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Visual Arts

Gerhard Richter

Germany has a great artistic tradition, dating to medieval times when famous painters such as Lucas Cranach and Albrecht Dürer lived there. In the 19th century, German art was one of the main influences on European Romanticism, with Caspar David Friedrich, Carl Spitzweg and Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein the leading figures. However, it was in the 20th century, especially in its first 30 years, that the power of visual arts from Germany was most visible. The expressionist works by Franz Marc, Emil Nolde and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, as well as urban images by Max Beckmann, George Grosz and Otto Dix formed the basis for the high esteem in which German expressionism is held around the world. Before World War II, Berlin was Germany’s leading center for the arts. The city now shares this role with Munich, Hamburg, Cologne, Düsseldorf and Frankfurt am Main, although - since German unification - its predominance is increasing again.

Since 1945, generations of young artists have claimed their importance in the German cultural landscape. With radical forms of painting and sculpture as well as with new philosophies and political art they have been absorbing new developments in society and challenging the public.

Immediately after World War II, Wassily Kandinsky, Oskar Kokoschka, Max Beckmann and Emil Nolde as well as a number of expressionists were the leading exemplars of the evolving art scene. By then, a number of different groups were already playing a crucial role in the evolution of the German art scene. These included the Junger Westen, founded in Recklinghausen in 1948, Zen 49, founded in Munich in 1949 and Quadriga, founded in Frankfurt in 1953. In the early 1950s, nearly all artists from those informal groups sought liberation from the dogmas of representational panel painting. The turn toward “Art Informel,” or abstraction, unleashed an explosion of creative energies, prompting the evolution of other styles that greatly enriched the postwar art spectrum in Germany. Movements such as the “happening,” initiated by Wolf Vostell and the “Fluxus” activities are events in which the audience plays an important role.

Here, Joseph Beuys (1921-1986) created works that dwarfed all others. Even his early drawings dating from the 1940s and his objects, sculptures and “actions” reveal that he lived out an unorthodox concept of art that opened up new dimensions and meanings. With his “extended concept of art,” and his “actions” using fat and felt, he created an instrument that enabled him to propagate “social sculpture” as the consummation of his artistic philosophy.

Whereas artists in western Germany picked up the thread of existing traditions and drew on all new artistic currents in Western Europe and the United States, their colleagues in the East soon found their hands tied by the “socialist realism” prescribed by the Soviet-influenced regime. New trends in this type of painting came largely from the Leipzig Academy of Art. Among its best-known practitioners were Werner Tübke (b. 1929) and Berhard Heisig (b. 1925), whose monumental paintings, though still tied to historical or social themes, shed the sterility of the 1950s and 1960s. Tübke and Heisig, as well as Walter Libuda and Volker Stelzmann from the later generation, used this approach to painting to reckon with the past. In West Germany, it was Georg Baselitz, Jörg Immendorff, Markus Lüpertz and Anselm Kiefer who sought to come to terms with the dark side of German history.

Pop Art, Fluxus, Aktion and Konzeptkunst (concept art) led to a new tolerance in art among western artists. This trend not only fostered new movements in painting, but also gave rise to strong individualist painters.

While Georg Baselitz (b. 1938), who has won many awards and established an international reputation, expresses the misery of the human condition in his upside-down pictures, Jörg Immendorf (b. 1945) is a kind of modern history painter. In his picture Café Deutschland, a storm of history blows the Berlin Wall away. In March 1997, Immendorf was awarded the Mexican Marco Prize, the world’s largest art prize (US$250,000), for his work Accumulation 2.

Markus Lüpertz's style is different: the current director of the Düsseldorf Academy of Art (b. 1941), projects a “drunken, rapturous” feeling of life with his dithyrambic paintings. Lüpertz is one of the fathers of the new (“wild”) representational painting style in Germany.

Anselm Kiefer (b. 1945) on the other hand, expresses himself by shaping massive works of art from materials such as dust, flower petals, ashes and roots in his factory hall studios. He calls his pictures, many of which are inspired by mythology, “picture bodies” because with his typically untreated materials, he lends sculptured volume to the two-dimensionality of traditional painting.

There is also Sigmar Polke. He created a new viewpoint in 1968 when he questioned the basic structures of painting and abstract art and ironically commented on this with his pictures.

The most popular contemporary German painter in the U.S. is probably Gerhard Richter, to whom the Museum of Modern Art in New York dedicated a major retrospective in 2002. He uses the most diverse painting techniques to inquire what painting can and should do. The painter, born in Dresden in 1932, changed his style every other year to demonstrate that the beauty of art lies in its diversity.

Since the 1980s, a new group of artists has emerged, the Junge Wilde (New Wilds). Their postmodernist approach to art has been defined mainly by a preference for multimedia projects and a definition of art's contexts. This virtual art is opposed by a movement of New Realism with painters like Katharina Grosse, Jonathan Meese and Neo Rauch.

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