German Art World

Now, after her concise, thesis-like book came out in 1985 juxtaposing art in East and West Germany and over a decade after German reunification, art historian Karin Thomas gives a comprehensive survey of the development of pan-German art since the end of World War II.

Such a monumental enterprise has never been undertaken before. Only curator Eckhart Gillen ventured in 1997 to present works from East and West next to each other, on an equal footing, as it were, in a show called Deutschlandbilder (i.e., Images of Germany) at Berlin’s Martin-Gropius-Bau as part of the 47th Berlin Festwochen. The object of the exercise was to make visible the differences – and similarities – between the artistic traditions in the two German countries that had been separated for 40 years. In selecting the exhibits Gillen focussed mainly on works explicitly concerned with the respective political system, such as Gerhard Richter’s October-Cycle on terrorism in West Germany in the late 1970s or the large-scale historical paintings of the Leipzig school (Werner Tübke, Bernhard Heisig, Wolfgang Mattheuer, Willi Sitte).

Karin Thomas takes the same approach, but also follows up certain less prominent “tangents” in the course of her survey. Works that at first glance seem apolitical and explicable solely in terms of the individual artist’s development are seen as emblematic of a specific life experience marked by the prevailing political system. The author embeds these works in the historical and cultural context of the period and tries to give some insight into day-to-day reality in the two countries. For the different underlying conditions and contexts in which art was created and made public in the two halves of Germany had a crucial influence on the establishment of different vocabularies of form as on the choice of artistic subjects.

The book is divided up into 10 big chapters, beginning with a description of how artists dealt with the trauma of the war while the country was being rebuilt out of the rubble. In the wake of the West German economic boom in the 1950s, however, artists there lost interest in essaying representational portrayals of the war and its after-effects. With such abstract forms of expression as Art Informel and Tachisme and with such exhibitions as the first documenta in 1955, artists sought not only to resume the modernist movement with which the Nazis had forcibly broken, but also to bring German art back into the international arena. Their orientation toward the American art market figured prominently in this endeavour.

At the same time the foundations were being laid and rules established in East Germany for the party-controlled commissioned art of socialist realism. Abstraction was considered particularly subversive. The attitude toward modern artists like Picasso who had officially declared their allegiance to Communism but whose works did not adhere to the tenets of socialist iconography proved a plentiful source of tension and controversy.

Time and again Karin Thomas points up the opposing views of our shared cultural past in divided Germany. Whereas in the FRG the ideal of the free creative individual was increasingly condemned in the late ’60s as a withdrawal into the private sphere, artists in the GDR recognized this idealistic conception of the artist, with its roots in 19th-century Romanticism, as a means of resistance to the state-imposed profile of the servile artist. But Thomas also discerns parallel phenomena, juxtaposing, for example, the efforts of Joseph Beuys and Gerhard Altenbourg in West and East Germany to expand the concept of art in the late ’60s to underscore its close links to life.

The author comments on milestones in the evolution of postwar German art and in the dialogue between East and West, closing with a preliminary assessment of the common ground traversed by the art scene since reunification in 1989. As recently borne out by the controversy over the elaboration of the Reichstag building in Berlin and over the Weimar exhibition on art in Nazi Germany and in the GDR (called The Rise and Fall of Modernism), after all these years of mutual demarcation the relationship is still marred by prejudices, insufficient information and misunderstandings. Critical approaches, attempts at dialogue or mutual influence were often consigned to oblivion during the prolonged separation. In her comprehensive and informative book, Karin Thomas makes an important contribution to nurturing an understanding of the divergent developments in art since 1945 in the two halves of Germany. The vast range of pictures included helps the reader sharpen his own perceptions. For however much they may reflect their respective historical situations, the art works nonetheless remain a testimony to individual perceptions of the world that can impart insights on many different levels.