Four Modern Masters Affirm Germany's Place in the Art World

Date 1980

By accepting and integrating their art into the greater German artistic tradition, four modern artists gained international recognition for contemporary German art.

Locale Venice, Italy

Key Figures

• Georg Baselitz (b. 1938), German artist who gave greater meaning and depth to the strong representational quality of German art
• Joseph Beuys (1921-1986), pioneer in modern German art
• Anselm Kiefer (b. 1945), late twentieth century German artist who was most willing to probe deeply into Germany’s past
• A. R. Penck (b. 1939), German artist whose use of symbolism served to give added impact to the conceptual tradition of German art
• Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528), German Renaissance master whose use of the visual and conceptual established the pattern for the subsequent development of German art
• Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880-1938), greatest of the German expressionists, whose works served as a source of inspiration for many later German artists
• Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), German philosopher whose theories on art confirmed and strengthened an existing tradition

Summary of Event

The almost unanimous condemnation by German art critics of the exhibit Burning, Deforestation, Sinking, Silting which Anselm Kiefer and Georg Baselitz mounted at the 1980 Biennale in Venice, ironically served to confirm what the international art community had recognized for some time—that Kiefer and Baselitz, together with Joseph Beuys and A. R. Penck, were the masters of German contemporary art. Indeed, some considered Kiefer, a student of Beuys, to be the most gifted and most promising of all contemporary artists. Baselitz and Penck were contemporaries, both having been born in what was to become the totalitarian state of East Germany. To escape persecution, both changed their names, to no avail. Both were accused by East German authorities of “incorrect thinking” and were forced to move to West Germany in order to continue their work.

What Baselitz, Kiefer, and Penck had in common were childhood memories of a national breakdown almost without parallel and an awareness of having to live not only with the sins of their fathers and mothers but also with a vast international reprobation likely to go on forever. Beuys, older than the rest, had experienced the nightmare of Nazism and the horrors of World War II firsthand. As a fighter pilot during the war, he was shot down over the Russian Crimea. Badly burned, he was almost literally brought back from the dead by the ministrations of tribal Tatars, who healed him by wrapping him in felt and fat.

What critics objected to in Kiefer’s work was what they saw as excessive “Teutonization”: the use of poses and symbols from the past, especially those related to the Nazi period. What many German critics did not see was that Kiefer and his colleagues were great precisely because they had come to terms with the German past. In so doing, they had reestablished contact with and had become part of the great German artistic tradition that extended back to the Renaissance master Albrecht Dürer and included the work of artists such as Caspar David Friedrich, a nineteenth century German Romantic painter whose landscapes were a source of inspiration for Kiefer.

The German artistic tradition basically involved a dualism between visual manifestation and expressed thought. Thought might be lofty idealism; more often, however, it was biting social criticism. German artists would deliberately distort line and composition, employ color or caricature, or even select a certain medium such as woodcut to give greater meaning and impact to the visual and thus achieve a didactic objective. The masters of this approach were the German expressionists active in the years before World War I. As if by premonition, they graphically portrayed the malaise of their time, a malaise that in succeeding decades would result in the near destruction of European civilization. The greatest of the German expressionists, and a source of inspiration for Beuys, Kiefer, Baselitz, and Penck, was Ernst Ludwig Kirchner.

The nineteenth century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche had intellectualized German artistic tradition when he declared that underlying all artistic creations are two principles, one, the “Apollonian,” representing beauty, harmony, and clarity; the other, the “Dionysian,” representing vitality, intoxication, and ecstasy. German artists embraced Nietzsche’s philosophy with enthusiasim. German art, for the most part, is strongly figurative or representational, and seldom abstract.

For Beuys, what is important is the impression left with the viewer, even if the work of art is nontraditional or transitory. Materials used ideally should have personal emotional association: felt for warmth, fat and honey for food, wax and a flashlight for direction. Thought, for Beuys, is three-dimensional; therefore, the most memorable art is sculpture. Some of Beuys’s most startling creations were his own actions; for example, wrapped in a huge cloak made of felt and with a live coyote as a companion, he would sit all day in a gallery. In becoming a living work of art in the round, Beuys broke the traditional barrier between art and life.

