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April A. Eisman\u00a0|\u00a0Iowa State University<\/p>\n
Whose East German Art is This?
\nThe Politics of Reception after 1989<\/strong>[1]<\/a><\/h5>\nE<\/span>ast German studies today is thriving in English-language scholarship. From history to cultural studies and especially film, scholars have shown us the complexity of East German society, which was not just a top-down repressive system but also a place where culture played an important if contested role in the making of the socialist person.[2]<\/a> This scholarship, which started primarily in the field of literature in the 1970s and 1980s, expanded into history, film, and material culture in the wake of the Cold War.[3]<\/a> But the visual fine arts\u2014including painting, graphics, and sculpture as well as performance and installation art\u2014have been almost completely overlooked.[4]<\/a> In English-language scholarship, for example, not a single monograph has been published on painting despite its centrality in the East German art world.[5]<\/a> In Germany, by comparison, the visual fine arts have been the focus of numerous studies and several large exhibitions. Much of the German scholarship written after unification, however, is permeated by lingering Cold War-era stereotypes and contemporary political agendas.[6]<\/a> A similar tendency can be seen in most areas of East German studies, but it has been challenged by scholars, often working outside of Germany, who take a more nuanced approach (Port 15). In art history, by comparison, such correctives are rare, so although one might assume that greater access to archival material after the fall of the Berlin Wall has led to a deeper understanding of the art scene and the mechanisms at work, the reality is that much of what is written today is more biased than scholarship on either side of the Wall in the 1980s.[7]<\/a><\/p>\nIn this article, I show how our current understanding of art created in the German Democratic Republic (GDR, or East Germany) is quite different from what it was thirty years ago and argue that it has been rewritten to fulfill Western expectations. Although some changes to the narrative have expanded our understanding, others have significantly distorted our view of East Germany, thus depriving us of an alternative perspective from which to understand the capitalist West. Such distortions also deny us a source for alternatives to the neoliberal present. I begin by looking briefly at the development of art in East Germany, focusing on painting, the most prestigious visual arts medium, in order to establish a baseline for understanding the history that has been subsequently rewritten. I then turn to the German-German Bilderstreit <\/em>(image battle) of the long 1990s, a series of vehement debates in the German press about what role East German art and artists should play in the new Germany. These debates offer insight into the larger issues at stake and the actors involved, and thus allow us to better understand the more recent rewriting. I then argue that the Bilderstreit <\/em>entered a new, quieter\u2014and therefore more insidious\u2014phase in the new millennium, a shift that began in 2003 with Kunst in der DDR, eine Retrospektive <\/em>(Art in the GDR, a Retrospective), a blockbuster exhibition held at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. This highly praised exhibition marks a high point in East German art\u2019s reception after 1989\/90, but it also inadvertently opened the door to a significant rewriting of East German art that reached its culmination in the 2012 Abschied von Ikarus<\/em> (Farewell to Icarus) exhibition in Weimar. I consider how both of these exhibitions presented East German art before explaining why the rewriting of this art matters for both art historians and scholars of the GDR.<\/p>\nArt in East Germany<\/strong><\/h5>\nIn Anglophone scholarship, East German art is virtually unknown, the result in part of the Cold War era\u2019s polarization\u2014and politicization\u2014of the visual arts, which were divided roughly in two since the late 1940s: abstract vs. realist, good vs. bad, Art vs. non-Art. According to these binaries, East Germany did not create art, merely political propaganda and kitsch. It is a stereotype that, despite the passage of more than a quarter century since the end of the Cold War, remains largely unexamined and therefore dominant in the minds of most Anglophone academics who, if asked to describe \u201cEast German art,\u201d would probably mention the term \u201cSocialist Realism\u201d and imagine paintings of Communist leaders or happy workers portrayed with an almost photographic realism. While such images were created throughout the forty-year history of the GDR, they reached their official apex in 1953 with works such as Otto Nagel\u2019s Junger Maurer von der Stalinallee <\/em>(Young Bricklayer from Stalinallee, 1953) [Fig. 1].<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/Fig.-1-Nagel.jpg\")
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In the wake of Stalin\u2019s death and the workers\u2019 revolt in June 1953, East German artistic policy loosened, and visual artists began to experiment openly with modernist styles in the vein of Pablo Picasso and Fernand L\u00e9ger. In fact, there was a multi-issue discussion of Picasso as a possible role model for East German artists in these years in Bildende Kunst<\/em>, the GDR\u2019s main art journal. Picasso seemed a particularly interesting figure because he combined a modernist aesthetic with a political commitment to communism (L\u00fcdecke). His influence can be seen in the flattened space and simplifed forms visible in paintings by Willi Sitte [Fig. 2] and Harald Metzkes, among others.[8]<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/Fig.-2-Sitte-.jpg\")
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By the mid-1960s, artists in Leipzig\u2014and, in particular, Bernhard Heisig, Wolfgang Mattheuer, and Werner T\u00fcbke, along with Willi Sitte from neighboring Halle\u2014had developed a uniquely East German style of contemporary art that would come to represent the GDR in the more relaxed cultural atmosphere of the Honecker era in the 1970s and 1980s. Paintings such as Heisig\u2019s Der Weihnachtstraum des unbelehrbaren Soldaten <\/em>(The Christmas Dream of the Unteachable Soldier, 1964) [Fig. 6]\u2014multivalent works that reflect a commitment to the modernist tradition\u2014would be exhibited in the West to great praise in the final decades of the Cold War era. Although this generation of artists includes East Germany\u2019s best-known artists today, they were not the only ones working in a modernist style but rather the first of several generations.<\/p>\nIn the 1970s, their students emerged with works that looked not only at the Expressionist tradition but also at Neue Sachlichkeit and Surrealism. Arno Rink, for example, responded to the 1973 putsch in Chile with a Daliesque painting about the Spanish Civil War, Spanien 1938 <\/em>(Spain 1938) that was exhibited to great praise at both the district and national levels (Feist 223). By the 1980s, a third generation of artists was creating large, Neoexpressionist canvases not unlike those of their Neue Wilde<\/em> (new Fauves) counterparts in West Germany, and both installation and performance art were gaining in popularity and were even recognized by the official art world. Steffen Fischer and Angela Hampel\u2019s installation, Offene Zweierbeziehung<\/em> (An Open Relationship, 1989) [Fig. 3], for example, was included in the District Art Exhibition in Dresden in 1989. The work shows a number of men and women strung up individually in nets that hover above upright missiles, a reference to the difficulties of sexual entanglements.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/Fig.-3-Fischer-Hampel.jpg\")
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As this brief overview reveals, art in East Germany was much more complex than is often assumed in the West. Rather than uniformly repressive, the East German system was marked by a series of freezes and thaws in artistic policy, but with an ever increasing openness to modern and contemporary art, such that by the late 1980s no style was completely taboo, not even performance and installation art.[9]<\/a><\/p>\nThe Bilderstreit<\/em> and the Staatsk\u00fcnstler<\/em> Label<\/strong><\/h5>\nIn sharp contrast to the lack of knowledge in the Anglophone West, the development of art in East Germany after 1953 is better recognized in both scholarship and museum exhibitions in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG, or West Germany until 1990, unified Germany thereafter), albeit problematically so. Already in the late 1960s Eduard Beaucamp was writing about Heisig, Mattheuer, Sitte, and T\u00fcbke\u2014the so-called \u201cLeipzig School\u201d\u2014in the major daily newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung<\/em>. A few years later, in 1977, these same four artists were invited to exhibit works at the international art exhibition documenta 6<\/em> in Kassel, West Germany. This event marks the emergence of contemporary East German art onto the Western art scene.[10]<\/a> In its wake these four artists would become virtually synonymous with East German art in the minds of many West German curators, and their work the most highly praised, collected, and exhibited in the 1980s.[11]<\/a> In the wake of 1989\/90 they were also the artists most frequently at the center of controversy in the German press, which labeled them \u201cStaatsk\u00fcnstler<\/em>,\u201d or State Artists. The controversy around artists such as Heisig, Mattheuer, Sitte, and T\u00fcbke was not new to the Mauerfall<\/em> (fall of the Berlin Wall), but rather began already with their inclusion in documenta 6<\/em> (Schirmer, DDR und documenta<\/em>). Protestors delivered leaflets and conducted a sit-in; the artist Georg Baselitz pulled his work from the show. Yet these voices did not command the press\u2019s attention the way they would in the wake of November 1989. In large part this was due to the leftist leanings of West Germany in the 1970s and 1980s. With the sudden collapse of the GDR, however, the authority that leftist intellectuals had enjoyed since Willy Brandt\u2019s Ostpolitik <\/em>(also known as d\u00e9tente) was undermined, and conservative voices came to the fore in a wave of victor\u2019s glory.<\/p>\nThe change in East German art\u2019s reception after the Mauerfall <\/em>occurred almost immediately. A major exhibition of Heisig\u2019s work that had opened in West Berlin to positive reviews in October 1989 was being criticized by the end of November. What became known as the German-German Bilderstreit<\/em> began a few years later when, in 1993, eighteen prominent West Germans\u2014including the GDR emigrants Georg Baselitz and Gerhard Richter\u2014left the visual arts department of the western Berlin Academy of Arts in protest against the en-bloc acceptance of colleagues from its eastern counterpart when the two academies were merged (Gillen). The following year the Neue Nationalgalerie in western Berlin became the center of controversy for an exhibition of postwar art from their permanent collection that placed masterpieces from the East and West side by side. The right-of-center Christian Democratic Party (CDU) in Berlin ignited the debate, likening the museum to a Parteischule <\/em>(school of the Communist Party) because of its inclusion of Heisig, Sitte, T\u00fcbke, and Mattheuer (Kahlcke). A third major confrontation took place in 1998 when Heisig was invited\u2014as one of only two East German artists\u2014to contribute work to the Reichstag building in Berlin. Heisig was attacked for being a teenage soldier in the Waffen SS and for being a Staatsk\u00fcnstler<\/em>. In fact, the two were conflated by the politician Uwe Lehmann-Braun from the CDU, who stated that Heisig had \u201cloyally served two dictatorships\u201d (quoted in Hecht 3).<\/p>\nThe height of the Bilderstreit<\/em>, however, was reached the following year with the exhibition Aufstieg und Fall der Moderne <\/em>(The Rise and Fall of Modernism) in Weimar. In this exhibition, the western German curator\u2019s contempt for the East German works on display was obvious\u2014the paintings were crowded together and hung up haphazardly against drop cloths in a space without climate control (Wolbert; Osmond). Moreover, a more carefully considered exhibition of Nazi works elsewhere in the building suggested not only a connection between the two regimes, but also that the Nazi works were more valuable. This was followed by one final clash over the planned 2001 exhibition of Willi Sitte\u2019s work at the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg for his 80th<\/sup> birthday (Grossmann). Ultimately, the furor in the press over Sitte\u2019s connections to the East German state\u2014his position as Staatsk\u00fcnstler<\/em>\u2014led to Sitte cancelling the show.<\/p>\nThe various debates within the Bilderstreit<\/em> fall into two main categories, both of which draw upon Cold War-era prejudices about East German art. The first dismissed East German art and artists as inferior to their western counterparts. This view was often accompanied by the term Auftragskunst<\/em> (commissioned art) and by images like Heinrich Witz\u2019s Der neue Anfang<\/em> (The New Beginning, 1959) [Fig. 4], which were readily accessible in the 1990s in exhibitions at history museums such as the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin (see Flacke). This focus on an assumed inferior quality can be seen in the controversy over the decision to unify the East and West German Academies of Art and in the Aufstieg und Fall der Moderne <\/em>exhibition.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/Fig.-4-Witz-.jpg\")
