Kunst in der DDR
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This exhibition was not to be missed. The first--and perhaps, unfortunately, the last--massive museum survey of painting, drawing, sculpture, photography, and film made in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) in the forty years of its existence (1949-89), "Kunst in der DDR" (Art in the GDR) couldn´t have been timelier. Its opening coincided, albeit unintentionally, with a cresting wave of nostalgia in Germany for East Germany. Six and a half million viewers watched the inaugural episode of the DDR Show on German television the first week in September, and almost as many--six million--went to German movie theaters earlier tiffs year to see Wolfgang Becker´s Good Bye, Lenin! Apparently the GDR has become a kind of curiosity cabinet that Germans find sentimentally appealing. Riding on this wave, "Art in the GDR" became an unexpected blockbuster: More than ten thousand visitors saw the exhibition in its first three days.
The GDR was born on October 7, 1949. Almost immediately, its artists were expected to play a leading role in educating the masses by making paintings that presented reality--not as it was, but as the Communist leaders wanted it to be seen. The East German artists´ canvases generally lack the bright colors and vivid light of the Soviet socialist realist paintings that served as their starting points. However, like them their objective was the construction of a new image of man. While West German artists denounced East German realism as outdated and provincial, during the cold war many Americans failed to distinguish between the totalitarian cultural politics of National Socialist Germany and aesthetic practice in Communist East Germany. Finally, Westerners on both sides of the Atlantic perceived the Neue Sachlichkeit and Expressionist roots of many East German paintings as simply too German. Those who were lucky enough to view both Max Beckmann´s recent traveling retrospective and "Art in the GDR" (which didn´t travel, sadly) may have been surprised to discover that his most fervent followers were East rather than West German artists.
The GDR was born on October 7, 1949. Almost immediately, its artists were expected to play a leading role in educating the masses by making paintings that presented reality--not as it was, but as the Communist leaders wanted it to be seen. The East German artists´ canvases generally lack the bright colors and vivid light of the Soviet socialist realist paintings that served as their starting points. However, like them their objective was the construction of a new image of man. While West German artists denounced East German realism as outdated and provincial, during the cold war many Americans failed to distinguish between the totalitarian cultural politics of National Socialist Germany and aesthetic practice in Communist East Germany. Finally, Westerners on both sides of the Atlantic perceived the Neue Sachlichkeit and Expressionist roots of many East German paintings as simply too German. Those who were lucky enough to view both Max Beckmann´s recent traveling retrospective and "Art in the GDR" (which didn´t travel, sadly) may have been surprised to discover that his most fervent followers were East rather than West German artists.
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