Of the four, Baselitz was probably the most strongly influenced by the expressionists, especially in the use of strong colors. Baselitz enhances the emotional aspects of his work and the sense of alienation it produces by the deliberate inversion of his subject matter. In so doing, he diverts the viewer from rational analysis to emotional uncertainty. Baselitz also divides or cuts up his representational object into strips, the gaps being filled by extraneous bits of reality. He thus makes the viewer aware of how fragile reality actually is.

Where Baselitz uses inversion to heighten emotional understanding, Penck reverts to a form of symbolism that verges on abstraction. To emphasize thought, the visual is reduced to the barest outlines, often to pictographs or stick figures, or likened to graffiti or the drawings of children. On the surface simplistic, the figures when combined become complex and disturbing. Even though they seem easily comprehensible, in the end they resolutely defy interpretation, a fact that does not detract from their power.

The most “German” of the four artists, Kiefer fills his works with references to the German past, from prehistoric myths to the Nazi years. What disturbs many of Kiefer’s critics is his lack of automatic condemnation of this past. For Kiefer, however, the purpose of the artist is not to dictate thought—the methodology of the Nazis—but rather to stimulate thought, which he does in a masterful manner. His painting To the Unknown Painter depicts a grandiose, empty fascist palace. Using a military symbol as an example, he graphically portrays the death of German art at the hands of the Nazis.

Like his teacher Beuys, Kiefer also utilized nontraditional materials and techniques in his artworks—combining, for example, painting with photographs or embedding surface objects such as straw, sand, or ashes in the paint. One of Kiefer’s more memorable paintings is Operation Sealion, which refers to the contemplated German invasion of England during World War II. The battle is staged in an enormous bathtub set in a desolate, burned landscape. The ships shown are toys, but the ensuing disaster is real. Kiefer exploits every device and technique to superimpose one level of meaning on another, leaving scope for multiple interpretations. Another of his famous works, Nero Paints, shows the outline of an artist’s palette superimposed again on a burned, exhausted landscape. In the background, the buildings of a postcard German village, not Nero’s Rome, are in flames. The reference to Adolf Hitler as the failed artist but the monstrous destroyer becomes obvious.

Significance

The effect of Beuys, Kiefer, Baselitz, and Penck on German art can be understood only in the context of the development of German art after World War II. The collapse of the Third Reich in 1945 left a stunned, demoralized Germany whose immediate objective was to divorce itself as completely as possible from the Nazi heritage responsible for the unprecedented catastrophe. Two developments ensued. On the official level, especially after the establishment of the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) in 1949, efforts were made to rehabilitate both the art of the pre-Nazi period and the artists who had been driven into exile or underground. The effort failed. The few artists who had remained were, for the most part, past their artistic prime. Others who had fled abroad remembered with bitterness how their art had been ridiculed, denigrated, and labeled “degenerate.” Kirchner, for example, had been driven to suicide. These artists had no desire to return, and indeed many had tried to shed their German identity altogether.

The artistic community attempted to find an identity for German art on an international level. What was to be avoided at all costs was the realistic official style of Nazi-approved art, which could best be described as monumental kitsch. Therefore, despite the strong representational and figurative tradition of German art, the emphasis shifted toward the abstract, toward experiments with what was called minimal art, and toward a new movement called Tachism, which employed irregular dabs or spots of color, each regarded as an element in its own right and an emotional projection. It was with some consternation that German artists increasingly became aware that their artistic efforts had only a limited effect in Germany and none outside Germany. The new West German capital of Bonn was regarded as a city of philistines, an artistic wasteland.

The change came when divided and isolated Berlin again became the center of German art; there was then, an art historian noted, “a hunger for pictures.” Both Baselitz and Penck lived and worked for a time in Berlin, and the Berlin galleries became the most enthusiastic supporters and promoters of the works of all four artists.

