This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, March 10, 2009 - Post-1945 German avant-garde art enjoys a limited, yet dedicated following in the United States. Not beautiful in a conventional sense, the installations, sculptures, paintings and other modes of representation from this period possess an uneasy aesthetic that is best understood within the Germany’s unique Cold War context.
On view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art until April 19 is the Art of Two Germanys/Cold War Cultures, a mammoth exhibit featuring more than 300 works. This show differs notably from other recent German art exhibitions in that half of these works were made in the former East Germany. Some of them, created in the Soviet-sanctioned socialist realist style, fulfill the function of rendering heroic the Communist East German state.
Exhibition curator Stephanie Barron explains why showing these works alongside West German works of art is important: “Since re-unification, German art exhibitions both here and in Germany have basically ignored socialist realism. Americans and Germans tend to view this style with disdain. They perceive it as pure political propaganda, where aesthetic experimentation just couldn’t happen. We’re trying to get beyond these binaries, and locate the ideological ambiguities that are present in works by both East and West German artists.”
St. Louis Connection
Visitors from St. Louis will likely be reminded of home when they catch a glimpse of two paintings normally housed on the third floor of the St. Louis Art Museum: “Beuysland,” painted in 1965 by the young Jörg Immendorf in honor of his teacher Joseph Beuys; and “November,” Gerhard Richter’s monumental 1989 abstract painting, whose numerous layers of black, gray and white paint serve as a powerful metaphor for the layers of history that led to re-unification.
Sabine Eckmann, director of the Mildred Lane Kemper Museum in St. Louis, has co-edited with Barron the immense and impressive exhibition catalog that features 14 essays by German art scholars.
It was, in fact, Eckmann’s 2007 “Reality Bites” exhibition at the Kemper that served as a prequel to the Los Angeles project. In both shows, political circumstances go hand in hand with artistic expression.
“There’s really no way to talk about German art if you omit the political context,” Eckmann said, “and this is simply because Germany struggled so much with its history since 1945. In the case of other countries, it may be easier to talk about art apart from politics, but with Germany that’s impossible. The reason why is that history has completely defined Germany’s present. Artists, along with everyone else, had to struggle with Germany’s violent Third Reich history, the total destruction of their country, and the ramifications of a divided Germany.”
From Devastation
The show is organized chronologically and opens with haunting photographs taken by Richard Peter Sr., who documented the everyday realities of Dresden shortly after the allied bombings in February of 1945.
We see the petrified corpse of a young mother leaning over her stroller, a dead body in an air raid shelter, and the bombed out interior of the Dresden opera house.
These and other images attest to the totality of destruction, both physical and spiritual, that Germans experienced directly after the war.
“That was the situation in Germany on the ground,” Barron said, “and this utter devastation was the nature of people’s reality. The rest of this show would not have been possible without these images.”
Following these photographs are somber portrayals of war, ruins and mourning by numerous painters, including Hans Grundig, Werner Heldt and the well-known Weimar photomontage artist Hannah Höch. All of these early works, done between 1945 and 1949, serve as a powerful eye-opener.
“The extent of many Americans’ knowledge of Germany in 1945 is ‘we bombed the hell out of them', ” Barron said. “The fact that millions of civilians suffered as victims is something that a lot of people just aren’t aware of.”
The second gallery is devoted to the 1950s, a period in which Cold War politics defined and polarized East and West German artistic styles.
One wall deals with early socialist realism and features, among other works, a group of paintings that honor the ambitious state-sponsored urban renewal efforts that were underway by the early 1950s in the German Democratic Republic.
Heinz Löffler’s 1953 painting “Construction of the Stalinallee” explores, for example, the breadth of this immense project by portraying the massive scale of re-building that took place on East Berlin’s grand boulevard. Other painters who were commissioned to paint Stalinallee preferred to pay homage to the individual worker.
What most people don’t know is that there were artists in the German Democratic Republic who were secretly making art far removed from the dictates of the state.
Hermann Glöckner, for example, never exhibited his work publicly. Yet in the privacy of his own studio, he made intriguing assemblages of abstract, constructivist “table forms” from common household materials, such as paper clips, fiberboard, eyeglasses and rubber bands. These diminutive sculptures, which are on view for the first time, fly in the face of the official GDR art that rejected abstraction as a Western bourgeois art-form.
The section devoted to the 1960s and 1970s features works by many widely acclaimed West German artists who were the first to deal critically with questions of German national identity and collective guilt. Installations by Joseph Beuys, Rolf Vostell and Gerhard Richter, as well as numerous excellent paintings and drawings by Richter, Sigmar Polke, Georg Baselitz and Anselm Kiefer are literally packed into the central galleries.
While marveling at this wealth of cultural artifacts, you won’t be able to escape the stench of Dieter Roth’s decomposing “Chocolate Lion Tower,” which might be taken as a warning that we should never get too comfortable in an institution of art.
Sydney Norton is a dance and visual arts writer.