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The second category of the Bilderstreit<\/em> focused on dismissing East Germany\u2019s most important artists\u2014those previously praised and collected in West Germany\u2014based on their biographies and, in particular, their largely positive relationship to the state. In these cases, the art itself could not be dismissed as \u201cbad art,\u201d and thus the focus shifted to the person. Examples of this type of dismissal appear in the controversies around the exhibition of postwar art at the Neue Nationalgalerie, Heisig\u2019s commission for the Reichstag building, and Sitte\u2019s cancellation of his solo exhibition in Nuremberg. These artists were labeled Staatsk\u00fcnstler<\/em>, meaning \u201cstate artist,\u201d a term that requires unpacking in order to be able to understand the reception of East German art in Germany today.<\/p>\nOn the surface of it, the term Staatsk\u00fcnstler<\/em> is not a negative one. The history of art is filled with them, from the Romans to Jacques-Louis David, artists who fulfilled commissions for\u2014and whose art came to represent\u2014the state. From this perspective, Heisig, Mattheuer, Sitte, and T\u00fcbke\u2014among many other East German artists\u2014were indeed Staatsk\u00fcnstler<\/em>. They fulfilled artistic commissions, and their work represented the GDR in major international exhibitions. Yet the term Staatsk\u00fcnstler<\/em> in the context of East German art has a number of negative connotations that upon closer examination do not apply, at least not to most of the artists so labeled. The example of Bernhard Heisig\u2014who was not only one of East Germany\u2019s best-known and most successful artists but also a key figure in the Bilderstreit<\/em>\u2014should suffice to illustrate some of the problems with this label.<\/p>\nThe first connotation of the term Staatsk\u00fcnstler <\/em>is that these artists forfeited artistic integrity in exchange for fame and power. In Heisig\u2019s case, however, it was just the opposite. He changed from an Adolf von Menzel-inspired realism in the 1950s, as evidenced in Zirkel junger Naturforscher<\/em> (Circle of Young Natural Scientists, 1952) [Fig. 5], to one inspired by German modernists such as Lovis Corinth, Max Beckmann, and Otto Dix in the early to mid-1960s, as visible in Der Weihnachtstraum des unbelehrbaren Soldaten<\/em> (The Christmas Dream of the Unteachable Soldier, 1964) [Fig. 6]. That is, he changed from an artistic style that was acceptable to conservative political functionaries to one that was not.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/Fig.-5-Heisig-1.jpg\")
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![\"\"](\"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/Fig.-6-Heisig-2.jpg\")
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This change in style led to a number of clashes with authorities in the latter half of the 1960s that have been largely overlooked or misinterpreted in German scholarship.[12]<\/a> It was only with Erich Honecker\u2019s rise to power in 1971 that Heisig became a highly valued artist at the national level, the result of a change\u2014and considerable relaxation in\u2014cultural policy. One could even argue that Heisig had led the way through his repeated provocations in the 1960s to the modern style for which East German art became known in the Honecker era.<\/p>\nA second implication behind the term Staatsk\u00fcnstler<\/em> is that these artists actively oppressed others. In Heisig\u2019s case, the implied accusation is that he, as professor at and rector of the Leipzig Academy (Hochschule f\u00fcr Grafik und Buchkunst Leipzig), prevented those with a more radical view of art in terms of stylistic innovation from becoming artists. Yet a closer examination of the record reveals that Heisig actually worked with younger artists to make the Leipzig Academy more modern. In the 1970s, he hired Hartwig Ebersbach to create and teach a multimedia class and ran interference with political functionaries in Berlin for years before the class was ultimately shut down (Lang, Malerei und Grafik<\/em> 275; Grundmann and Michael 10-11, 43-46, 48). Similarly, as vice president of the national Union of Visual Artists (VBK), he helped negotiate a compromise for the controversial Herbstsalon <\/em>(Fall Salon) in Leipzig in 1984, a so-called \u201cunderground\u201d exhibition of young artists who were able to display works not considered acceptable by the government (Lang, Malerei und Grafik<\/em> 210-11). All of these facts\u2014and more\u2014suggest that Heisig was open to the younger generation and worked to include them and their broadening interests in the system, even if he was not interested in creating such works himself. Indeed, Ebersbach defended Heisig on just such terms during the debate around the inclusion of Heisig\u2019s work in the Reichstag in 1998.[13]<\/a><\/p>\nIn the end, however, the truth of whether or not Heisig and the other so-called Staatsk\u00fcnstler <\/em>had actually oppressed others\u2014or sold out their artistic integrity\u2014did not really matter to those making the accusations. What mattered was these artists\u2019 high-profile association with the GDR, the collapse of which in 1989\/90 seemed to prove it had been an Unrechtstaat <\/em>(illegitimate state). In the highly charged political atmosphere of the 1990s, the so-called Staatsk\u00fcnstler<\/em> were seen by many (western) German conservatives as having helped legitimate the East German regime\u2014and thus having contributed to its longevity\u2014by the very fact that they had not left. This subtly poisonous accusation recalls the exiles vs. Hierbleiber<\/em> (those remaining here) debates of the Third Reich, in which exiles were castigated for abandoning the German people in their time of greatest need, and Hierbleiber<\/em> for tacitly lending their support to the regime by not leaving. Artists such as Heisig were thus castigated for being Hierbleiber<\/em>, for staying in the GDR and attempting to change it from within rather than abandoning it.[14]<\/a><\/p>\nNot all of the criticism came from western Germans. There were, in fact, at least three distinct groups of eastern Germans in the art world whose condemnations of the so-called Staatsk\u00fcnstler <\/em>were used to buoy conservative western German criticisms. The first came from a younger generation of artists from the GDR, artists whose radicality in terms of formal innovation had caused conflict with the government, and for whom the Mauerfall <\/em>had ended the GDR before such conflicts could be worked out or, in the case of those who had recently emigrated to the West, before they could dissociate themselves from their East German past.[15]<\/a> This group in particular\u2014artists such as Lutz Dammbeck (b. 1948) and Han-Hendrick Grimmling (b. 1947)\u2014sees the so-called Staatsk\u00fcnstler <\/em>as having sold out their artistic integrity and misused their power to oppress younger, more formally radical artists.[16]<\/a> Archival evidence and interviews, however, suggest that the issue at stake here is less one of aesthetic repression than a generational conflict.[17]<\/a> These younger artists were rebelling against the hegemony of the 1920s generation of artists\u2014the so-called Staatsk\u00fcnstler<\/em>\u2014who were not only greatly praised in the GDR and internationally in the final decades of the Cold War but also largely controlled the art academies and institutions and, as such, dictated policy.<\/p>\nA second group of eastern German voices critical of the so-called Staatsk\u00fcnstler <\/em>came from artists who had left the GDR and made international names for themselves as \u201cGerman\u201d artists. The most notable example is Georg Baselitz, who stated in a much-quoted 1990 interview in Art<\/em> magazine: \u201cThere are no artists in the GDR, they all left [\u2026] no artists, no painters. None of them ever painted a picture [\u2026]. They are interpreters who fulfilled the program of the East German system [\u2026] [they are] simply assholes\u201d (quoted in Hecht and Welti 70). Both he and Gerhard Richter left the GDR as adults for the West, where they established international reputations. Until recently, their East German backgrounds\u2014including artistic training\u2014have been glossed over.[18]<\/a> Yet this background presumably contributed to their positive reception, lending them an aura of Otherness that also seemed to confirm the presumed superiority of the West by their choice to emigrate there.<\/p>\nThe third group of eastern German voices is comprised of artists, critics, and art historians from places other than Leipzig or Halle. These individuals have attempted to reconfigure\u2014perhaps unconsciously\u2014the history of East German art in recent years. In particular, they downplay the importance of the Leipzig School. This view was particularly apparent in the Kunst in der DDR, Eine Retrospektive<\/em> exhibition where the Leipzig School had only one small, artificially lit room, while artists from Berlin enjoyed three of the five rooms open to natural lighting. For those unfamiliar with the history of East German art, the Leipzig School would have seemed no more important than Constructivism, which also had a small room in the exhibition.<\/p>\nWhen examined in context, the Bilderstreit<\/em> reveals itself primarily as a battle for place within the new Germany and, for some, a battle over what role, if any, East German art and artists should play in helping to define Germany\u2019s post-Wall cultural identity. In the new millennium, however, the vociferous battles over East German art diminished, in part, because of the passage of time.<\/p>\nThe Quiet Rewriting of East German Art<\/strong><\/h5>\nThe shift to a new, quieter phase in the reception of East German art began in 2003 when the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin held a major exhibition, Kunst in der DDR, eine Retrospektive<\/em>. Not only did the exhibition avoid controversy in the press, it attracted large numbers of visitors and was ultimately named \u201cExhibition of the Year\u201d by the International Art Critics Association (AICA). The exhibition benefitted in part from fortuitous timing: the wildly successful film, Goodbye Lenin<\/em>, released earlier that year, marked a high point in Ostalgie<\/em> (nostalgia for the East). The exhibition also addressed a western audience with the intent of showing that East Germany did indeed have art of value. It was intended, at least in part, as a response to\u2014and perhaps the final word on\u2014the controversy sparked nearly ten years earlier when the Neue Nationalgalerie<\/em> exhibited works from both East Germany and the West next to each other.[19]<\/a> Curated by two former East German curators, Roland M\u00e4rz and Eugen Blume, Kunst in der DDR <\/em>included 400 works of painting, drawing, sculpture, photography, and video by 130 artists. The intent was to show that the GDR had a \u201cdifferentiated and rich variety of artistic voices, especially in the art centers of Berlin, Dresden, Halle and Leipzig,\u201d regardless of the politics and limitations of the \u201cclosed society\u201d (Blume and M\u00e4rz 12).<\/p>\nThe exhibition was arranged roughly chronologically. It began in the immediate postwar years with images of wartime destruction, artistic self-reflection in the context of rebuilding, and early artistic experimentation in the Eastern Zone. Paintings included Hans Grundig\u2019s Opfer des Faschismus <\/em>(Victims of Fascism, 1946) [Fig. 7], Bernhard Kretzschmar\u2019s Selbstbildnis <\/em>(Self Portrait, 1946), and Edmund Kesting\u2019s Land im Versinken <\/em>(Sinking Country, 1949), respectively. It then offered two rooms with paintings and sculpture from the 1950s such as Sitte\u2019s Raub der Sabinerinnen <\/em>[Fig. 2] and Metzkes\u2019 Abtransport der sechsarmigen G\u00f6ttin <\/em>(Removing the Six-armed Goddess, 1956), works inspired by Picasso and other modernist artists.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/Fig.-7-Grundig-.jpg\")
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The exhibition then shifted to a number of rooms dedicated to three of East Germany\u2019s main art centers\u2014Dresden, East Berlin, and Leipzig\u2014reflecting the importance of districts, or Bezirke<\/em>, in the development of artistic styles. In 1952, the SED had divided East Germany into fourteen districts, each of which had its own local branches of various national organizations, including the Union of Visual Artists (VBK).[20]<\/a> These local branches interpreted rules passed down from the national organization, dealt with local artistic issues such as commissions and exhibitions, and were the official advocates for their artists. They also organized the juried district art exhibitions held throughout the country every two to three years. These exhibitions enabled each district to display its art to the public and politicians alike, and it was largely from these exhibitions that works were chosen for the national art exhibition held in Dresden every four to five years. Dresden, East Berlin, and Leipzig each had an art school and a unique artistic profile. This emphasis on the regional defines much of East Germany\u2019s art, which\u2014unlike the West\u2019s\u2014did not develop in terms of movements or styles but rather in terms of regional tendencies. These tendencies were encouraged, in part, by regularly scheduled exhibitions and exchanges among artists at the local level, the unique history of the region, and the specific emphasis of the art school, whether painting (Berlin and Dresden), printmaking (Leipzig), or industrial design (Halle).<\/p>\nFor Dresden, the exhibition included images by artists who worked largely outside of official art circles in the 1960s and 1970s, including Peter Graf [Fig. 8], Strawalde (also known as J\u00fcrgen B\u00f6ttcher), and Ralf Winkler (better known in the West as A.R. Penck). Dresden artists such as these tended to emphasize the painterly quality, if not coloration, associated with German Expressionism, which was founded in Dresden and remained an important inspiration for artists who lived there.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/Fig.-8-Graf.jpg\")
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In the rooms devoted to Berlin, the selected artists tended to look to Paris for inspiration, generally adopting a quiet, poetic approach to art\u2014from the \u201cblack melancholy\u201d of the 1950s as embodied by Ernst Schr\u00f6der and Manfred B\u00f6ttcher to the more colorful images of the 1960s by artists such as Harald Metzkes. In the 1970s and 1980s, a number of artists from a younger generation emerged who looked to Neue Sachlichkeit<\/em> (New Objectivity) for inspiration, as can be seen in Clemens Groszer\u2019s Caf\u00e9 Liolet<\/em> [Fig. 9], a clear reference to Otto Dix.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/Fig.-9-Groszer.jpg\")
