German Art after 1945

In this talk I will not attempt to show a comprehensive history since German art has experienced the same pluralism that has exploded neat categorisations throughout the Western world in the past 60 years.  Instead I will try to map out some of the most influential features specific to German art in this period through the work of a few exemplary artists.  

The war years were a period of severe isolation for German artists.  The policies of the Third Reich ensured that there was no avant-garde art allowed on public display and international exchanges were cut off from the mid thirties till well beyond1945.  This paper looks at the way some artists attempted to retrace a path to Germany's pre-war avant-garde while others attempted to reconnect with the European mainstream and then chart the emergence of others who confront the trauma of the holocaust itself. 

 Before the war there were three main movements that may be seen as the starting point for the post war generation.  These were German Expressionism, Dada and the Abstract legacy of the Bauhaus.  The Utopian aspirations of The Bauhaus had been based on a spirit of modernist experimentation that had been severely damaged by the two world wars.  Neue Sachlichkeit was a form of political realism evolved out of Expressionism exemplified by Otto Dix, Christian Schad and George Grosz. The Dada artists Hannah Hoch, John Heartfield and Raoul Hausmann were also political realists in their way making searing political commentaries in their multi media works.  On occasions there had been a joining of forces in Neue Sachlichkeit as for example Grosz and Heartfield collaborated on photomontages after the First World War.

Karl Schmidt-Rottluff Woman and girl 1920
Emil Nolde In the caf� 1911
Otto Dix Three women 1926
Otto Dix The odd couple 1925

It would be possible to simply trace reconnections with these historical strands and for some of the artists such as Georg Baselitz that is largely what happened.  For many others however the trauma of defeat and the revelation of the horror of the Holocaust became a crucial content for the new art that emerged.  In considering this effect I will concentrate on Joseph Beuys who nearly died in action, suffered mental collapse and re-emerged as a charismatic leader during the 1960s and 1970s.  His students at Dusseldorf Akademie dominated European art of the 1980s and 1990s.  They were born during or at the end of the war and grew up with the dilemmas of living with unbearably painful memory and the present danger of amnesia.

In the immediate post war years however the USA dominated international cultural exchange obscuring the first glimmerings of European cultural reconstruction.  Germany was particularly affected because of their long isolation.  Most of their major private collections such as the Ludwig, Str�her and Marc which were to become the basis of the new contemporary Museums were founded on American Abstract Expressionism and followed on with Hard-edge abstraction, Pop art and Minimalism some of which you will have seen in this series over the last few weeks.  Many artists emulated this overwhelming influence while others made a point of resistance to it.  There was little recognition for any of this activity however until the sixties. 

GEORG BASELITZ to Neue Wilden

Georg Baselitz MMM in G and A  1961-1966 and The great friends 1965

Baselitz was born in East Germany but came to West Berlin to study at the Berlin College for Visual Arts in 1957. Among his peers were important artists like Hodicke and Koberling although it was Baselitz that was to become the most influential figure outside Germany. 

In 1958 the college hosted two influential exhibitions Jackson Pollock and New American Painting.  These were to have a big impact on the expressionism that this young generation were trying to recover.  It is possible to recognise a replay of German expressionists such as Kirchner, Nolde, Beckmann and Pechstein through the transforming filter of Pollock, Franz Klein and Arshile Gorky in these works. In the early years these new figurative expressionists were against the grain of popular opinion that had become comfortable with politically neutral abstract art.  They struggled on keeping an underground group alive.  This kind of struggle does wonders for feelings of solidarity in adversity and creates just the right amount of angst to give the work its edge.

Baselitz and Schonebeck were active in this underground producing angry manifestos such as Pandemonium. 

" Negation is a gesture of genius, not a wellspring of responsibility�. with solemn obsessiveness, autocratic elegance, with warm hands, pointed fingers, rhythmic love, radical gestures - we want to excavate ourselves, abandon ourselves irrevocably- as we have no questions, as we look at each other, as we embrace - as we�.carry our colour ordeal over into life, �what our sacrifice is, In happy desperation, with inflamed senses, undilgent love, gilded flesh: vulgar nature, violence, reality, fruitless�. I am on the moon as others are on the balcony.  Life will go on. All writing is crap!"

