1959) is a stylized, minimally detailed depiction of a manual typewriter whose rows of blank keys seem like pawns in a totalitarian regime. The  Magritte-like starkness and shadowy palette of his work place Klapheck in a Pop category all his own.

In “1960s and 1970s: Working Through and Acting Out,” the third section of the exhibition, German art was shown to slowly open to self-reflection and historical reckoning. At first, oblique strategies prevail. With black-and-white painting, photographs and grainy film featuring a nebbishy-looking art student, the installation Volker Bradke (1966), by Richter, satirizes socialist Realism’s idealization of the common man. The LACMA exhibition re-created the original presentation at Galerie Schmela in Düsseldorf in 1966 (born in 1932, Richter had emigrated from the GDR in 1961), including its kitschy patterned wallpaper and institutional floor tiles, and added filmed documentation of the opening.

Across from this installation were pranksterish works by Polke. “The Fifties” (1963-69) is a quirky wall grouping of 12 paintings in wildly different styles hung on decorative latticework, each a parody of a different critically endorsed mode of art, from organic abstraction to Pop. Potato House Object (1967) is an 8-foot-tall wooden latticework hut whose joints are all capped with real potatoes, an absurdist allusion to the food shortages Polke experienced during his childhood in war-ravaged Silesia (his family emigrated when Polke was 12).

Other familiar artists active in the FRG in the 1960s, such as Dieter Roth, Wolf Vostell and Jörg Immendorff, are represented by strong works that offer perversely humorous takes on German culture. The full-force return of expressionism, in all of its explosive irony and wrenching psychology, is evident in large-scale Neo-Expressionist paintings by Penck, Kiefer and Georg Baselitz, who share an interest in the charged subject matter of the war and its aftermath. Baselitz’s gruesomely dismembered corpses (Picture for the Fathers, 1963), Penck’s stick figure walking a fiery tightrope (Passage, 1963) and Kiefer’s vertiginous Germany’s Spiritual Heroes (1973), a Volkshalle (Great Hall) in which raking orthogonals converge at a portentous black door, are raw, unflinching evocations of German political reality. Eugen Schönebeck is represented by two collaborations with Baselitz and two exuberant solo paintings, including a portrayal (1965) of the Russian poet Mayakovsky filled with self-doubt (like Baselitz, Schönebeck left the GDR in the mid-’50s). Czech-born Markus Lüpertz fashions a stark, forceful icon of the specter haunting postwar German consciousness: a German helmet atop a hulking army-green form (Helmet II, 1970).

Among this array of heavy hitters, several paintings by lesser-known East German artists are also impressive. An intricate magic realist allegory by Tübke (a founder in the mid-’60s of the Leipzig school of painting) was inspired by the postwar Nazi trials: Reminiscences of Schulze III, JD (1965) is a brilliantly articulated treatment of a fictional Nazi judge in a Boschian setting of political corruption and concentration camp horrors. Former Waffen-SS soldier Heisig’s Under the Swastika (1973) presents a nightmarish conflagration of wartime corpses, soldiers and  what are surely propaganda-blaring bullhorns.

A somewhat awkward space at the Broad featured several works by Joseph Beuys, including the remains of the seminal action Sweeping Up (1972-85), which may be seen as emblematic of German self-doubt and reclamation. Collected in a horizontal vitrine is trash Beuys cleaned up from Karl-Marx-Platz in Berlin after a 1972 May Day demonstration, along with his push broom. On the opposing wall was Thomas Schütte’s Large Wall (1977), 1,200 panels installed like masonry and painted to look like bricks. The formal references to Conceptual and Minimalist art here seem to play second fiddle to the work’s obvious allusion to the physical presence of the Berlin Wall.

The last section of the exhibition, “1980s: Blurring Boundaries and the Waning of the Cold War,” is, perhaps understandably, the least coherent, a whirlwind of styles. Attention is paid to the impact of radical politics in several works, including Jürgen Klauke’s disturbing “Faces” (1972-2000), a grid of 65 close-up black-and-white news photos of masked terrorists, and Katharina Sieverding’s Battlefield Germany XI/78 (1978), an enigmatic three-part photographic print on steel, likewise appropriated from a media source, showing five members of a well-known German antiterrorism unit striking an aggressive stance.

For this generation of artists, the turmoil, tragedy and symbols of the war remain. Raffael Rheinsberg’s Hand and Foot (1980), an installation consisting of 400 worn shoes and gloves arranged in rows on the floor, poignantly references the labor camps of World War II. A large swastika in a painting by Albert Oehlen skewers art world complacency (The Führer’s Headquarters, 1982), and the still-taboo symbol appears in a 1982 mixed-medium installation by Olaf Metzel (Turk Flat—Compensation DM 12,000 [or Best Offer]) to point to the lingering racism of West German society. Georg Herold, who was released to the West in 1973 after being detained as a political prisoner in the East, is represented by Laocoön (1984), an altered canister vacuum cleaner whose twisted hoses emit his recorded voice declaiming a speech by Adolf Hitler on “degenerate art.”