Barbara Frey
A Regional study of Europe
December 14, 2009
Expressionism and the Influences, Evolution and Restrictions on German Art in the 20th Century
ABSTRACT
“Modern & Postmodern German art is more often than not identified with one single artistic style – namely, expressionism in its various incarnations.”
Stated by one of the organizers of the exhibition: “Art of Two Germanys/Cold War Cultures” shown in Los Angeles, Nuremberg and Berlin, in which the exhibition attempts to examine German art’s survival and progress after World War II. The exhibition and its examination of the art of Germany during the Cold War provides a unique opportunity in art history to explore what happens in a country with an emerging and powerful nationalistic art identity when it is ruptured by war and split into two distinct ideological zones? Rarely has the subject been as clearly defined in a culture as rich and powerful as Germany. Through an amazingly thorough investigation, the organizers are able to classify the influences of the totalitarian Eastern Bloc and the market-oriented Western world as well as the country’s traumatic past to determine that of the many art capabilities available to artists, the Expressionist roots do remain in German art.
Berlin. Late nineteenth century. A hub of activity. The very center of German art. A time of relative peace in which the focus of artistic interest was the glorification of the Kaiser. (Wolf 7). A time when subject matter needed no more substance than history and genre painting. Across the border in France, of course, there were much more interesting things going on. Impressionism was firmly rooted in the art circles, though officially denounced and rejected by the Academy in Paris. It was influencing and drawing artists from all directions to study form, color, subjects and light. Pure subjectivism was the order of the day in the French capital. German artists, however, still seemed content to paint bucolic scenes of aristocrats and florals. All that changed around the turn of the century when German artists became aware of the latest art style from France: Post- Impressionism. While the Germans did not seem to have much interest in Impressionism, Post-impressionism did resonate an attraction to the “characteristically German romantic attitude towards nature (Wolf 12). Paul Gauguin, Vincent Van Gogh, and Paul Cezanne’s bold colors and shapes awakened Berlin’s artists ultimately engendering a style, Expressionism, which German artists have been attached to ever since. Defined, Expressionism is an “artistic style in which the artist seeks to depict not objective reality but rather the subjective emotions and responses that objects and events arouse within a person. The artist accomplishes this aim through distortion, exaggeration, primitivism, and fantasy and through the vivid, jarring, violent, or dynamic application of formal elements. Its qualities of highly subjective, personal, spontaneous self-expression are typical of a wide range of modern artists and art movements. Expressionism can also be seen as a permanent tendency in Germanic and Nordic art from at least the European Middle Ages, particularly in times of social change or spiritual crisis, and in this sense it forms the converse of the rationalist and classicizing tendencies of Italy and later of France.” (Brittanica.com) Expressionism developed under a series of transitory “Secessions,” organized groups of artists in Dresden, Munich, Berlin, and Vienna. Those groups and its influential drivers into which many of the artists of the Expressionist movement were known to have spent time developing their own emblematic styles and currencies became the incubators of a lasting international style of art.
One of the more prominent Expressionist groups was DIE BRÜCKE formed in 1905 in Dresden. A group of four architects, “The Bridge” group drawn to images from Cranach, Rembrandt, Dürer, along with those of Palau islanders, Gauguin, Matisse. Interested in form and color, the Brücke artists favored the woodcut for its “strength of contrast and an uncompromising emphasis on plane and line.” They took the simple woodcut to “to its highest degree of artistic justification.” (Wolf 26-27). Emil Nolde and Ludwig Kirchner were two of its leading proponents.
An article in a recent issue of Art in America, entitled: “How German Is It?” was about an exhibition at the Los Angeles Contemporary Museum of Art in which the curators positioned the art of East and West Germany during the Cold War period. The primary questions asked by the organizers for the co-existence of the works were: what are the differences in the art created by those in the German Democratic Republic, GDR, better known as East Germany and those in the Federal Republic of Germany, FRG, better known as West Germany. What constraints did the artists work under given their open environment (the West) or totalitarian environment (the East). Did the artists of each side engage with each other? Did the artists produce works that utilized or recognized the situation their country was in and had recently been in? How did the predominant style of Expressionism evolve among the artists of both sides and was it embraced and continued or was it abandoned? Because the natural evolution of expressionism was broken during the Nazi regime, when modern art was labeled ‘degenerate,’ did expressionism pick up and carry on after the Nazis had left? “Importantly, this dominant model of German art based on expressionism has been such a powerful and successful concept largely because of its suppression and ridicule under the Nazi regime. (Barron 35). Modern art and especially for Germany, Expressionism was celebrated in US and internationally partly because of the Nazi ridicule.