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Leipzig, too, had a room, albeit smaller than those for Dresden and Berlin. Paintings from Leipzig tended to emphasize complex compositions and layers of meaning, inspired at least in part because it was a city of books and publishing: artists in Leipzig not only regularly illustrated books but also incorporated literary complexity into their work [Fig. 6]. The size of the room and number of paintings included for Leipzig, however, suggests a downplaying of the city\u2019s importance to the history of East German art in comparison to Dresden and East Berlin. This is a revision that reveals the impact of the third group of critical voices about East German art\u2019s reception: artists, critics, and art historians from places other than Leipzig or Halle\u2014in this case, two curators from East Berlin. This desire to downplay Leipzig\u2019s role stems in part from long-standing rivalries between various districts in East Germany. Whereas Leipzig emphasized highly intellectual content, energetic brushwork, and bold colors, Berlin focused on aesthetics: poetic voicings, subtle colors, and brushwork inspired by the work of French painters like Paul Cezanne (Blume and M\u00e4rz 220-21). For some intellectuals in Berlin, the art created in Leipzig was too brash and received too much attention in the press, both before and after unification.[21]<\/a><\/p>\nIn addition to rooms devoted to the individual art centers, there were also rooms that focused on particular styles or media. There was a small room devoted to Constructivism, a hallway to photography, and in the center, a large room to the brightly painted Neoexpressionist works created by a younger generation of artists in the 1980s, including Trak Wendisch, Klaus Killisch, and Wolfgang Smy. There were also thematic rooms that included artists who did not fit within the other categories, such as Gerhard Altenbourg and Carlfriedrich Claus, two solitary figures in the GDR whose work emphasized drawing, and Willy Wolff [Fig. 10], one of the few artists in East Germany who engaged directly with Pop Art.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/Fig.-10-Wolff.jpg\")
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The exhibition Kunst in der DDR<\/em> succeeded in its attempt to show that East Germany had art of value to Western tastes. Although this may seem obvious, it was an important fact to establish in Germany at this time. In the wake of the many exhibitions\u2014usually in history museums\u2014of lesser quality works, and the denigrations of the Aufstieg und Fall der Moderne <\/em>exhibition four years earlier, the fact that East Germany had a flourishing contemporary art scene was not yet an obvious one. Yet in making this point, the curators were necessarily selective, downplaying Soviet-style Socialist Realist works in favor of those that looked to the modernist\u2014particularly the German modernist traditions of Expressionism and Neue Sachlichkeit (Blume and M\u00e4rz 12). The end result was a highly successful exhibition that helped change people\u2019s views of East German art. But the curators\u2019 emphasis on art in<\/em> the GDR\u2014as opposed to East German Art or Art of East Germany\u2014had unintended consequences: it opened the door for future curators to include anything that was created on East German soil without regard for its importance within East German society and thus to create distorted accounts of art\u2019s role and reception (Blume and M\u00e4rz 31). The evidence for this appears in the last major retrospective exhibition on East German art to be organized in Germany, one that took place nearly ten years later.\u00a0<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\nAbschied von Ikarus<\/em><\/strong>, 2012-13 <\/strong><\/h5>\nAbschied von Ikarus. Bildwelten in der DDR\u2014neu gesehen<\/em> (Farewell to Icarus. Imagery in the GDR\u2014newly seen) was a major exhibition of East German art held in Weimar from October 2012 until February 2013. It included approximately 279 works by 96 artists and was intended, in part, as a corrective to the controversial Aufstieg und Fall der Moderne<\/em> exhibition held in Weimar thirteen years earlier. This time, however, the art was treated as art and exhibited in an art museum. The Neues Museum Weimar dedicated all seventeen rooms of its impressive two-story building to the exhibition. The first floor focused primarily on the Ulbricht era and was arranged roughly chronologically. After an introductory room of two paintings, the exhibition had a large room [Fig. 11] of well-known Socialist Realist works from the late 1940s and early 1950s. These included paintings such as Otto Nagel\u2019s Junger Maurer von der Stalinallee<\/em> (Young Bricklayer on Stalin Boulevard, 1953) [Fig. 1], Kretzschmar\u2019s Die Volkslehrerin<\/em> (Teacher of the People, 1953), and Mayer-Foreyt\u2019s Ehrt die alten Meister<\/em> (Honor the Old Masters, 1952), works that were absent from the earlier blockbuster exhibition in Berlin. These paintings reflect the officially encouraged emphasis in the early 1950s on realism and optimism, on works that could help educate the people and offer models for behavior in the wake of the Third Reich.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/Fig.-11-Wall-of-SR.jpg\")
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These were followed by rooms on the lesser-known stories of the Bauhaus tradition at the Weimar Academy\u2014the visual arts department of which was closed in 1951\u2014and the modernist painters associated with the Galerie Hennig in Halle in the 1950s. Sitte\u2019s Volkmar im Faschingskost\u00fcm <\/em>(Volkmar in a Fasching Costume, 1954) and Joachim Heuer\u2019s Tod mit Melone und M\u00fctze <\/em>(Death with Melon and Hat, 1948-49) reveal the importance of early modernist movements for these artists. The next room focused on the Constructivist creations of the Dresden artist Hermann Gl\u00f6ckner. The focus was primarily on smaller works he had created, often from non-art materials such as medicine boxes or old broken glasses. Works such as these had been highlighted a few years earlier in a major exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum, Art of Two Germanys \/ Cold War Cultures<\/em>. This small, solo space was followed by a large room of paintings focusing on East German workers created from the 1950s through the 1980s. These included Volker Stelzmann\u2019s famous Junger Schwei\u00dfer <\/em>(Young Welder, 1971) [Fig. 12] and the cartoon-like, lesser-known Die Aura der Schmelzer <\/em>(The Aura of the Smelters, 1988) by Eberhard Heiland.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/Fig.-12-Stelzmann.jpg\")
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Whereas the exhibition\u2019s first floor offered a roughly chronological overview of art during the first two decades of the Cold War era, most of the works on the second floor dated from the Honecker period and were organized thematically. As on the first floor, these rooms offered a combination of well-known works and new discoveries, especially from the alternative scene. The Leipzig School was shown in a room titled, \u201cThe Apotheosis of Horror.\u201d It included work by Heisig, Mattheuer, Sitte, and T\u00fcbke, as well as by younger artists, including Hartwig Ebersbach and Hubertus Giebe. Many of these paintings focused on the Nazi past or the imperialist present. Ebersbach\u2019s polyptych, Widmung an Chile<\/em> (Dedicated to Chile, 1974) [Fig. 13], for example, was a response to the 1973 putsch in Chile in which Augusto Pinochet, with CIA backing, violently overthrew the democratically elected communist leader Salvador Allende and installed a military dictatorship that tortured tens of thousands of people, several thousand of whom were \u201cdisappeared.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/Fig.-13-Ebersbach.jpg\")
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Another room, titled \u201cMelancholy Antiquity,\u201d focused on the use of mythology in East German art. It included works by Heisig, Mattheuer, and Metzkes, among others. Mythology was a major theme in the 1970s and 1980s, enabling artists to comment on current events through allegorical figures such as Sisyphus, Penthesilea, and especially Icarus, who appeared in more than sixty works in these years (Arlt 116). In Hans-Hendrick Grimmling\u2019s diptych, Ikarus zu Hause<\/em> (Icarus at Home, 1978) [Fig. 14], Icarus appears as a bird-like figure bound to a chair in the left-hand panel, whereas in the right-hand panel he is gone: only the upturned chair and bird mask remain, presumably having been swatted down by the hand of the giant face that hovers outside the window. It is a work that perhaps reflects the artist\u2019s frustration at trying to make a name for himself as a young artist at the time.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/Fig.-14-Grimmling-borders.jpg\")
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A third room was devoted to women artists. Titled, \u201cOld Adam, New Eve,\u201d it contained work by a number of important painters, including Angela Hampel, Nuria Quevedo, and Doris Ziegler. Many of the paintings, such as Ziegler\u2019s Ich bin Du<\/em> (I am You, 1988) [Fig. 15] and Hampel\u2019s Angela und Angelus I-IV <\/em>(1986), were self-portraits. This exhibition marks the first time that so many important female painters were included in a major exhibition of East German art after unification. The room also included alternative artists such as Annemirl Bauer and Gabriele St\u00f6tzer, artists whose work was hardly recognized during the Cold War period.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/Fig.-15-Ziegler.jpg\")
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\u00a0<\/strong>A fourth room, \u201cOutbreak and Disintegration: the 1980s\u201d [Fig. 16], focused on large-scale works of painting and installation created in the final decade of the Cold War, including large, expressionist paintings by Wolfram Adalbert Scheffler [Fig. 16, left] and Cornelia Schleime [Fig. 16, middle].[22]<\/a> As in the room \u201cOld Adam, New Eve,\u201d some of these artists had been exhibited in major exhibitions in East Germany, while others had had a much smaller audience. The exhibition did not distinguish between those artists who were well known and those who were not.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/Fig.-16-Room-.jpg\")
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Abschied<\/em> von Ikarus <\/em>successfully expanded the view of East German art to include artwork from both the canon and the alternative scene, two art worlds hitherto generally treated separately in exhibitions.[23]<\/a> Indeed, the inclusion of Socialist Realist, modernist, and alternative art together in one space was the exhibition\u2019s real achievement, offering a never-before-seen breadth of art created in East Germany. Abschied von Ikarus<\/em> therefore contained great potential for offering insight into the complexity of artistic production in East Germany. In many ways the first floor fulfilled this promise in its chronological presentation of Soviet-inspired Socialist Realist works next to the Bauhaus-inspired art at the Weimar Academy and the modernist art and artists\u2014some well-known in official circles, some not\u2014around the Galerie Henning in Halle. These rooms added important new dimensions to the narrative around East German art, especially in the 1950s. The second floor, however, did not; organized thematically, it offered little guidance for how to understand the works in relation to the larger context in which they were created. Instead, the thematic groupings organized the material through a Western\u2014often negative\u2014lens that ultimately distorted the material and impeded understanding. The rooms \u201cMelancholy Antiquity\u201d and \u201cOutbreak and Disintegration: The 1980s,\u201d for example, imposed a negative framework on the works shown as evidenced by the terms melancholy and disintegration.[24]<\/a> \u201cThe Apotheosis of Horror,\u201d on the other hand, framed the works as a spectacle of violence rather than a critique of the Nazi past or imperialist present, as intended by the artists. As such, the title of the room deflected attention away from the idea held by many East German artists\u2014as well as politicans\u2014of \u201cart as a weapon\u201d in the fight against war and fascism.[25]<\/a><\/p>\nThe exhibition\u2014and especially the catalogue\u2014privileged a Western perspective in a number of other ways as well, most notably in its underrepresentation of women artists. Although Abschied von Ikarus <\/em>included more women painters from the 1970s and 1980s than many of its predecessor exhibitions in the West, the percentage of women was nonetheless far lower in comparison to the realities of the East German art world. Of ninety-six artists in the exhibition, only nine were women, a ratio of less than one in ten, which erroneously suggests that art is primarily a masculine endeavor. This small proportion stands in sharp contrast to the actual East German art world where, as of the 1980s, women comprised more than 33 percent of the artists in the national Union of Visual Artists and more than 20 percent of artists included in the national art exhibitions in Dresden (Zentrum 12; M\u00fcller, Appendix 1).[26]<\/a>\u00a0Indeed, women had been above 15 percent of the artists included in that exhibition since the 1950s (Eisman, \u201cEconomic\u201d 177). Abschied von Ikarus<\/em>\u2019s low percentage reflected Western expectations for women\u2019s participation more than Eastern reality. Not only did Abschied von Ikarus<\/em> include far fewer women, their art, with only a few exceptions, was confined to just one room\u2014and not one of the larger ones\u2014which effectively ghettoized them within the exhibition. While grouping women together is common in the West, it was virtually unheard of in the East. The suggestion was thus that women\u2019s participation in the East German art world was as low as it was\u2014and continues to be\u2014in the West.