Beuys was the pioneer in the new art movement, primarily because he was among the first to reestablish artistic ties with the past and reawaken memories, no matter how painful. In fact it can be said that he is the only contemporary German artist of stature who unreservedly has come to terms with the war. Second was Kiefer, to be followed by Baselitz and Penck. It was said that these four artists helped to demolish two walls. Since both Baselitz and Penck came from East Germany, their acceptance in the West represented a triumph over the physical wall dividing East and West Berlin (a wall soon to be demolished in actuality); the second was the symbolic wall of German history between 1933 and 1945. There was now, as the German poet Paul Celan succinctly phrased it, a reconstituted “gash of fire” spanning Germany’s cultural heritage.

What ensued was a new art movement called “neoexpressionism” that began to coalesce in the 1970’s and reached maturity by 1980. Like the old expressionism, the new was born in a period of turmoil; also like the old, an integral part of neoexpressionism was social criticism. The basis, however, had broadened. Empathy had replaced abstract thought. The objective was attacking universal problems such as violence, bigotry, corruption, and hunger. Overpopulation and an endangered environment loomed large. Beuys was a cofounder of the German Green Party, one of Europe’s pioneer environmental groups. The art movement, at first essentially German, soon spread to other countries, including Italy, France, England, and the United States. The Germans, once again, had become a respected and productive part of the international art community.

Bibliography

Behr, Shulamith. Expressionism. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. A concise, accessible history of expressionism, from the early part of the twentieth century to the movement’s demise under the Third Reich to its postwar reemergence.

Borer, Alain. The Essential Joseph Beuys. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997. Includes essays on the influential artist and 152 reproductions of his work in all media.

Gordon, Donald E. Expressionism, Art, and Idea. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987. Donald Gordon is generally considered to be the leading American authority on German expressionism. This book is of interest because it details both the original expressionism and the neoexpressionism of Beuys, Kiefer, Baselitz, and Penck. Many fine illustrations, both black-and-white and color.

Joachimides, Christos M., Norman Rosenthal, Wieland Schmied, and Werner Becker, eds. German Art in the Twentieth Century: Painting and Sculpture, 1905-1985. 2d ed. New York: Neues, 1988. Based on an exhibition of twentieth century German art held at the Royal Academy of Art in London in 1985 and the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart in 1986, this profusely illustrated volume details the new international interest in German art. In addition to 299 full-color plates, the book contains a number of excellent essays on subjects ranging from the philosophy of Nietzsche to a monograph on Beuys. Also contains short but detailed biographies of forty-eight modern German artists.

Kiefer, Anselm, Theodore E. Stebbins, and Jürgen Harten. A Book by Anselm Kiefer. New York: George Braziller, 1988. Some of Kiefer’s outstanding artistic works are in the form of books. This one is an interesting demonstration of his use of color, ranging from the cool blues and greens to the warm oranges and hot reds. Both the foreword and introduction give a great deal of personal and professional information on this extraordinary artist.

McShine, Kynaston, ed. Berlinart, 1961-1987. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1987. Published in connection with a major exhibit of art associated with Berlin mounted by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. All the artworks in the exhibit, including those by Beuys and Baselitz, are reproduced in color. Interesting essays by authorities such as René Block, Laurence Kardish, Kynaston McShine, Karl Ruhrberg, and Wieland Schmied give valuable information on the development of modern German art, including the rejection of abstraction, the return to roots, and the reemergence of Berlin as a major international art center.

Ritchie, Andrew Carnduff. German Art of the Twentieth Century. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1957. Although dated, this remains one of the best and most readable introductions to German art in the twentieth century. It is interesting to see the inertia affecting German art at the time of the book’s publication.

Russell, John. The Meanings of Modern Art. Rev. ed. New York: Harper & Row, 1981. The modern art of any country cannot be fully understood without an understanding of how it relates to a broader international pattern. John Russell, an eminent art critic for The New York Times, explains such relationships in a clear manner. He devotes considerable space to Beuys, whom he considers to be one of the leading artists of the time.