Expressionism, by the mid twentieth century was connected to German national identity and political context. How art should intersect with social and political contexts after the Third Reich’s aestheticization of politics by way of socialist realism? (Barron 35).
Does the state have an overt influence over the artist’s communications beyond that which the artist would want to portray independent of the state’s influence?
These and many other intricate questions abound in the exhibition and its catalogue.
I do not expect to reach an absolute conclusion on any of these answers because a complete, global and historical analysis is far beyond the scope of this essay, I will attempt to analyze the subject with a few examples of art and artists of the period in both East and West Germany.
The exhibition integrated the works of the artists of both sides of the Berlin Wall, the East “with their pointed utopian slant and compares them with those of the West with their “consciousness-raising and social rehabilitation” (AiA 163).
The first section of the exhibition, “1945-49: Mourning, Melancholy, and the Search for National Identity,” predictably portrays the early East German painting, film footage and photography focuses on grim imagery approved by the Nazi regime.
Herbert List Plaster Casts in the Academy, 1946
Lea Grundig Never Again!, 1946
Wilhelm Rudolph Dresden Destroyed, 1945-46
The second section of the exhibition, “1950s: National Aesthetics Defined by the Cold War,” where West German artists were emulating the popular abstract art of the rest of Europe and the U.S. with “no overt socio-political referents.” (AiA 163) contrasts with the GDR reconstruction, utopian reincarnation.
Heinz Löffler Construction of the Stalinallee, 1953
East German Socialist Realism
“Already split along multiple political and aesthetic lines during the Weimar Republic, German art bifurcated after the war into largely separate trajectories once the Iron Curtain descended over Europe.’ (Barron 226).
In an attempt to transfer Stalinist art programs to the newly occupied East German frontier, Soviet cultural ministers “prescribed an aesthetic of easily legible, photo-naturalistic realism” also known as Social Realism, the so called “art of the people combined accessible imagery with clear, didactic themes readily understood by the masses.” This art, they claimed was superior to the “bourgeois” art of the west, which was “unintelligible to those outside the cultural elite.”(Barron 105). The Russians had a long history with Socialist realism in their own country and were determined to transfer its successes to all of its Eastern Bloc nations. They did, however grant the East Germans the freedom to use the concepts of socialist realism within its own vernacular and did not interfere too much with its execution, although self-censorship and the watching eyes of the cultural apparatus were always present.
Otto Nagel Young Bricklayer, 1953
Section 3: “1960s and 1970s: Working through and Acting Out,” “German art was shown to slowly open to self-reflection and historical reckoning” (AiA 166).
On the Eastern side, A.R. Penck “tried to overcome Germany’s painful schisms by using archetypal pictorial forms to develop a modern universal graphic language by using matchstick figures (Barron 331), while his counterpart, Robert Rehfeldt “made pointed critiques of Eastern European Communism though collaged postcards that he sent out by mail. With this strategy, Rehfeldt assumed the role of the media by using the postal system to disseminate political dissent. His postcard collages were part of an Eastern Bloc mail-art network though which many artists critiqued Communism by manipulating its existing information systems. (Barron 331).
A.R. Penck Le Passage, 1963
“A few German artists took up the real history of the Holocaust and its effects. They lifted the prevailing prohibition of Nazi imagery that had dominated high culture. It was as if long-forgotten or repressed memory images returned, often in highly stylized form in the paintings of Georg Baselitz, Anselm Kiefer and Gerhardt Richter in the FRG.” (Barron 232). The artists of the GDR were as profoundly impacted by the earlier German Expressionists art as were their West German counterparts. They too were experiencing and coming to terms with the recent past, the air bombing of their cities, the Holocaust, the victimization of themselves and others while trying to visually depict the world in which they currently lived. It was as if the German psyche continued while ruptured. Those in the east continuing with the figurative and realist imagery as a modernist-expressionist form, perhaps clinging to the avant-garde and Weimar intellectual histories, juxtaposed with the “writings of Georg Lukacs, a Marxist philosopher, whose authority determined the doctrine of socialist realism in the postwar GDR until the mid-1950s.” (Barron 233).