[27]<\/a><\/p>\nAnother way the exhibition distorted East German art was through an overemphasis on the alternative scene. This appears noticeably in the designation of most of the corner rooms to alternative art and artists, including the Bauhaus in Weimar, Hermann Gl\u00f6ckner, Carlfriedrich Claus, Lutz Dammbeck, and Klaus H\u00e4hner-Springm\u00fchl.[28]<\/a> No official artist received similar treatment. The exhibition thus obscured the difference between well-known works and those that had a limited audience within the GDR. Indeed, it often inverted the two. The result was an exhibition that showed that a lot of art had been created in East Germany and in a wide variety of styles and media, but offered little indication as to which works were important and to whom, be it the official art scene, artistic subgroups, or the curators who had put the exhibition together.[29]<\/a><\/p>\nAnother significant distortion was the negative tone of the exhibition, which appeared most prominently in its presentist insistence on the GDR\u2019s failure and, with it, the loss of the utopia East Germany had promised, rather than scholarly engagement with the art and art system in which it was created. The exhibition\u2019s tendentious nature is evident from its title, \u201cFarewell to Icarus,\u201d which refers to a mythological figure who came to symbolize the ideals of the GDR in many artists\u2019 work in the 1970s and 1980s; Icarus also symbolized the artists themselves and the struggles they faced in trying to realize these ideals. To say farewell to Icarus is thus to say goodbye not just to the GDR, but also to its art and artists as well as its hope for a better future. The emphasis on East Germany\u2019s failure also appeared in the first room of the exhibition, which contained a wall text and two paintings, Bernhard Kretzschmar\u2019s Blick auf Eisenh\u00fcttenstadt<\/em> (1955) [Fig. 17] and Wolfgang Mattheuer\u2019s Freundlicher Besuch im Braunkohlenrevier<\/em> (Friendly Visit to the Lignite Region, 1974) [Fig. 18]. Kretzschmar\u2019s early painting captures a high point in East German construction: the completion of an entire city built from scratch, the smoke in the background a sign of productivity rather than pollution. Mattheuer\u2019s painting from nearly twenty years later, in comparison, depicts a landscape of dirt with a power plant in the distance ringed in clouds or smog. The suggestion is that the ideals of the earlier work have resulted in the seemingly destroyed landscape of the latter one. Similarly, both images show figures in the foreground. Yet whereas in Kretzschmar\u2019s paintings, the many tiny people are enjoying a beautiful day\u2014there is a dog on a leash, a couple having a picnic, and many bikes\u2014the latter shows a figure, perhaps heading off to work, while others, their heads concealed in boxes with smiling faces painted on the sides, head the other way. The juxtaposition of these two paintings thus not only suggests that the early hopes and dreams have resulted in environmental degradation but also the need for people in the GDR to mask their true thoughts and feelings. In other words, it suggests that the GDR was doomed to fail, and it is this idea of failure, coming as it does in the very first room, that sets the stage for the rest of the exhibition despite the fact that the artists themselves were unaware of this outcome and were not engaging with it in their work. To emphasize East Germany\u2019s failure thus not only misrepresents the artworks shown, it also subtly undermines their importance since it frames the works as the artistic creations of a failed state. Like the title of the exhibition, this emphasis on failure suggests that these works belong to the \u201cdustbin of history,\u201d a common refrain in what historian Sandrine Kott and others have identified as a totalitarian approach to East German studies, an approach that was prevalent in Germany in the 1990s but has since been widely criticized (Cohen; Kott).[30]<\/a><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/Fig.-17-Kretzschmar.jpg\")
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![\"\"](\"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/Fig.-18-Mattheuer.jpg\")
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The negative tone of the exhibition is most explicit, however, in the exhibition\u2019s catalogue. A quick glance at the articles\u2019 titles reveals words and phrases such as impossibility, fatigue, coercion, melancholy, a Pyrrhus victory, dictated standards, ugly, apotheosis of terror, apocalypse and redemption, demise and horror, resistant painting, and escape (Rehberg, et al. 4-5). East Germany is presented as a place whose reality was \u201cinfiltrated\u201d by melancholy, which was perhaps a \u201cpremonition of the failure of the \u2018great Project\u2019\u201d (61). Elsewhere it is compared to George Orwell\u2019s dystopian novel, 1984 <\/em>(51).<\/em> Even when authors acknowledge that some people chose to live in the GDR, the examples suggest it was a bad choice: the journalist Rudolf Herrnstadt\u2014who moved to the East and made his career in the SED but was later forced to resign and was essentially banned to a small town after a clash with Ulbricht\u2014is compared to Helmut Kindler, a journalist who moved to the West and became one of West Germany\u2019s most successful publishers (51-52).<\/p>\nThe negative tone also appears in the catalogue\u2019s emphasis on repression, which is particularly evident in how it portrays Hermann Gl\u00f6ckner, a Dresden artist who is best known today for his many Constructivist paintings and sculptures. The catalogue states that Gl\u00f6ckner first \u201cbroke through the cultural political ice\u201d of the art world in 1984 at the age of 95 (160). In this year, he completed a major sculpture in Dresden and received the GDR\u2019s national Art Prize. According to the catalog, this marked the end of a \u201cperiod of [\u2026] official ignorance and humiliating limits\u201d on the artist (160). Not only is the language loaded, but the information is false. Gl\u00f6ckner exhibited work in East and West Germany throughout the 1950s, created numerous works of architectural art through the end of the 1960s, and had his breakthrough in 1969 when he was given a major solo exhibition at the Kupferstichkabinet in Dresden that included more than 150 works. Thereafter, he regularly exhibited work in local and national exhibitions in Dresden and was the focus of numerous articles, several catalogues, and a book. Indeed, the major sculpture mentioned in the catalogue was a multi-year commission given to him in the mid-1970s that cost upwards of 45,000 Marks to create and install (BfaK-D). Yet the Abschied von Ikarus <\/em>exhibition and catalogue maintained the fiction that Gl\u00f6ckner was a repressed artist who received recognition in the GDR only a few years before his death. While Gl\u00f6ckner did not share the level of fame of the Leipzig School of artists, he was a well-known and well-respected artist in East Germany throughout the Honecker era.[31]<\/a> To suggest otherwise is to rewrite East German art along Western expectations of repression. Such rewriting not only distorts the realities of the East German art world, but also deprives artists of their agency and artworks of their meaning. The emphasis throughout the catalogue is thus more on judging East Germany than on understanding the art and the artistic context in which it was created. As historian Andrew Port has noted about some German scholarship on the GDR more generally, the catalogue is an example of \u201chistory as comfort food for those most interested in moralistic posturing\u201d (Port 14). Rather than ask questions that further our understanding of East Germany, the catalogue falls back on banalities: the GDR as a repressive, totalitarian state, as a footnote of history.<\/p>\nWhen examined within the larger context of East German art\u2019s reception in the West, Abschied von Ikarus<\/em> exemplifies the second of what I have identified as four main approaches to East German art. The first, often found in English-language scholarship but also in the Bilderstreit<\/em> of the long 1990s, is the idea that there was no art in East Germany or, at least, no art of value to the West, be it aesthetically (e.g. kitsch, Auftragskunst<\/em>) or because of the artists\u2019 political beliefs (Staatsk\u00fcnstler<\/em>). The second approach acknowledges that art was created in East Germany, but limits these works to so-called dissident or alternative artists or to those who were oppressed by the system. This can be seen in the Abschied von Ikarus<\/em> exhibition in its overemphasis on the alternative scene, which was highlighted in the corner rooms, and in its rewriting of artists such as Hermann Gl\u00f6ckner. The third approach, which I have not engaged with in this article, acknowledges that even the so-called Staatsk\u00fcnstler<\/em> created art but attempts to separate these artists from the East German state, most often by overemphasizing problems they may have had and ignoring or downplaying any positive connections. This approach can be seen, for example, in the 2005 exhibition, Bernhard Heisig: Wut der Bilder<\/em> (see Eisman, \u201cDenying Difference\u201d). The fourth level is the one I am advocating for here: an engagement with East German art on its own terms. This approach sets aside moral judgments in an attempt to understand the art created\u2014and the artists who created it\u2014in relationship to the East German context in which it was produced. I am arguing, in essence, that art history follow the lead of East German studies more generally and move away from a totalitarian model of engagement in favor of a more nuanced approach (Kott; Port).<\/p>\nAbschied von Ikarus<\/em> was the last major retrospective exhibition of East German art to take place in Germany. Its size and claim to be the final word in the Bilderstreit<\/em> will presumably make it the last for many years to come.[32]<\/a> Problematic as it was, it marks the current state of East German art\u2019s reception in Germany today and shows how the Bilderstreit<\/em> is over not because it has been successfully resolved but rather because time has made East German art less of a threat to the now not-so-newly unified nation. Even an exhibition in a major art museum is not going to lead to a rewriting of the postwar German canon more than twenty years after unification. Similarly, the negative aspects of the exhibition were more subtle than in the 1990s and, more importantly, were most evident in the catalogue, a massive tome that overwhelms with its size and thus ensures that few of the exhibition visitors will do more than flip through it. As for East German scholars who might voice criticisms, they have largely disappeared in the new millennium, be it from exhaustion, resignation, or death.[33]<\/a><\/p>\nConclusion<\/strong><\/h5>\nFor art historians, East Germany offers an unparalleled opportunity to study the impact of politics on art. Until 1945, what would become East Germany and West Germany was the same country with the same (art) history. How art developed thereafter is directly related to the super power in charge and, more specifically, the capitalist or communist ideology applied. Having developed largely outside of a market system, East Germany offers art historians an \u201calternative modernism,\u201d one in which artists did not need to reject the threat of commodity culture as so many artists in the West did. Indeed, a rejection of the commodification of art is partly what spurred the development of conceptual and performance art in the West. As such, East Germany offers an alternative perspective from which to view the development of Western art. In fact, East German art reveals the neoliberal underpinnings of postwar Western art with the latter\u2019s emphasis on the individual, the postmodern play of the signifier, and diversity at the cost of challenging inequality (Michaels). One might even argue that East German art\u2019s focus on the people and on challenging inequality is an old-school correlative to the activist Social Practice artists who have emerged in recent years\u2014artists whose desire for social engagement has been theorized most famously by the French curator and art critic Nicolas Borriaud in his 1998 book, Relational Aesthetics<\/em>.<\/p>\nA nuanced view of East German art can also offer new insights for German Studies scholars. First, art was an important part of East German culture. Like writers, visual artists were expected to play a major role in helping to form the new socialist identity. Initially this meant creating heroic images of workers and communist leaders as alternative role models to help educate the German people after twelve years of Nazi propaganda. Later it meant creating complex works that engaged the audience in discussions with artists and each other about a variety of issues. Like literature, art became an alternative public sphere (Bathrick). As part of the intellectual elite who helped to create the very fabric of the society in which they lived, artists shared many of the same social responsibilities as writers and filmmakers, both of whom are better known in Anglophone scholarship. East German art is thus not only important in its own right but also in terms of comparisons with these other fields. Like literature, art offered opportunities for discussion through its subject matter, but unlike writers, artists needed some level of official recognition for their work to be seen. Large paintings could not be surreptitiously shared or smuggled across the border (Pachnicke and Merkert 7-8). But like writers, artists could work alone and create whatever they wanted, something those in the film industry could not do owing to the greater number of people involved and the larger monetary investment. In addition to differentiating the conditions of creativity among the cultural elites, it would also be valuable to compare the freezes and thaws in cultural policy: did they happen at the same time and to the same extent across the various fields? Anecdotal evidence suggests not. So what can this tell us?<\/p>\n