The Great friends was a clear attempt at political protest in the tradition of Neue Sachlichkeit with the fracturing of the figure representing a shattered society but increasingly the images become more personal and abstract.  In the later paintings he insists on the materiality of the medium and the mark even taking up the habit of inverting the fractured figures to make their content even less accessible.

Georg Baselitz Die Striefen - Der Maler in mantel - Zweites frakturbild 1966 and B for Larry1967
Georg Baselitz Church song 1987 and Madchen Kommt Carl Frederick1987

These later paintings came after the revival of figurative expressionism that swept the Western world in the early 1980s.  The New Spirit in painting exhibition at London's Royal Academy 1981 and Zeitgeist in Berlin 1982 and Sydney Biennale also in 1982 were part of a major curatorial response to the market's growing exhaustion with the derivatives of Minimalism and Pop art. This was not primarily a new movement but a disinterring of artists who had always been working this way, Auerbach and Freud in the UK for example.  There was a response from hungry young artists but in most cases it has been the older artists who have stayed the course.  Rainer Fetting was one of the most successful newcomers who were collectively dubbed Neue wilden his style reached back almost seamlessly to artists like Schmidt-Rottluff.

Rainer Fetting Self portrait with Yellow hat  1982 and Vangogh and mauer1978

Georg Jiri Dokoupil was swept up in the marketing of this new figuration although his background was somewhat different.  He escaped with his family from Czechoslovakia to Frankfurt in 1968 and then studied in New York with Hans Haake and Joseph Kosuth before returning to work in Koln.  Haake is a political conceptualist in the tradition of Dada while Kosuth was the founder of conceptual art in America.  Expressionism here then is heavily mediated by irony and a critical exploration of the meaning of expressionist style. 

Georg Jiri Dokoupil Nose Bleeding 1984 and Candle drawing c.1990
Walther Dahn  Untitled 1988 and studio installation 1991

Dokoupil joined Walther Dahn and Peter Bommels to form the Mulheimer Freiheit group in Koln in the 1980s they were a disparate group but Dahn like Dokoupil was more conceptual in his orientation.  He had been a student of Beuys in Dusseldorf and expected a bit more from his art than self-expression.  His work was always based on process including the use of the photograph.  When we look at the other students of Beuys later the importance of this photographic base will become more apparent.

GERHARD RICHTER
Many of the artists to come from Eastern Germany brought a more critical attitude to the Zeitgeist and to the uncritical consumerism of the West. The most important of these was Gerhard Richter. 

Gerhard Richter Verwaltungsgebaude 1964 and Uncle Rudi  1965

Richter's early paintings gave Pop Art a political edge.  His subject matter was often based on news print photographs mimicking the blurring of surveillance images taken from a moving car.  Richter�s origins in Eastern Germany gave this quality a more personal resonance. His painting�s relationship to photography has remained constant even though his subject matter has varied from landscape, to historical paintings, to apparently minimalist abstraction.  It is not the accuracy of the image that interests him but on the contrary the potential for blurring, loss of focus and definition that it produces.

Gerhard Richter Two candles 1982 and Arnold 1982
Gerhard Richter Venice 1985 and Claudius 1986

In his installation Atlas at DIA in New York and later at Documenta 1997 Richter displayed a vast array of small photos taken as if for a sketchbook.  These included hundreds of images of textures, clouds, seas, tiles, brickwork, trees, and so on.  These were sometimes painted over, sometimes re-photographed so that the layering of photograph and paint became inextricably conflated.  The textures and colours of the worked photos bore a striking resemblance to the repertoire of marks and colours of Richter�s abstract paintings. 

Gerhard Richter Abstract painting (812)  1994 and Emma 1992  Coll AGNSW
Gerhard Richter Abstract 1987 and Abstract 1988

His paintings of murders and the dead including the Bader Meinhoff group taken from published photographs remained disturbing for Germans twenty years after the terrorists were killed.  Memorialising them was particularly sensitive because so many young Germans sympathised with their political criticism of complacent materialism even if they were shocked by their methods.  These paintings ended up in the museum of modern art NY rather than MMK Frankfurt where they really belonged for this reason.