Georg Baselitz Picture of the Fathers, 1965
Anselm Kiefer, Germany's Spiritual Heroes (Deutschlands Geisteshelden ), 1973
In the GDR artists were facing their gruesome collective and personal histories prominently with painting. Werner Tübke’s Reminiscenses of Schultze, illustrating the Nazi trials and Bernhard Heisig, a former SS Soldier who depicts the war in the city of Oder confront their own personal histories and depict them on canvas. These artists and others “shied away from any outright critique of their own dictatorship . . . and yet in their work there slowly emerges spaces of political criticism clawed out from under the pressure of censorship and enforced self-criticism.” (Barron 234-35).
Sigmar Polke and two fellow students, Gerhard Richter and Konrad Fischer-Leug, formed a movement of artistic style called "Capitalism Realism," a term they used ironically to refer to the modern art of the West which, in the 1970s and 1980s was undergoing huge sales in galleries and auction houses. “Polke repeatedly painted pictures that take up previous art works. His treatment of Dürer's famous hare is particularly brash and uninhibited. This hare has been looked upon as the quintessence of German art” (Answers.com).
The Final section of the exhibit, entitled, “1980s: Blurring Boundaries and the Waning of the Cold War,” in which artists were finally facing history on both sides of the wall. Young German artists’ attitudes confronted the past and the present in daring, sardonic, and sarcastic ways that were more reflective of the Expressionist ancestors than of the more recent artists who had lived through the war or its more recent aftermath. “On September 1, 1989, the fiftieth anniversary of the German invasion of Poland that began WWII, Raffael Rheinsherf took the work boots and gloves of forced laborers, which he had found on the grounds of a freight depot and spread them out in the Langemarckhalle of the Olympic stadium.” (Barron 286).
Raffael Rheinsherf Hand und Fuß, 1989
In East Berlin, the Neo-Expressionist imagery of artists like Trak Wendisch illustrated their isolation and plight in paintings like Berlin, Berlin III, which shows a young couple as tightrope walkers above the city, with the wall in the painting below the couple.
Trak Wendisch Berlin, Berlin III, 1990
Still, Worlds Apart
Among the many incidents of separation and contrasts between the two sides, throughout the cold war era is this: “In 1955 West Berlin founded its own Academy of Art in response to the one opened in East Berlin in 1950; it was intended as the beacon for the free arts of a free world. In 1957, for example, the academy in West Berlin exhibited the work of modern architect Le Corbusier, while its East Berlin counterpart showed the “realist” Otto Dix. Also, in 1992, when it became known that eighteen prominent West German artists had resigned from the West Berlin academy in protest of the planned wholesale admission of their colleagues from the academy in the East, it was seen as a belated reflex of this Cold War between abstract and realist artists after 1945.” (Barron 279-80). Quoting the source of this occurrence in the book, “It is as if the more than forty-year-old bitter feud between the abstract and representational artists continues.” (Barron 282).
Otto Dix Portrait of the Journalist Sylvia von Harden, 1926
Revisiting Expressionism
Otto Dix Wounded Soldier, 1924
Bernhard Heisig Excavated Air-Raid Shelter, 1965
Of course, this essay barely scratches the surface of such a complex and many decades long period of art history. The catalogue text of the exhibition, Art of Two Germanys, Cold War Culture, a full 460 page hardcover text delves much deeper into the subject with numerous learned authors’ essays that describe the years, the artists, the emotive forces behind the art produced during this tragic and incredibly creative era. Suffice it to say, among the many styles and modes of art, not relegated to and not limiting to, but certainly available to German artists during the Cold War and up to today, there appears to be a familiar strain running through the undercurrent of German artists that is willing to return to a distinctly German style: Expressionism.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
1. Wolf-Dieter Dübe. The Expressionists. London: Thames and Hudson, 1972.
2. Barron, Stephanie and Eckmann, Sabine. Art of Two Germanys, Cold War Cultures. Los Angeles: Harry N. Abrams, 2009
3. Duncan, Michael. “How German Is It?”. Art in America July 2009: 160-169.
4. http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/198740/Expressionism.
5. http://www.answers.com/topic/sigmar-polke.
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Self-Portrait with Model”, 1910