A study of the visual arts is also important because of the crossover that existed between fields. Visual artists were deeply engaged with the literature of their country, and texts by authors from Brecht to Christa Wolf were frequently referred to if not illustrated outright in their work. Indeed, the Leipzig Academy was known for its literary approach to painting, an approach encouraged by the city\u2019s many publishers and book fairs, and many of the artists who studied or taught there also created literary prints throughout their careers. Artists and writers also knew each other and some were friends. Christa Wolf\u2019s circle, for example, included both Nuria Quevedo and Angela Hampel, both of whom created numerous works inspired by her novels. Indeed, there is a tremendous amount to be learned about the literature of East Germany as seen through the eyes of East German artists, and presumably that influence moved in both directions. Moreover, artists and writers also sometimes worked together on projects. In 1975, for example, the Mitteldeutscher Verlag in Halle published a nearly 300-page oversize book titled Chile: Gesang und Bericht <\/em>(Chile: Song and Report). It was created through a joint effort of writers and artists\u2014including Volker Braun and Anna Seghers as well as Heisig, Sitte, and T\u00fcbke\u2014in response to the 1973 putsch in Chile. There was also crossover between the visual arts and film. The filmmaker J\u00fcrgen B\u00f6ttcher, for example, worked early on as a painter in Dresden under the name Strawalde. There were also many artists who engaged with the Super-8 film medium in the 1980s. To what extent were these latter artists informed by or perhaps even informing DEFA filmmakers?<\/p>\n
In this article, I show how our current understanding of art created in the German Democratic Republic (GDR, or East Germany) is quite different from what it was thirty years ago and argue that it has been rewritten to fulfill Western expectations. Although some changes to the narrative have expanded our understanding, others have significantly distorted our view of East Germany, thus depriving us of an alternative perspective from which to understand the capitalist West. Such distortions also deny us a source for alternatives to the neoliberal present. I begin by looking briefly at the development of art in East Germany, focusing on painting, the most prestigious visual arts medium, in order to establish a baseline for understanding the history that has been subsequently rewritten. I then turn to the German-German Bilderstreit <\/em>(image battle) of the long 1990s, a series of vehement debates in the German press about what role East German art and artists should play in the new Germany. These debates offer insight into the larger issues at stake and the actors involved, and thus allow us to better understand the more recent rewriting. I then argue that the Bilderstreit <\/em>entered a new, quieter\u2014and therefore more insidious\u2014phase in the new millennium, a shift that began in 2003 with Kunst in der DDR, eine Retrospektive <\/em>(Art in the GDR, a Retrospective), a blockbuster exhibition held at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. This highly praised exhibition marks a high point in East German art\u2019s reception after 1989\/90, but it also inadvertently opened the door to a significant rewriting of East German art that reached its culmination in the 2012 Abschied von Ikarus<\/em> (Farewell to Icarus) exhibition in Weimar. I consider how both of these exhibitions presented East German art before explaining why the rewriting of this art matters for both art historians and scholars of the GDR.<\/p>\n In Anglophone scholarship, East German art is virtually unknown, the result in part of the Cold War era\u2019s polarization\u2014and politicization\u2014of the visual arts, which were divided roughly in two since the late 1940s: abstract vs. realist, good vs. bad, Art vs. non-Art. According to these binaries, East Germany did not create art, merely political propaganda and kitsch. It is a stereotype that, despite the passage of more than a quarter century since the end of the Cold War, remains largely unexamined and therefore dominant in the minds of most Anglophone academics who, if asked to describe \u201cEast German art,\u201d would probably mention the term \u201cSocialist Realism\u201d and imagine paintings of Communist leaders or happy workers portrayed with an almost photographic realism. While such images were created throughout the forty-year history of the GDR, they reached their official apex in 1953 with works such as Otto Nagel\u2019s Junger Maurer von der Stalinallee <\/em>(Young Bricklayer from Stalinallee, 1953) [Fig. 1].<\/p>\n In the wake of Stalin\u2019s death and the workers\u2019 revolt in June 1953, East German artistic policy loosened, and visual artists began to experiment openly with modernist styles in the vein of Pablo Picasso and Fernand L\u00e9ger. In fact, there was a multi-issue discussion of Picasso as a possible role model for East German artists in these years in Bildende Kunst<\/em>, the GDR\u2019s main art journal. Picasso seemed a particularly interesting figure because he combined a modernist aesthetic with a political commitment to communism (L\u00fcdecke). His influence can be seen in the flattened space and simplifed forms visible in paintings by Willi Sitte [Fig. 2] and Harald Metzkes, among others.[8]<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n By the mid-1960s, artists in Leipzig\u2014and, in particular, Bernhard Heisig, Wolfgang Mattheuer, and Werner T\u00fcbke, along with Willi Sitte from neighboring Halle\u2014had developed a uniquely East German style of contemporary art that would come to represent the GDR in the more relaxed cultural atmosphere of the Honecker era in the 1970s and 1980s. Paintings such as Heisig\u2019s Der Weihnachtstraum des unbelehrbaren Soldaten <\/em>(The Christmas Dream of the Unteachable Soldier, 1964) [Fig. 6]\u2014multivalent works that reflect a commitment to the modernist tradition\u2014would be exhibited in the West to great praise in the final decades of the Cold War era. Although this generation of artists includes East Germany\u2019s best-known artists today, they were not the only ones working in a modernist style but rather the first of several generations.<\/p>\n In the 1970s, their students emerged with works that looked not only at the Expressionist tradition but also at Neue Sachlichkeit and Surrealism. Arno Rink, for example, responded to the 1973 putsch in Chile with a Daliesque painting about the Spanish Civil War, Spanien 1938 <\/em>(Spain 1938) that was exhibited to great praise at both the district and national levels (Feist 223). By the 1980s, a third generation of artists was creating large, Neoexpressionist canvases not unlike those of their Neue Wilde<\/em> (new Fauves) counterparts in West Germany, and both installation and performance art were gaining in popularity and were even recognized by the official art world. Steffen Fischer and Angela Hampel\u2019s installation, Offene Zweierbeziehung<\/em> (An Open Relationship, 1989) [Fig. 3], for example, was included in the District Art Exhibition in Dresden in 1989. The work shows a number of men and women strung up individually in nets that hover above upright missiles, a reference to the difficulties of sexual entanglements.<\/p>\n As this brief overview reveals, art in East Germany was much more complex than is often assumed in the West. Rather than uniformly repressive, the East German system was marked by a series of freezes and thaws in artistic policy, but with an ever increasing openness to modern and contemporary art, such that by the late 1980s no style was completely taboo, not even performance and installation art.[9]<\/a><\/p>\n In sharp contrast to the lack of knowledge in the Anglophone West, the development of art in East Germany after 1953 is better recognized in both scholarship and museum exhibitions in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG, or West Germany until 1990, unified Germany thereafter), albeit problematically so. Already in the late 1960s Eduard Beaucamp was writing about Heisig, Mattheuer, Sitte, and T\u00fcbke\u2014the so-called \u201cLeipzig School\u201d\u2014in the major daily newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung<\/em>. A few years later, in 1977, these same four artists were invited to exhibit works at the international art exhibition documenta 6<\/em> in Kassel, West Germany. This event marks the emergence of contemporary East German art onto the Western art scene.[10]<\/a> In its wake these four artists would become virtually synonymous with East German art in the minds of many West German curators, and their work the most highly praised, collected, and exhibited in the 1980s.[11]<\/a> In the wake of 1989\/90 they were also the artists most frequently at the center of controversy in the German press, which labeled them \u201cStaatsk\u00fcnstler<\/em>,\u201d or State Artists. The controversy around artists such as Heisig, Mattheuer, Sitte, and T\u00fcbke was not new to the Mauerfall<\/em> (fall of the Berlin Wall), but rather began already with their inclusion in documenta 6<\/em> (Schirmer, DDR und documenta<\/em>). Protestors delivered leaflets and conducted a sit-in; the artist Georg Baselitz pulled his work from the show. Yet these voices did not command the press\u2019s attention the way they would in the wake of November 1989. In large part this was due to the leftist leanings of West Germany in the 1970s and 1980s. With the sudden collapse of the GDR, however, the authority that leftist intellectuals had enjoyed since Willy Brandt\u2019s Ostpolitik <\/em>(also known as d\u00e9tente) was undermined, and conservative voices came to the fore in a wave of victor\u2019s glory.<\/p>\n The change in East German art\u2019s reception after the Mauerfall <\/em>occurred almost immediately. A major exhibition of Heisig\u2019s work that had opened in West Berlin to positive reviews in October 1989 was being criticized by the end of November. What became known as the German-German Bilderstreit<\/em> began a few years later when, in 1993, eighteen prominent West Germans\u2014including the GDR emigrants Georg Baselitz and Gerhard Richter\u2014left the visual arts department of the western Berlin Academy of Arts in protest against the en-bloc acceptance of colleagues from its eastern counterpart when the two academies were merged (Gillen). The following year the Neue Nationalgalerie in western Berlin became the center of controversy for an exhibition of postwar art from their permanent collection that placed masterpieces from the East and West side by side. The right-of-center Christian Democratic Party (CDU) in Berlin ignited the debate, likening the museum to a Parteischule <\/em>(school of the Communist Party) because of its inclusion of Heisig, Sitte, T\u00fcbke, and Mattheuer (Kahlcke). A third major confrontation took place in 1998 when Heisig was invited\u2014as one of only two East German artists\u2014to contribute work to the Reichstag building in Berlin. Heisig was attacked for being a teenage soldier in the Waffen SS and for being a Staatsk\u00fcnstler<\/em>. In fact, the two were conflated by the politician Uwe Lehmann-Braun from the CDU, who stated that Heisig had \u201cloyally served two dictatorships\u201d (quoted in Hecht 3).<\/p>\n The height of the Bilderstreit<\/em>, however, was reached the following year with the exhibition Aufstieg und Fall der Moderne <\/em>(The Rise and Fall of Modernism) in Weimar. In this exhibition, the western German curator\u2019s contempt for the East German works on display was obvious\u2014the paintings were crowded together and hung up haphazardly against drop cloths in a space without climate control (Wolbert; Osmond). Moreover, a more carefully considered exhibition of Nazi works elsewhere in the building suggested not only a connection between the two regimes, but also that the Nazi works were more valuable. This was followed by one final clash over the planned 2001 exhibition of Willi Sitte\u2019s work at the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg for his 80th<\/sup> birthday (Grossmann). Ultimately, the furor in the press over Sitte\u2019s connections to the East German state\u2014his position as Staatsk\u00fcnstler<\/em>\u2014led to Sitte cancelling the show.<\/p>\n The various debates within the Bilderstreit<\/em> fall into two main categories, both of which draw upon Cold War-era prejudices about East German art. The first dismissed East German art and artists as inferior to their western counterparts. This view was often accompanied by the term Auftragskunst<\/em> (commissioned art) and by images like Heinrich Witz\u2019s Der neue Anfang<\/em> (The New Beginning, 1959) [Fig. 4], which were readily accessible in the 1990s in exhibitions at history museums such as the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin (see Flacke). This focus on an assumed inferior quality can be seen in the controversy over the decision to unify the East and West German Academies of Art and in the Aufstieg und Fall der Moderne <\/em>exhibition.<\/p>\n The second category of the Bilderstreit<\/em> focused on dismissing East Germany\u2019s most important artists\u2014those previously praised and collected in West Germany\u2014based on their biographies and, in particular, their largely positive relationship to the state. In these cases, the art itself could not be dismissed as \u201cbad art,\u201d and thus the focus shifted to the person. Examples of this type of dismissal appear in the controversies around the exhibition of postwar art at the Neue Nationalgalerie, Heisig\u2019s commission for the Reichstag building, and Sitte\u2019s cancellation of his solo exhibition in Nuremberg. These artists were labeled Staatsk\u00fcnstler<\/em>, meaning \u201cstate artist,\u201d a term that requires unpacking in order to be able to understand the reception of East German art in Germany today.