Gerhard Richter Gegenuberstellung 1988 and Sugendbildnis 1988
Gerhard Richter Dead 1988 and Erschossener 2  1988

BEUYS
The cathartic aspect of German art has dominated the post war years.  Beuys is the key to it since he lived through the war and in a way his life provides a vivid picture of the German trauma and his working through of this paved the way for those who came after.  A remarkable number of the following artists claim Beuys as their mentor. 

Joseph Beuys How to explain pictures to a dead hare 1965and Celtic 1970
Joseph Beuys Mainstream land down under 1965 x 2

TRAUMA
In the 1930s Beuys� adolescent life was swept up in the trauma of the Second World War that was to deeply affect his later art.  Beuys himself felt the energy and excitement of the new order and went on the infamous Sternmarsch to Nuremberg. There was a book burning at his school where Beuys rescued some listed books from the fire.  By a curious coincidence one of these was the classical biological text Systema naturae by Linnaeus.  Beuys had a passion for the biological sciences that was reflected in his continuing deep concern for the environment.

In 1940 he was called up and served in the Luftwaffe.  His war was shattering and complex.  He was injured five times and ended the war in a British prison camp but his most extreme experience was the celebrated crash in the Crimean winter.  He experienced near death in the Crimea being resuscitated by Tartar nomads using fat and felt -(animal materials providing heat and insulation)�This is the story that gives rise to him claiming the role of Shaman.  

Then there is the political and historical trauma of the Holocaust.  On his return from the war he realises the horrors perpetrated by the German people and faces up to his personal part in it.

Between 1949 and 1958 Beuys experienced serious mental illness.  This time was like a descent into the abyss where he struggled with himself and his demons.  During this illness he evolved a theory of sculpture as an extension of bodily processes and warmth.  Art became for him a matter of healing.  Not only of the individual body but also of society.

He described his visits to a farmyard during his convalescence when he had sheltered in a cow barn.  The smell of straw, manure, milk, cow�s breath and the animals� body warmth gave him back a sense of connection with nature.   It was during this time that he began to associate the disasters of modern society with a rupture between nature and culture and to identify this with an antediluvian harmony between prehistoric man and nature presided over by the Goddess.  His enactments of childhood games can be seen as a part of his deeper concern to build a bridge between culture and the maternal earth from which it evolves.

Joseph Beuys Queen Bee 1952 x 2

His theory of sculpture involved a use of material based not on rational materialism but going back to the root of Material in �mater� the mother.  This is the substance of evolution where form arises from the earth through biological processes.  His drawings in the late 40s and early fifties reflect this obsession with animals and with the Earth Mother. 

Some of his earliest sculptures were also made during this period.  In particular Queen Bee 1952, a group of wax sculptures that make the connection between Venus, bees, wax and healing.  The queen bee not only symbolises Venus and the earlier cult of Astarte but also holds more mundane evidence of the body as a productive site.  Out of their bodies the bees create materials, wax and honey and fabricate immaculate architecture.  Nature in this case produces culture, thereby epitomising Beuys� sculptural theory
 
Joseph Beuys Radio fat filters with eggs bees wax neon sail cloth and hare's fat 1963-65  x 4

His vitrines assembled for Hessisches Landesmuseum include several examples of these materials.  In one, dated 1963, bees wax, bees bodies, sail cloth, neon, and fat filters are accompanied by a broken neon tube wrapped in sail cloth soaked in hare�s fat and anointed with mercuric oxide which he described as an energy tool.  Being bent back on itself the bundle also echoes the Eurasian staff that symbolised the flow of ideas from the East into the West and then returning having reversed the polarity of intuition to that of logic.

These objects and materials are deliberately used to provoke strong physiological responses.  The body retains learned associations with materials particularly biological residues and materials in states of change, melting, burning or solidifying.  It is this sensory amplification of ideas that allows Beuys� objects to bind matter with consciousness. 

Joseph Beuys Auschwitz 1958 x 4

Beuys assembled these studies and materials in response to a competition sponsored by the International Auschwitz committee.  He later assembled all this material into this vitrine now at Hessisches Landesmuseum, Darmstadt.

POLITICAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL ACTIONS
Throughout the 60s and 70s Beuys developed his ideas and his sculptural methodologies but he began to concentrate increasingly on environmental and political reform. 

