Art in the GDR A Retrospective Exhibition of the Nationalgalerie Berlin
in cooperation with the Art and Exhibition Hall of the Federal Republic
of Germany, Bonn
22 October 2004 – 13 February 2005
funded by
Re-(en)visioning
Art in the GDR
Thirteen years after the end of Communism in East Germany, the exhibition
looks back on fourty years of art in the German Democratic Republic
(GDR). The exhibition shows works of art that demonstrate a preoccupation
with – although often manifested as a refusal of – the
social fabric of the GDR and its artistic program. Presenting a diversity
of artistic positions, the exhibition challenges current perceptions
of “GDR Art”: it serves neither the cliché image
of “Socialist Realism”, nor the simplistic polarization
into State and Dissident art. Rather, it follows a narrative that
shows the complex relationships – including the similarities
– between oppositional and conformist art.
Curated by Eugen Blume, “Art in the GDR” brings together
270 works by 136 artists in a variety of media, including painting,
drawing, collage, sculpture, photography, and film.
“Formalism”
– “Realism” – “Art in Socialism”
The exhibition explores the “maneuvering room” of art
in the GDR in twenty stations. It begins chronolocically with the
“Zero Hour” of 1945 and the immediate post-war years in
which Dresden artists such as Wilhelm Lachnit endeavoured to revive
modernist artistic traditions banned in the Third Reich. Although
this working through National Socialism and the war belonged to the
self-understanding of the GDR, modernist artistic expression soon
fell into disrepute. Defamed in the 1950s as “formalist”
by the leadership of the Communist Party (SED), which promoted an
optimistic portrayal of everyday life under Socialism, modern art
nonetheless continued in the GDR. Abstract artists created both informal
and constructive, concrete art. Figurative artists drew inspiration
from modern masters like Picasso and Léger.
Also working outside the “straight jacket” of official
artistic ideology, was the Dresden “Blue Wonder” circle
of artists around Strawalde (Jürgen Böttcher) with his archaic
and at the same time poetic authenticity of expression. Artists like
Albert Ebert found their niche in a sensitive observation of the everyday.
Others found a retreat in the inner laws of painting
In contrast, Collage in the GDR actively subverted the realism dictate
of the SED leadership. Similarly, Edmund Kesting’s early montages
of photographic negatives, displayed in the Corridor of Photography
and Graphics, held up a distorted mirror to reality. In addition to
exploring thematic and stylistic currents, the exhibition also looks
at the art centers of the GDR: Berlin, Dresden, Halle, Karl-Marx-Stadt
(now Chemnitz), and Leipzig.
Berlin is presented as a
concentration of different artistic outlooks: Visions of the City
and Nature find their Antithesis in Otto Dix-inspired Versim. Out
of the early melancholic pictures of the so-called “Black Period”
developed the Berlin School, which avoided all State platitudes. In
contrast, art in Leipzig, under the leadership of Werner Tübke,
Bernhard Heisig, and Wolfgang Mattheuer, while metaphorical and critical,
was at times co-opted by the State. In addition to groups and schools,
there were also important artistic loners: the free-floating intelligence
of both Gerhard Altenbourg and Carfriedrich Claus unfolds in the Hall
of Drawings. The tendencies of the 1980s appear in several rooms:
wild, expressive painting, provocative photo art, and the music-like
imagery of “Poetic Abstraction”. At the end of the exhibition,
we return to the theme of history as a source and failure of Utopia,
an idea that photography at the end of the GDR increasingly treated
with irony or replaced completely with an unflinching view of reality.
Also on view in the exhibition will be a series of films by painters
like Strawalde (Jürgen Böttcher), the “autoperforation”
artists, and many others, as well as original television recordings
from the GDR of the official Dresden art exhibitions. This documentation
was developed especially for this exhibition in cooperation with the
German Broadcast Archive, Frankfurt am Main – Potsdam-Babelsberg.
Curated by Eugen Blume, “Art in the GDR” brings together
270 works by 136 artists in a variety of media, including painting,
drawing, collage, sculpture, photography, and film. 