<\/p>\n On the surface of it, the term Staatsk\u00fcnstler<\/em> is not a negative one. The history of art is filled with them, from the Romans to Jacques-Louis David, artists who fulfilled commissions for\u2014and whose art came to represent\u2014the state. From this perspective, Heisig, Mattheuer, Sitte, and T\u00fcbke\u2014among many other East German artists\u2014were indeed Staatsk\u00fcnstler<\/em>. They fulfilled artistic commissions, and their work represented the GDR in major international exhibitions. Yet the term Staatsk\u00fcnstler<\/em> in the context of East German art has a number of negative connotations that upon closer examination do not apply, at least not to most of the artists so labeled. The example of Bernhard Heisig\u2014who was not only one of East Germany\u2019s best-known and most successful artists but also a key figure in the Bilderstreit<\/em>\u2014should suffice to illustrate some of the problems with this label.<\/p>\n The first connotation of the term Staatsk\u00fcnstler <\/em>is that these artists forfeited artistic integrity in exchange for fame and power. In Heisig\u2019s case, however, it was just the opposite. He changed from an Adolf von Menzel-inspired realism in the 1950s, as evidenced in Zirkel junger Naturforscher<\/em> (Circle of Young Natural Scientists, 1952) [Fig. 5], to one inspired by German modernists such as Lovis Corinth, Max Beckmann, and Otto Dix in the early to mid-1960s, as visible in Der Weihnachtstraum des unbelehrbaren Soldaten<\/em> (The Christmas Dream of the Unteachable Soldier, 1964) [Fig. 6]. That is, he changed from an artistic style that was acceptable to conservative political functionaries to one that was not.<\/p>\n This change in style led to a number of clashes with authorities in the latter half of the 1960s that have been largely overlooked or misinterpreted in German scholarship.[12]<\/a> It was only with Erich Honecker\u2019s rise to power in 1971 that Heisig became a highly valued artist at the national level, the result of a change\u2014and considerable relaxation in\u2014cultural policy. One could even argue that Heisig had led the way through his repeated provocations in the 1960s to the modern style for which East German art became known in the Honecker era.<\/p>\n A second implication behind the term Staatsk\u00fcnstler<\/em> is that these artists actively oppressed others. In Heisig\u2019s case, the implied accusation is that he, as professor at and rector of the Leipzig Academy (Hochschule f\u00fcr Grafik und Buchkunst Leipzig), prevented those with a more radical view of art in terms of stylistic innovation from becoming artists. Yet a closer examination of the record reveals that Heisig actually worked with younger artists to make the Leipzig Academy more modern. In the 1970s, he hired Hartwig Ebersbach to create and teach a multimedia class and ran interference with political functionaries in Berlin for years before the class was ultimately shut down (Lang, Malerei und Grafik<\/em> 275; Grundmann and Michael 10-11, 43-46, 48). Similarly, as vice president of the national Union of Visual Artists (VBK), he helped negotiate a compromise for the controversial Herbstsalon <\/em>(Fall Salon) in Leipzig in 1984, a so-called \u201cunderground\u201d exhibition of young artists who were able to display works not considered acceptable by the government (Lang, Malerei und Grafik<\/em> 210-11). All of these facts\u2014and more\u2014suggest that Heisig was open to the younger generation and worked to include them and their broadening interests in the system, even if he was not interested in creating such works himself. Indeed, Ebersbach defended Heisig on just such terms during the debate around the inclusion of Heisig\u2019s work in the Reichstag in 1998.[13]<\/a><\/p>\n In the end, however, the truth of whether or not Heisig and the other so-called Staatsk\u00fcnstler <\/em>had actually oppressed others\u2014or sold out their artistic integrity\u2014did not really matter to those making the accusations. What mattered was these artists\u2019 high-profile association with the GDR, the collapse of which in 1989\/90 seemed to prove it had been an Unrechtstaat <\/em>(illegitimate state). In the highly charged political atmosphere of the 1990s, the so-called Staatsk\u00fcnstler<\/em> were seen by many (western) German conservatives as having helped legitimate the East German regime\u2014and thus having contributed to its longevity\u2014by the very fact that they had not left. This subtly poisonous accusation recalls the exiles vs. Hierbleiber<\/em> (those remaining here) debates of the Third Reich, in which exiles were castigated for abandoning the German people in their time of greatest need, and Hierbleiber<\/em> for tacitly lending their support to the regime by not leaving. Artists such as Heisig were thus castigated for being Hierbleiber<\/em>, for staying in the GDR and attempting to change it from within rather than abandoning it.[14]<\/a><\/p>\n Not all of the criticism came from western Germans. There were, in fact, at least three distinct groups of eastern Germans in the art world whose condemnations of the so-called Staatsk\u00fcnstler <\/em>were used to buoy conservative western German criticisms. The first came from a younger generation of artists from the GDR, artists whose radicality in terms of formal innovation had caused conflict with the government, and for whom the Mauerfall <\/em>had ended the GDR before such conflicts could be worked out or, in the case of those who had recently emigrated to the West, before they could dissociate themselves from their East German past.[15]<\/a> This group in particular\u2014artists such as Lutz Dammbeck (b. 1948) and Han-Hendrick Grimmling (b. 1947)\u2014sees the so-called Staatsk\u00fcnstler <\/em>as having sold out their artistic integrity and misused their power to oppress younger, more formally radical artists.[16]<\/a> Archival evidence and interviews, however, suggest that the issue at stake here is less one of aesthetic repression than a generational conflict.[17]<\/a> These younger artists were rebelling against the hegemony of the 1920s generation of artists\u2014the so-called Staatsk\u00fcnstler<\/em>\u2014who were not only greatly praised in the GDR and internationally in the final decades of the Cold War but also largely controlled the art academies and institutions and, as such, dictated policy.<\/p>\n A second group of eastern German voices critical of the so-called Staatsk\u00fcnstler <\/em>came from artists who had left the GDR and made international names for themselves as \u201cGerman\u201d artists. The most notable example is Georg Baselitz, who stated in a much-quoted 1990 interview in Art<\/em> magazine: \u201cThere are no artists in the GDR, they all left [\u2026] no artists, no painters. None of them ever painted a picture [\u2026]. They are interpreters who fulfilled the program of the East German system [\u2026] [they are] simply assholes\u201d (quoted in Hecht and Welti 70). Both he and Gerhard Richter left the GDR as adults for the West, where they established international reputations. Until recently, their East German backgrounds\u2014including artistic training\u2014have been glossed over.[18]<\/a> Yet this background presumably contributed to their positive reception, lending them an aura of Otherness that also seemed to confirm the presumed superiority of the West by their choice to emigrate there.<\/p>\n The third group of eastern German voices is comprised of artists, critics, and art historians from places other than Leipzig or Halle. These individuals have attempted to reconfigure\u2014perhaps unconsciously\u2014the history of East German art in recent years. In particular, they downplay the importance of the Leipzig School. This view was particularly apparent in the Kunst in der DDR, Eine Retrospektive<\/em> exhibition where the Leipzig School had only one small, artificially lit room, while artists from Berlin enjoyed three of the five rooms open to natural lighting. For those unfamiliar with the history of East German art, the Leipzig School would have seemed no more important than Constructivism, which also had a small room in the exhibition.<\/p>\n When examined in context, the Bilderstreit<\/em> reveals itself primarily as a battle for place within the new Germany and, for some, a battle over what role, if any, East German art and artists should play in helping to define Germany\u2019s post-Wall cultural identity. In the new millennium, however, the vociferous battles over East German art diminished, in part, because of the passage of time.<\/p>\n The shift to a new, quieter phase in the reception of East German art began in 2003 when the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin held a major exhibition, Kunst in der DDR, eine Retrospektive<\/em>. Not only did the exhibition avoid controversy in the press, it attracted large numbers of visitors and was ultimately named \u201cExhibition of the Year\u201d by the International Art Critics Association (AICA). The exhibition benefitted in part from fortuitous timing: the wildly successful film, Goodbye Lenin<\/em>, released earlier that year, marked a high point in Ostalgie<\/em> (nostalgia for the East). The exhibition also addressed a western audience with the intent of showing that East Germany did indeed have art of value. It was intended, at least in part, as a response to\u2014and perhaps the final word on\u2014the controversy sparked nearly ten years earlier when the Neue Nationalgalerie<\/em> exhibited works from both East Germany and the West next to each other.[19]<\/a> Curated by two former East German curators, Roland M\u00e4rz and Eugen Blume, Kunst in der DDR <\/em>included 400 works of painting, drawing, sculpture, photography, and video by 130 artists. The intent was to show that the GDR had a \u201cdifferentiated and rich variety of artistic voices, especially in the art centers of Berlin, Dresden, Halle and Leipzig,\u201d regardless of the politics and limitations of the \u201cclosed society\u201d (Blume and M\u00e4rz 12).<\/p>\n The exhibition was arranged roughly chronologically. It began in the immediate postwar years with images of wartime destruction, artistic self-reflection in the context of rebuilding, and early artistic experimentation in the Eastern Zone. Paintings included Hans Grundig\u2019s Opfer des Faschismus <\/em>(Victims of Fascism, 1946) [Fig. 7], Bernhard Kretzschmar\u2019s Selbstbildnis <\/em>(Self Portrait, 1946), and Edmund Kesting\u2019s Land im Versinken <\/em>(Sinking Country, 1949), respectively. It then offered two rooms with paintings and sculpture from the 1950s such as Sitte\u2019s Raub der Sabinerinnen <\/em>[Fig. 2] and Metzkes\u2019 Abtransport der sechsarmigen G\u00f6ttin <\/em>(Removing the Six-armed Goddess, 1956), works inspired by Picasso and other modernist artists.<\/p>\n The exhibition then shifted to a number of rooms dedicated to three of East Germany\u2019s main art centers\u2014Dresden, East Berlin, and Leipzig\u2014reflecting the importance of districts, or Bezirke<\/em>, in the development of artistic styles. In 1952, the SED had divided East Germany into fourteen districts, each of which had its own local branches of various national organizations, including the Union of Visual Artists (VBK).[20]<\/a> These local branches interpreted rules passed down from the national organization, dealt with local artistic issues such as commissions and exhibitions, and were the official advocates for their artists. They also organized the juried district art exhibitions held throughout the country every two to three years. These exhibitions enabled each district to display its art to the public and politicians alike, and it was largely from these exhibitions that works were chosen for the national art exhibition held in Dresden every four to five years. Dresden, East Berlin, and Leipzig each had an art school and a unique artistic profile. This emphasis on the regional defines much of East Germany\u2019s art, which\u2014unlike the West\u2019s\u2014did not develop in terms of movements or styles but rather in terms of regional tendencies. These tendencies were encouraged, in part, by regularly scheduled exhibitions and exchanges among artists at the local level, the unique history of the region, and the specific emphasis of the art school, whether painting (Berlin and Dresden), printmaking (Leipzig), or industrial design (Halle).<\/p>\n For Dresden, the exhibition included images by artists who worked largely outside of official art circles in the 1960s and 1970s, including Peter Graf [Fig. 8], Strawalde (also known as J\u00fcrgen B\u00f6ttcher), and Ralf Winkler (better known in the West as A.R. Penck). Dresden artists such as these tended to emphasize the painterly quality, if not coloration, associated with German Expressionism, which was founded in Dresden and remained an important inspiration for artists who lived there.<\/p>\n In the rooms devoted to Berlin, the selected artists tended to look to Paris for inspiration, generally adopting a quiet, poetic approach to art\u2014from the \u201cblack melancholy\u201d of the 1950s as embodied by Ernst Schr\u00f6der and Manfred B\u00f6ttcher to the more colorful images of the 1960s by artists such as Harald Metzkes. In the 1970s and 1980s, a number of artists from a younger generation emerged who looked to Neue Sachlichkeit<\/em> (New Objectivity) for inspiration, as can be seen in Clemens Groszer\u2019s Caf\u00e9 Liolet<\/em> [Fig. 9], a clear reference to Otto Dix.<\/p>\n Leipzig, too, had a room, albeit smaller than those for Dresden and Berlin. Paintings from Leipzig tended to emphasize complex compositions and layers of meaning, inspired at least in part because it was a city of books and publishing: artists in Leipzig not only regularly illustrated books but also incorporated literary complexity into their work [Fig. 6]. The size of the room and number of paintings included for Leipzig, however, suggests a downplaying of the city\u2019s importance to the history of East German art in comparison to Dresden and East Berlin. This is a revision that reveals the impact of the third group of critical voices about East German art\u2019s reception: artists, critics, and art historians from places other than Leipzig or Halle\u2014in this case, two curators from East Berlin. This desire to downplay Leipzig\u2019s role stems in part from long-standing rivalries between various districts in East Germany. Whereas Leipzig emphasized highly intellectual content, energetic brushwork, and bold colors, Berlin focused on aesthetics: poetic voicings, subtle colors, and brushwork inspired by the work of French painters like Paul Cezanne (Blume and M\u00e4rz 220-21). For some intellectuals in Berlin, the art created in Leipzig was too brash and received too much attention in the press, both before and after unification.