Joseph Beuys  Sweep Up Berlin  May 1st 1972  x 2

Fluxus was a major International movement during this period and Beuys was a key part of that movement as was Rene Block so that Germany and New York became its main focus and yet it attracted artists from all over the world.  He associated with radical groups inviting Rudi Dutschke to attend meetings such as the 100 days conference at Documenta in 1977.

Joseph Beuys Honey Pump 1977 Documenta and   Expulsion from Akademie 1972. 

His affiliation with radical forces brought him into conflict with the Academy and as early as 1972 he was removed from the premises.  It was not just external associations that brought about this split.  His work at the Academy was also unconventional. Beuys ran his classes very much along democratic lines anyone who came was welcome and no formal entry system was enforced nor was graduation an issue.  To have participated was enough.  Like Woodstock a multitude claim to have been there!

Joseph Beuys  Documenta FIU 1977 x 2

After leaving the formal education system Beuys formed the FIU or Free International University.  Which Subsequently held conferences across Europe and continues in some form till today.

Saving the woods 1972 and Planting a 1000 trees Sydney 1984    Proceeds from sale of the pieces goes to fund ecological work.

ANSELM KIEFER who appears in the photograph taken from Saving the woods spent some time in the company of Beuys at the Dusseldorf Academy this photo was taken in 1972 the year when things came to a head for the relationship between Beuys and the Academy.  Kiefer began his career as an artist with performances in which he mimicked the Nazi Salute calling for Germans to remember and to acknowledge the loss to their culture through the mad xenophobia of the Third Reich. 

He was also interested from the start with the metaphysical problems that come from consciousness and spirituality trapped forever in material flesh. 

Anselm Kiefer From the book Martin Heidegger  1976 and Siegfried's difficult way to Brunhilde 1977

Anselm Kiefer Athenor  1983/4 and Die Saulen 1983

From the late 70s through the early 1980s Kiefer made a series of paintings that acknowledged the Holocaust.  Nazi topics, images of Speer's architecture burnt fields, references to historic German battles and mythology.  It was these paintings that brought him international recognition although in America many critics were suspicious of this reference to Teutonic traditions.  It was conflated with the anti Semitic content of Wagner, (not Kiefers favourite composer!)  In Israel however he has been consistently honoured for his recognition of loss.  They understand that only after you have shown your wounds can you begin to talk of reconciliation. 

Following the path of Beuys Kiefer now turned his attention to antiquity, first studying the Cabala and other Jewish mysteries because this was the loss Germany had suffered particularly in the Frankfurt area where Kiefer lived.  He then moved on to other esoteric philosophies of the ancient Mediterranean region. 

His themes in the 1980s have included forms of healing often associated with herbalist remedies and the symbolism of plants and nature.  Healing images are sometimes built into images of frustrated transcendence. 

Anselm Kiefer Glaube Hoffnung Liebe  1986 And Untitled 1984

This work carries many layers of meaning each of which contains its opposite.  The propeller is a symbol of flight and therefore of transcendence yet it is made of lead and cannot take off.  If it were to fly it would describe a helix, this is the shape of DNA but it is also a Dionysian sign of transcendence.  This spiral appears in the form the snake on the staff of Hermes the messenger of the gods and the bringer of healing from the other side.  These and many other clues reveal Kiefer�s constant theme, which raises basic questions of being, of mind and matter, spirit and body, and dreaming of transcending these boundaries.

The three blades of the propeller are inscribed with the three virtues; faith, hope, and love.  Three is repeated again and again in the composition.  He has attached three lead rocks; it includes reference to the three elements of earth, fire and water, as well as the land, the sea and the sky.   Three is a number with mystical connotations and multiplied by itself it gives the order of the celestial hierarchies.  Kiefer first called this work The Order of The Seraphim.  

The aspirations expressed here are confounded in several ways, the propeller is lead and will never rise above the earth, it also appears to have crashed like Icarus who dared to approach divine knowledge and was destroyed for his insolence.  Kiefer seems to inspire a great vision for our journey through life even if it is eventually doomed.   Life after all is only a journey.

Anselm Kiefer  Buch mit Flugel 1992 and Melancholia 1991

There are also images of intrusions from above molten lead or comets falling from the heavens to the earth

Anselm Kiefer Wolken Saule  1984  and Yggdrasil 1991

Most recently Kiefer has been exploring the other hidden stories such as those of women who have been demonised in mythology and in history, Lilith is the archetype but Judith, Delilah, and women of the revolution have all appeared.

