Paintings, East German-style: 30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Düsseldorf Kunstpalast museum showcases art from Germany's formerly Communist east. It's not all conform with the authorities' tastes.
Image: Wolfgang Mattheuer/VG Bild-Kunst Bonn, 2019/bpk/Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden
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Works from the 'Utopia and Demise: Art in East Germany' exhibition
Thirty years after the fall oft he Berlin Wall, a museum in the western German city Düsseldorf presents East German art. The idea is to overcome old prejudices.
Image: Bernhard Heisig/VG Bild- Kunst Bonn, 2019/bpk/Museum der bildenden Künste, Leipzig
Wolfgang Mattheuer: 'The Flight of Sisyphos' (1972)
Wolfgang Mattheuer was one of East Germany's most famous artists. His New Objectivity paintings were charged with symbolism, and also shown outside the GDR, including at the West German international art show Documenta, as well as at the Venice Biennale. Mattheuer's figures, landscapes and scenes drawn from classical mythology are open to interpretation. What is his Sisyphus fleeing from?
Image: Wolfgang Mattheuer/VG Bild-Kunst Bonn, 2019/bpk/Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden
Carlfriedrich Claus: 'Beginning of a letter to Prof. Will Grohmann' (1963)
Carlfriedrich Claus (1930-1998) came from a family of book and art dealers. Perhaps that's why, at an early age, he became interested in language and writing. From the 1950s onwards, he experimented with "sound processes" on tape and designed complex writing and sign scapes on handwritten "language sheets" like the above letter to Prof. Will Grohmann.
Gerhard Altenbourg, whose real name was Gerhard Ströch (1926-1989), created surreal, poetic works that sold well. Forced to abandon his art studies in Weimar because of the alleged "amorality of his choice of motif," he worked as a freelancer and called himself Altenbourg after his hometown Altenburg in Thuringia. His "Ecce Homo" is up to his neck in water.
Image: Gerhard Altenbourg/VG Bild-Kunst Bonn, 2019/PUNCTUM/Bertram Kober
Hermann Glöckner: 'Black and White on Blue' (1957)
For decades this artist was only known to few art lovers — until a solo exhibition at the Dresden Kupferstichkabinett in 1969 made Hermann Glöckner (1889-1987) famous even beyond East Germany. The Nazis hadn't enjoyed his abstract style of painting, and East German leaders, too, criticized his informal artworks that did not come close to Socialist Realism.
Image: Hermann Glöckner/VG Bild-Kunst Bonn, 2019/Herbert Boswank
Cornelia Schleime: Untitled (1986)
Cornelia Schleime (born 1953) is one of the youngest artists on show in Düsseldorf. After completing an apprenticeship as a hairdresser and studying to become a make-up artist, she studied graphics and painting in Dresden. She graduated but was banned from exhibiting — GDR culture bureaucrats disliked her concept of art, which included not only photographs but performances, films and punk music.
Image: Cornelia Schleim
A.R. Penck: 'The Crossing' (1963)
A stick figure balances across a narrow, burning bridge — East German leaders saw A.R. Penck's (1939-2017) painting as critical of life in the GDR and slammed the artist with an exhibition ban. Previously, Penck, whose real name was Ralf Winkler, had already been denied the right to study art. In 1980, the GDR expelled the undesirable artist. His second career began in the West.
Willi Sitte: 'After the Shift in the Salt Mine' (1982)
Willi Sitte (1921-2013) was a painter and an influential official. In 1963, he became politically active in the Socialist Unity Party (SED). His early works may have been inspired by Picasso, but from then on, the "Socialist human being" was at the center of his expressive paintings. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Sitte faced accusations that he had worked for the GDR's Stasi secret police.
Werner Tübke: 'Portrait of a Sicilian Landowner with Marionettes' (1972)
Werner Tübke (1929-2004) was also regarded as an artist close to the East German regime. After his participation in the 1977 Documenta show in the West German city of Kassel — along with fellow GDR artists Willi Sitte, Wolfgang Mattheuer and Bernhard Heisig — he became one of the East German artists most frequently exhibited in the West.
Image: Werner Tübke/VG Bild-Kunst Bonn, 2019/bpk/Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden
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With the exhibition "Utopia and Demise: Art in the GDR," the Düsseldorf Kunstpalast museum gives an overview of art in Communist East Germany from the post-war years to the fall of the Berlin Wall. The show focuses on painting, which was the country's most important medium for visual artists.
About 130 paintings and paper works by 13 painters are on show. They were created by different generations of painters who cultivated different styles, each with their own artistic positions. Not all of them were known beyond the GDR borders.
Variety in East German art
There is much to discover in the exhibition, and that is intentional, says curator Steffen Krautzig. "We want to look at the works of art, at their diversity — and that existed in the GDR, too," he told DW.
The choice of artists, Krautzig says, makes clear that "the to this day stereotypical juxtaposition of free abstraction in the West and ideologically charged realism in the East must be questioned."
The art business was divided into those who were privileged and those who were bullied. Willi Sitte, who headed the GDR Artists' Association, publicly declared his support for the system. "But many artists undermined this idea and sought alternatives to the state cultural system," Krautzig says, adding that he does not want the exhibition to get mired in the old controversy over "GDR state art."
Life in the GDR
"It is high time that a large art venue in western Germany finally shows and explains the often hidden scene in former East Germany," says Kunstpalast general director Felix Krämer.
In the west, interest in GDR art works has so far been "rather marginal," he argues, adding that young people today know very little even about East German history. All the more important, says Krämer, that President Frank-Walter Steinmeier has taken on patronage of the art show.
The exhibition "Utopia and Demise: Art in the GDR" runs from September 5, 2019, through January 19, 2020 at the Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf.