[21]<\/a><\/p>\n In addition to rooms devoted to the individual art centers, there were also rooms that focused on particular styles or media. There was a small room devoted to Constructivism, a hallway to photography, and in the center, a large room to the brightly painted Neoexpressionist works created by a younger generation of artists in the 1980s, including Trak Wendisch, Klaus Killisch, and Wolfgang Smy. There were also thematic rooms that included artists who did not fit within the other categories, such as Gerhard Altenbourg and Carlfriedrich Claus, two solitary figures in the GDR whose work emphasized drawing, and Willy Wolff [Fig. 10], one of the few artists in East Germany who engaged directly with Pop Art.<\/p>\n The exhibition Kunst in der DDR<\/em> succeeded in its attempt to show that East Germany had art of value to Western tastes. Although this may seem obvious, it was an important fact to establish in Germany at this time. In the wake of the many exhibitions\u2014usually in history museums\u2014of lesser quality works, and the denigrations of the Aufstieg und Fall der Moderne <\/em>exhibition four years earlier, the fact that East Germany had a flourishing contemporary art scene was not yet an obvious one. Yet in making this point, the curators were necessarily selective, downplaying Soviet-style Socialist Realist works in favor of those that looked to the modernist\u2014particularly the German modernist traditions of Expressionism and Neue Sachlichkeit (Blume and M\u00e4rz 12). The end result was a highly successful exhibition that helped change people\u2019s views of East German art. But the curators\u2019 emphasis on art in<\/em> the GDR\u2014as opposed to East German Art or Art of East Germany\u2014had unintended consequences: it opened the door for future curators to include anything that was created on East German soil without regard for its importance within East German society and thus to create distorted accounts of art\u2019s role and reception (Blume and M\u00e4rz 31). The evidence for this appears in the last major retrospective exhibition on East German art to be organized in Germany, one that took place nearly ten years later.\u00a0<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n Abschied von Ikarus. Bildwelten in der DDR\u2014neu gesehen<\/em> (Farewell to Icarus. Imagery in the GDR\u2014newly seen) was a major exhibition of East German art held in Weimar from October 2012 until February 2013. It included approximately 279 works by 96 artists and was intended, in part, as a corrective to the controversial Aufstieg und Fall der Moderne<\/em> exhibition held in Weimar thirteen years earlier. This time, however, the art was treated as art and exhibited in an art museum. The Neues Museum Weimar dedicated all seventeen rooms of its impressive two-story building to the exhibition. The first floor focused primarily on the Ulbricht era and was arranged roughly chronologically. After an introductory room of two paintings, the exhibition had a large room [Fig. 11] of well-known Socialist Realist works from the late 1940s and early 1950s. These included paintings such as Otto Nagel\u2019s Junger Maurer von der Stalinallee<\/em> (Young Bricklayer on Stalin Boulevard, 1953) [Fig. 1], Kretzschmar\u2019s Die Volkslehrerin<\/em> (Teacher of the People, 1953), and Mayer-Foreyt\u2019s Ehrt die alten Meister<\/em> (Honor the Old Masters, 1952), works that were absent from the earlier blockbuster exhibition in Berlin. These paintings reflect the officially encouraged emphasis in the early 1950s on realism and optimism, on works that could help educate the people and offer models for behavior in the wake of the Third Reich.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n These were followed by rooms on the lesser-known stories of the Bauhaus tradition at the Weimar Academy\u2014the visual arts department of which was closed in 1951\u2014and the modernist painters associated with the Galerie Hennig in Halle in the 1950s. Sitte\u2019s Volkmar im Faschingskost\u00fcm <\/em>(Volkmar in a Fasching Costume, 1954) and Joachim Heuer\u2019s Tod mit Melone und M\u00fctze <\/em>(Death with Melon and Hat, 1948-49) reveal the importance of early modernist movements for these artists. The next room focused on the Constructivist creations of the Dresden artist Hermann Gl\u00f6ckner. The focus was primarily on smaller works he had created, often from non-art materials such as medicine boxes or old broken glasses. Works such as these had been highlighted a few years earlier in a major exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum, Art of Two Germanys \/ Cold War Cultures<\/em>. This small, solo space was followed by a large room of paintings focusing on East German workers created from the 1950s through the 1980s. These included Volker Stelzmann\u2019s famous Junger Schwei\u00dfer <\/em>(Young Welder, 1971) [Fig. 12] and the cartoon-like, lesser-known Die Aura der Schmelzer <\/em>(The Aura of the Smelters, 1988) by Eberhard Heiland.<\/p>\n Whereas the exhibition\u2019s first floor offered a roughly chronological overview of art during the first two decades of the Cold War era, most of the works on the second floor dated from the Honecker period and were organized thematically. As on the first floor, these rooms offered a combination of well-known works and new discoveries, especially from the alternative scene. The Leipzig School was shown in a room titled, \u201cThe Apotheosis of Horror.\u201d It included work by Heisig, Mattheuer, Sitte, and T\u00fcbke, as well as by younger artists, including Hartwig Ebersbach and Hubertus Giebe. Many of these paintings focused on the Nazi past or the imperialist present. Ebersbach\u2019s polyptych, Widmung an Chile<\/em> (Dedicated to Chile, 1974) [Fig. 13], for example, was a response to the 1973 putsch in Chile in which Augusto Pinochet, with CIA backing, violently overthrew the democratically elected communist leader Salvador Allende and installed a military dictatorship that tortured tens of thousands of people, several thousand of whom were \u201cdisappeared.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Another room, titled \u201cMelancholy Antiquity,\u201d focused on the use of mythology in East German art. It included works by Heisig, Mattheuer, and Metzkes, among others. Mythology was a major theme in the 1970s and 1980s, enabling artists to comment on current events through allegorical figures such as Sisyphus, Penthesilea, and especially Icarus, who appeared in more than sixty works in these years (Arlt 116). In Hans-Hendrick Grimmling\u2019s diptych, Ikarus zu Hause<\/em> (Icarus at Home, 1978) [Fig. 14], Icarus appears as a bird-like figure bound to a chair in the left-hand panel, whereas in the right-hand panel he is gone: only the upturned chair and bird mask remain, presumably having been swatted down by the hand of the giant face that hovers outside the window. It is a work that perhaps reflects the artist\u2019s frustration at trying to make a name for himself as a young artist at the time.<\/p>\n A third room was devoted to women artists. Titled, \u201cOld Adam, New Eve,\u201d it contained work by a number of important painters, including Angela Hampel, Nuria Quevedo, and Doris Ziegler. Many of the paintings, such as Ziegler\u2019s Ich bin Du<\/em> (I am You, 1988) [Fig. 15] and Hampel\u2019s Angela und Angelus I-IV <\/em>(1986), were self-portraits. This exhibition marks the first time that so many important female painters were included in a major exhibition of East German art after unification. The room also included alternative artists such as Annemirl Bauer and Gabriele St\u00f6tzer, artists whose work was hardly recognized during the Cold War period.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong>A fourth room, \u201cOutbreak and Disintegration: the 1980s\u201d [Fig. 16], focused on large-scale works of painting and installation created in the final decade of the Cold War, including large, expressionist paintings by Wolfram Adalbert Scheffler [Fig. 16, left] and Cornelia Schleime [Fig. 16, middle].[22]<\/a> As in the room \u201cOld Adam, New Eve,\u201d some of these artists had been exhibited in major exhibitions in East Germany, while others had had a much smaller audience. The exhibition did not distinguish between those artists who were well known and those who were not.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Abschied<\/em> von Ikarus <\/em>successfully expanded the view of East German art to include artwork from both the canon and the alternative scene, two art worlds hitherto generally treated separately in exhibitions.[23]<\/a> Indeed, the inclusion of Socialist Realist, modernist, and alternative art together in one space was the exhibition\u2019s real achievement, offering a never-before-seen breadth of art created in East Germany. Abschied von Ikarus<\/em> therefore contained great potential for offering insight into the complexity of artistic production in East Germany. In many ways the first floor fulfilled this promise in its chronological presentation of Soviet-inspired Socialist Realist works next to the Bauhaus-inspired art at the Weimar Academy and the modernist art and artists\u2014some well-known in official circles, some not\u2014around the Galerie Henning in Halle. These rooms added important new dimensions to the narrative around East German art, especially in the 1950s. The second floor, however, did not; organized thematically, it offered little guidance for how to understand the works in relation to the larger context in which they were created. Instead, the thematic groupings organized the material through a Western\u2014often negative\u2014lens that ultimately distorted the material and impeded understanding. The rooms \u201cMelancholy Antiquity\u201d and \u201cOutbreak and Disintegration: The 1980s,\u201d for example, imposed a negative framework on the works shown as evidenced by the terms melancholy and disintegration.[24]<\/a> \u201cThe Apotheosis of Horror,\u201d on the other hand, framed the works as a spectacle of violence rather than a critique of the Nazi past or imperialist present, as intended by the artists. As such, the title of the room deflected attention away from the idea held by many East German artists\u2014as well as politicans\u2014of \u201cart as a weapon\u201d in the fight against war and fascism.[25]<\/a><\/p>\n The exhibition\u2014and especially the catalogue\u2014privileged a Western perspective in a number of other ways as well, most notably in its underrepresentation of women artists. Although Abschied von Ikarus <\/em>included more women painters from the 1970s and 1980s than many of its predecessor exhibitions in the West, the percentage of women was nonetheless far lower in comparison to the realities of the East German art world. Of ninety-six artists in the exhibition, only nine were women, a ratio of less than one in ten, which erroneously suggests that art is primarily a masculine endeavor. This small proportion stands in sharp contrast to the actual East German art world where, as of the 1980s, women comprised more than 33 percent of the artists in the national Union of Visual Artists and more than 20 percent of artists included in the national art exhibitions in Dresden (Zentrum 12; M\u00fcller, Appendix 1).[26]<\/a>\u00a0Indeed, women had been above 15 percent of the artists included in that exhibition since the 1950s (Eisman, \u201cEconomic\u201d 177). Abschied von Ikarus<\/em>\u2019s low percentage reflected Western expectations for women\u2019s participation more than Eastern reality. Not only did Abschied von Ikarus<\/em> include far fewer women, their art, with only a few exceptions, was confined to just one room\u2014and not one of the larger ones\u2014which effectively ghettoized them within the exhibition. While grouping women together is common in the West, it was virtually unheard of in the East. The suggestion was thus that women\u2019s participation in the East German art world was as low as it was\u2014and continues to be\u2014in the West.[27]<\/a><\/p>\n Another way the exhibition distorted East German art was through an overemphasis on the alternative scene. This appears noticeably in the designation of most of the corner rooms to alternative art and artists, including the Bauhaus in Weimar, Hermann Gl\u00f6ckner, Carlfriedrich Claus, Lutz Dammbeck, and Klaus H\u00e4hner-Springm\u00fchl.[28]<\/a> No official artist received similar treatment. The exhibition thus obscured the difference between well-known works and those that had a limited audience within the GDR. Indeed, it often inverted the two. The result was an exhibition that showed that a lot of art had been created in East Germany and in a wide variety of styles and media, but offered little indication as to which works were important and to whom, be it the official art scene, artistic subgroups, or the curators who had put the exhibition together.