Anselm Kiefer Kyffhauser 1968-97 and Gotterdammerung 1968-97

Anselm Kiefer  Women of the Revolution 1999

REBECCA HORN was another of the generation born after the war that studied with Beuys.  In terms of the Holocaust her most telling work is probably a permanent installation in an old tower at Munster. 

Rebecca Horn  The tower at Munster 1998 x 4

This tower had been a mediaeval dungeon and was returned to active service as an interrogation centre by the SS during the Third Reich.   The only natural light comes from tiny windows in some cells and areas of broken brickwork opening onto the gloomy central well.  Horn has augmented this with very low watt nightlights that glow red in the dark corridors.   At first it is hard to see anything but there is a sporadic sound of tapping.  It eerily evokes the messages tapped on the walls from cell to cell since time immemorial.  Then you discover the little geological hammers that are attached to the brickwork and mechanically chip away at its impenetrable mass.

Horn's use of evocative rhythms and mechanical devices are not always dire.  On the contrary there is an element of humour in some of her works. 

Rebecca Horn  Pendulum with Emu egg 1987 and Love thermometer 1992

Pendulum with Emu Egg from the gallery collection may be threatening at first but the near miss of the javelin translates into an erotic stroking of the egg.  The sexual references in her work are even more striking in Love Thermometer.  In its beautiful made to measure case the gigantic thermometer nestles quiescent but if it is held in the hand the red fluid rushes up the stem in a parody of erectile engorgement.

SIGMAR POLKE came with his family from Poland to Western Germany as a child.  He later studied at Dusseldorf with Beuys 1961 to 1967
His earliest work was influenced by Pop Art but he quickly moved on to explore the mysterious alchemy of the photographic image and of paint. 

Sigmar Polke Freundsdinnen 1965-66 and  Liebespaar 1965

Documenting life on the streets but making the occupants merge with their environment.

Sigmar Polke New York Hamburg and Sao Paolo 1973-75 x 2

Making performances in which objects transform into a palm tree
Sigmar Polke Polke als palme 1968 and   Watte palme 2 1968

Documenting his journey through the subcontinent dominated by magic mushrooms

Sigmar Polke Afghanistan and Pakistan 1974 x 2

Fascinated by Goyas images of witchcraft he made dozens of versions of this image.

Sigmar Polke  After Goya 1982 x 2

In these images the photographic process has produced images of poltergeist or other mysterious apparitions.

Sigmar Polke Venice 1986 and  Berne 1978

In his later paintings Polke continues this layering of images and allowing processes to create mysterious presences or to dissolve the certainty of the image or make time and space fluid.

Sigmar Polke Break domination1998 and  Untitled 1998
Sigmar Polke Self esteem 1996 and Audacia 1986

All of the paintings we have seen emphasise the physical nature of the object and compel a bodily response. 

 Baselitz smears and pokes the paint onto canvas or hacks into woodblocks in such a way that the immediacy of the process intrudes into the viewing experience.

Richter plays with the focal length and apparent movement of the eye so that the viewer has difficulty in interpreting their own senses.  He moves back and forth between photography and painting invoking the associations of the photographic lens that question our perception. 

Kiefer combines photography as an alchemical trace with materials such as lead and plants that are symbolic but also work on the senses directly.  Lead may be symbolically associated with Saturn but it is visibly heavy however it has a strange luminosity about it that suggests deep space on a stormy day.

Polke also works with photographs as alchemical traces and in his paintings allows materials and processes to introduce mysterious presences.  The spilled and poured resins have a disturbing physical quality particularly when they intrude between us and the image as text.

There are other important strands of German art since 1945 that I have had to cut out of this account in order to make it manageable in one lecture.   These include the Photographic school of the Beckers that is renowned for rigorously formal frontal realist compositions.  The Zero group who collaborated with the French Nouveau Realistes while continuing a pre war European metaphysical abstraction, and several schools of cool design oriented abstractionists and neo Koncrete artists and a plethora of post-modern adventures.  Most of these schools have direct parallels in most other countries but I have focussed on a few artists whose work seems particular to Germany in the wake of the war.