Art of Two Germanys/Cold War Cultures

BCAM, Los Angeles, USA

When I recently visited the Los Angles County Museum of Art’s new annex, the Renzo Piano-designed Broad Contemporary Art Museum, to see ‘Art of Two Germanys/Cold War Cultures’, an immense rainbow arched over the green expanse of the Hollywood Hills. If it seemed a bit jarring to turn from the pale letters of the Hollywood sign to a historical exhibition examining more than four decades of parallel yet wildly divergent art-making in West and East Germany, that incongruity was somewhat mitigated by the fact that LA’s own cultural history has been formed by the many German and Austrian WWII exiles that fled here in the ’30s and ’40s - among them Thomas Mann, Bertholt Brecht, Billy Wilder and Theodor Adorno. (This was likely very much in the mind of LACMA’s Stephanie Barron - co-curator here with Eckhart Gillen of Kulturprojekte Berlin GmbH - as she staged two celebrated German shows at the LA institution in the ’90s: ‘Degenerate Art: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany’ and ‘Exiles and Emigrés: The Flight of European Artists from Hitler’ in 1997.) Indeed, Adorno’s over-employed maxim, that poetry was impossible after Auschwitz, seems an insistent touchstone for an exhibition that traces how German artists from both sides of the wall struggled to make art in the wake of the Holocaust, and the waves of damaging political developments - including the partition of their country - that followed it.

With some 300 works - paintings, photographs, sculptures, installations and videos - by 120 artists, the exhibition explores how Cold War-era politics framed - while not always defined - art-making in Germany between the end of WWII and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Yes, modernist abstraction dominated West Germany at the same time that a static socialist realism became the state-sanctioned East German artistic mode, but within those structures there was more ebb and flow, more overlap and conversation, than one may think.  Artistic experimentation was not relegated to the West (see Hermann Glöckner’s inspired objects made in the GDR from the ’50s on), while aesthetic stasis and questionable political motive did not wholly reside in the East (note the sometimes limp abstraction in the West, not to mention an uncomfortable overload of Beuys’ übermensch-healer theatrics). But beyond those welcome (if expected) revelations is a larger one that the exhibition slowly, carefully reveals: how East and West, over the course of nearly half a century, attempted to come to terms with their appalling history through their visual art.

‘Art of Two Germanys’ opens with a small, dark gallery of works from 1945 to 1949. The styles are disparate (Surrealism, Cubism, Expressionism, sober photojournalism) but the tone - one of mute, immutable destruction - is not.  Images of dancing skeletons, dead birds and twisted hands repeat across the walls like refrains. Ruined buildings, their gaping facades like so many skulls, are depicted in photographs of Dresden by Richard Peter Sr., a drawing on a door by Werner Heldt and a haunting collage by Juro Kubicek, with its torn pieces of paper floating down on a bombed-out building like ash. Hannah Höch contributes not a witty collage but a folksy, Expressionistic figurative painting, Mourning Women (1945), its taut female faces recalling nothing so much as Käthe Kollwitz’s own wrenching self-portraits, made in despair over the son lost in WWI.

From such multivalent and horrific beginnings, the show moves through the ’50s, an era dominated by socialist realism in the East, which readily delineates its limits in forgettable paintings of industrious workers, triumphant building projects and noble comrades. The work from the West is more varied: from Scheeler-like Precisionism to torpid abstraction to a verdant Expressionist figuration reminiscent of Alice Neel. But two early A. R. Penck paintings, made in the East, are the most experimental works in the room, preparing the viewer for his unflaggingly central role in the exhibition, and in modern German art history as a whole. Nevertheless, despite Penck’s talent, walking into the next gallery, devoted to the art of the ‘60s and the ‘70s, is like walking into another century.

In 1961, the Berlin Wall was erected and Adolf Eichmann went on trial, while the German art world became at once more politicized and emboldened with artistic experiment from international movements such as Fluxus and Minimalism. Artists like Gerhard Richter and Georg Baselitz (whose early paintings suggest that he gained much from his later decision to turn them upside down) trade abstraction for a more politically loaded figuration (as in Richter’s blurry portrait of his smiling Uncle Rudi in Nazi uniform), while Blinky Palermo, Eva Hesse and artists from the Zero Group begin working in a pared-down yet sensual Minimalism that seems light years ahead of the comrades rolling up their sleeves next door. Günther Uecker’s domestic objects - a television, a chair, a yellow triangle - studded with nails, which trail the works like demented shadows, are a revelation; Nam June Paik’s work nearby looks fairly conventional in comparison. It was a little discomforting to suddenly arrive at works such as Dieter Roth’s wonderful chocolate lions (whose aroma permeated the gallery) and sausages wrought from books he hated (an unloved Martin Walser novel) after the political intensity of the work that came before. But this levity is short-lived: Sigmar Polke’s large installations critiquing West Germany’s ‘economic miracle’ are pointed, while Wolf Vostell’s Pop-inflected Coca-Cola collage and ‘lipstick bombers’ disturb in a way that American Pop cannot.

Beuys’ decisive tenure in Düsseldorf began about this time, and performance photos show him being attacked by an audience member on the 20th anniversary of a failed assassination attempt of Hitler; hung nearby a Jörg Immendorf painting declaims ‘Beuysland’ under the man himself adorned in his famed fishing vest. While Beuys’ felt suit and sleds are now so familiar as to be opaque, and his familiar striding figure in a human-sized photograph feels too militaristic and authoritarian by far, the artist is also represented by a vitrine of rubbish swept up on May Day, 1972. The crumpled newspapers, plastic cups and cans, all set behind glass, are politically resonant in a way that the artist’s more celebrated works - and their self-mythologizing stance - cannot reach in the larger political context of this exhibition. But less vaunted works impressed even more: Herman Glöckner’s folded paper and tempera pieces, with their vague allusions to flags and alpine vistas, dissolve the nationalist tendencies of both motifs in a studied and defiant abstraction, while Penck’s moving ‘Standart’ models - using bottles, a rolled manuscript, and cardboard - are both cryptic and inexplicably affecting.

As ‘Art of Two Germanys’ turns to the late ’70s and ’80s, the work gets even more pointedly political. Swastikas, homages to Nazi victims and fallen activists, explorations of the Red Army Faction and images of Ronald Reagan abound. Photography gains ground, revealing - in the deliberate work of Thomas Ruff, Candida Höfer and Thomas Struth - the inescapable influence of the Bernd and Hilla Becher, who are also on view here. While Höfer and Olaf Metzel detailed growing anti-Turkish sentiment and latent anti-Semitism, East German photographers like Ulrich Wüst and Helga Paris chronicled the stagnant streets and complicated citizens of the GDR. The Autoperforationists, a Dresden-based group of artists, offer some of the most intriguing work on view: a series of photographs and videos of their food and cage-festooned performances (by the likes of Via Lewandowsky and the celebrated East German poet Durs Grünbein). Against the surprise of such work, the last room is a little more familiar, and its choices seem crucial if customary symbols of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Richter’s magisterial November (1989) shares space with a Rosemarie Trockel hammer-and-sickle motif and Iza Genzken’s 1988 ‘door’ made of heavy rocks. But an inscrutable Martin Kippenberger painting, though made a few years earlier, evoked the most: titled Martin Peeks Through the Keyhole (1983), it functioned less as a door closing on Germany’s Cold War era, but more as a hint of a new, unfathomable world to come.

Quinn Latimer

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