[29]<\/a><\/p>\n Another significant distortion was the negative tone of the exhibition, which appeared most prominently in its presentist insistence on the GDR\u2019s failure and, with it, the loss of the utopia East Germany had promised, rather than scholarly engagement with the art and art system in which it was created. The exhibition\u2019s tendentious nature is evident from its title, \u201cFarewell to Icarus,\u201d which refers to a mythological figure who came to symbolize the ideals of the GDR in many artists\u2019 work in the 1970s and 1980s; Icarus also symbolized the artists themselves and the struggles they faced in trying to realize these ideals. To say farewell to Icarus is thus to say goodbye not just to the GDR, but also to its art and artists as well as its hope for a better future. The emphasis on East Germany\u2019s failure also appeared in the first room of the exhibition, which contained a wall text and two paintings, Bernhard Kretzschmar\u2019s Blick auf Eisenh\u00fcttenstadt<\/em> (1955) [Fig. 17] and Wolfgang Mattheuer\u2019s Freundlicher Besuch im Braunkohlenrevier<\/em> (Friendly Visit to the Lignite Region, 1974) [Fig. 18]. Kretzschmar\u2019s early painting captures a high point in East German construction: the completion of an entire city built from scratch, the smoke in the background a sign of productivity rather than pollution. Mattheuer\u2019s painting from nearly twenty years later, in comparison, depicts a landscape of dirt with a power plant in the distance ringed in clouds or smog. The suggestion is that the ideals of the earlier work have resulted in the seemingly destroyed landscape of the latter one. Similarly, both images show figures in the foreground. Yet whereas in Kretzschmar\u2019s paintings, the many tiny people are enjoying a beautiful day\u2014there is a dog on a leash, a couple having a picnic, and many bikes\u2014the latter shows a figure, perhaps heading off to work, while others, their heads concealed in boxes with smiling faces painted on the sides, head the other way. The juxtaposition of these two paintings thus not only suggests that the early hopes and dreams have resulted in environmental degradation but also the need for people in the GDR to mask their true thoughts and feelings. In other words, it suggests that the GDR was doomed to fail, and it is this idea of failure, coming as it does in the very first room, that sets the stage for the rest of the exhibition despite the fact that the artists themselves were unaware of this outcome and were not engaging with it in their work. To emphasize East Germany\u2019s failure thus not only misrepresents the artworks shown, it also subtly undermines their importance since it frames the works as the artistic creations of a failed state. Like the title of the exhibition, this emphasis on failure suggests that these works belong to the \u201cdustbin of history,\u201d a common refrain in what historian Sandrine Kott and others have identified as a totalitarian approach to East German studies, an approach that was prevalent in Germany in the 1990s but has since been widely criticized (Cohen; Kott).[30]<\/a><\/p>\n The negative tone of the exhibition is most explicit, however, in the exhibition\u2019s catalogue. A quick glance at the articles\u2019 titles reveals words and phrases such as impossibility, fatigue, coercion, melancholy, a Pyrrhus victory, dictated standards, ugly, apotheosis of terror, apocalypse and redemption, demise and horror, resistant painting, and escape (Rehberg, et al. 4-5). East Germany is presented as a place whose reality was \u201cinfiltrated\u201d by melancholy, which was perhaps a \u201cpremonition of the failure of the \u2018great Project\u2019\u201d (61). Elsewhere it is compared to George Orwell\u2019s dystopian novel, 1984 <\/em>(51).<\/em> Even when authors acknowledge that some people chose to live in the GDR, the examples suggest it was a bad choice: the journalist Rudolf Herrnstadt\u2014who moved to the East and made his career in the SED but was later forced to resign and was essentially banned to a small town after a clash with Ulbricht\u2014is compared to Helmut Kindler, a journalist who moved to the West and became one of West Germany\u2019s most successful publishers (51-52).<\/p>\n The negative tone also appears in the catalogue\u2019s emphasis on repression, which is particularly evident in how it portrays Hermann Gl\u00f6ckner, a Dresden artist who is best known today for his many Constructivist paintings and sculptures. The catalogue states that Gl\u00f6ckner first \u201cbroke through the cultural political ice\u201d of the art world in 1984 at the age of 95 (160). In this year, he completed a major sculpture in Dresden and received the GDR\u2019s national Art Prize. According to the catalog, this marked the end of a \u201cperiod of [\u2026] official ignorance and humiliating limits\u201d on the artist (160). Not only is the language loaded, but the information is false. Gl\u00f6ckner exhibited work in East and West Germany throughout the 1950s, created numerous works of architectural art through the end of the 1960s, and had his breakthrough in 1969 when he was given a major solo exhibition at the Kupferstichkabinet in Dresden that included more than 150 works. Thereafter, he regularly exhibited work in local and national exhibitions in Dresden and was the focus of numerous articles, several catalogues, and a book. Indeed, the major sculpture mentioned in the catalogue was a multi-year commission given to him in the mid-1970s that cost upwards of 45,000 Marks to create and install (BfaK-D). Yet the Abschied von Ikarus <\/em>exhibition and catalogue maintained the fiction that Gl\u00f6ckner was a repressed artist who received recognition in the GDR only a few years before his death. While Gl\u00f6ckner did not share the level of fame of the Leipzig School of artists, he was a well-known and well-respected artist in East Germany throughout the Honecker era.[31]<\/a> To suggest otherwise is to rewrite East German art along Western expectations of repression. Such rewriting not only distorts the realities of the East German art world, but also deprives artists of their agency and artworks of their meaning. The emphasis throughout the catalogue is thus more on judging East Germany than on understanding the art and the artistic context in which it was created. As historian Andrew Port has noted about some German scholarship on the GDR more generally, the catalogue is an example of \u201chistory as comfort food for those most interested in moralistic posturing\u201d (Port 14). Rather than ask questions that further our understanding of East Germany, the catalogue falls back on banalities: the GDR as a repressive, totalitarian state, as a footnote of history.<\/p>\n When examined within the larger context of East German art\u2019s reception in the West, Abschied von Ikarus<\/em> exemplifies the second of what I have identified as four main approaches to East German art. The first, often found in English-language scholarship but also in the Bilderstreit<\/em> of the long 1990s, is the idea that there was no art in East Germany or, at least, no art of value to the West, be it aesthetically (e.g. kitsch, Auftragskunst<\/em>) or because of the artists\u2019 political beliefs (Staatsk\u00fcnstler<\/em>). The second approach acknowledges that art was created in East Germany, but limits these works to so-called dissident or alternative artists or to those who were oppressed by the system. This can be seen in the Abschied von Ikarus<\/em> exhibition in its overemphasis on the alternative scene, which was highlighted in the corner rooms, and in its rewriting of artists such as Hermann Gl\u00f6ckner. The third approach, which I have not engaged with in this article, acknowledges that even the so-called Staatsk\u00fcnstler<\/em> created art but attempts to separate these artists from the East German state, most often by overemphasizing problems they may have had and ignoring or downplaying any positive connections. This approach can be seen, for example, in the 2005 exhibition, Bernhard Heisig: Wut der Bilder<\/em> (see Eisman, \u201cDenying Difference\u201d). The fourth level is the one I am advocating for here: an engagement with East German art on its own terms. This approach sets aside moral judgments in an attempt to understand the art created\u2014and the artists who created it\u2014in relationship to the East German context in which it was produced. I am arguing, in essence, that art history follow the lead of East German studies more generally and move away from a totalitarian model of engagement in favor of a more nuanced approach (Kott; Port).<\/p>\n Abschied von Ikarus<\/em> was the last major retrospective exhibition of East German art to take place in Germany. Its size and claim to be the final word in the Bilderstreit<\/em> will presumably make it the last for many years to come.[32]<\/a> Problematic as it was, it marks the current state of East German art\u2019s reception in Germany today and shows how the Bilderstreit<\/em> is over not because it has been successfully resolved but rather because time has made East German art less of a threat to the now not-so-newly unified nation. Even an exhibition in a major art museum is not going to lead to a rewriting of the postwar German canon more than twenty years after unification. Similarly, the negative aspects of the exhibition were more subtle than in the 1990s and, more importantly, were most evident in the catalogue, a massive tome that overwhelms with its size and thus ensures that few of the exhibition visitors will do more than flip through it. As for East German scholars who might voice criticisms, they have largely disappeared in the new millennium, be it from exhaustion, resignation, or death.[33]<\/a><\/p>\n For art historians, East Germany offers an unparalleled opportunity to study the impact of politics on art. Until 1945, what would become East Germany and West Germany was the same country with the same (art) history. How art developed thereafter is directly related to the super power in charge and, more specifically, the capitalist or communist ideology applied. Having developed largely outside of a market system, East Germany offers art historians an \u201calternative modernism,\u201d one in which artists did not need to reject the threat of commodity culture as so many artists in the West did. Indeed, a rejection of the commodification of art is partly what spurred the development of conceptual and performance art in the West. As such, East Germany offers an alternative perspective from which to view the development of Western art. In fact, East German art reveals the neoliberal underpinnings of postwar Western art with the latter\u2019s emphasis on the individual, the postmodern play of the signifier, and diversity at the cost of challenging inequality (Michaels). One might even argue that East German art\u2019s focus on the people and on challenging inequality is an old-school correlative to the activist Social Practice artists who have emerged in recent years\u2014artists whose desire for social engagement has been theorized most famously by the French curator and art critic Nicolas Borriaud in his 1998 book, Relational Aesthetics<\/em>.<\/p>\n A nuanced view of East German art can also offer new insights for German Studies scholars. First, art was an important part of East German culture. Like writers, visual artists were expected to play a major role in helping to form the new socialist identity. Initially this meant creating heroic images of workers and communist leaders as alternative role models to help educate the German people after twelve years of Nazi propaganda. Later it meant creating complex works that engaged the audience in discussions with artists and each other about a variety of issues. Like literature, art became an alternative public sphere (Bathrick). As part of the intellectual elite who helped to create the very fabric of the society in which they lived, artists shared many of the same social responsibilities as writers and filmmakers, both of whom are better known in Anglophone scholarship. East German art is thus not only important in its own right but also in terms of comparisons with these other fields. Like literature, art offered opportunities for discussion through its subject matter, but unlike writers, artists needed some level of official recognition for their work to be seen. Large paintings could not be surreptitiously shared or smuggled across the border (Pachnicke and Merkert 7-8). But like writers, artists could work alone and create whatever they wanted, something those in the film industry could not do owing to the greater number of people involved and the larger monetary investment. In addition to differentiating the conditions of creativity among the cultural elites, it would also be valuable to compare the freezes and thaws in cultural policy: did they happen at the same time and to the same extent across the various fields? Anecdotal evidence suggests not. So what can this tell us?<\/p>\n A study of the visual arts is also important because of the crossover that existed between fields. Visual artists were deeply engaged with the literature of their country, and texts by authors from Brecht to Christa Wolf were frequently referred to if not illustrated outright in their work. Indeed, the Leipzig Academy was known for its literary approach to painting, an approach encouraged by the city\u2019s many publishers and book fairs, and many of the artists who studied or taught there also created literary prints throughout their careers. Artists and writers also knew each other and some were friends. Christa Wolf\u2019s circle, for example, included both Nuria Quevedo and Angela Hampel, both of whom created numerous works inspired by her novels. Indeed, there is a tremendous amount to be learned about the literature of East Germany as seen through the eyes of East German artists, and presumably that influence moved in both directions. Moreover, artists and writers also sometimes worked together on projects. In 1975, for example, the Mitteldeutscher Verlag in Halle published a nearly 300-page oversize book titled Chile: Gesang und Bericht <\/em>(Chile: Song and Report). It was created through a joint effort of writers and artists\u2014including Volker Braun and Anna Seghers as well as Heisig, Sitte, and T\u00fcbke\u2014in response to the 1973 putsch in Chile. There was also crossover between the visual arts and film. The filmmaker J\u00fcrgen B\u00f6ttcher, for example, worked early on as a painter in Dresden under the name Strawalde. There were also many artists who engaged with the Super-8 film medium in the 1980s. To what extent were these latter artists informed by or perhaps even informing DEFA filmmakers?<\/p>\nArt in East Germany<\/strong><\/h5>\n
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\nThe Bilderstreit<\/em> and the Staatsk\u00fcnstler<\/em> Label<\/strong><\/h5>\n
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\nThe Quiet Rewriting of East German Art<\/strong><\/h5>\n
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\nAbschied von Ikarus<\/em><\/strong>, 2012-13 <\/strong><\/h5>\n
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\nConclusion<\/strong><\/h5>\n