Another fascinating read with my Sunday morning coffee. It reminded me of your earlier article about the collection at Spandau Castle (https://open.substack.com/pub/katjahoyer/p/from-hitlers-horses-to-lenins-head?r=1flx1b&utm_medium=ios). I suppose it was inevitable that the ‘victorious’ BRD would want to belittle, dismiss, and remove the public art of the former DDR. As with all erstwhile authoritarian regimes there are examples of state sponsored art of little merit yet even there, historians can trace the progress or otherwise of the former regime. Last year I read a book (difficult read) about the challenges faced in the former USSR to politically correctly memorialise the Second World War. It neatly encapsulated the fiery hoops the artists had to jump through to cleave to the official line of the moment. The art from the former DDR may not be to our taste yet it helps to complete the picture of a vanished state and failed political system.
Fascinating. It's making me wonder about music too - were DDR composers also shunned after reunification? It is harder to identify the form and content of music with politics unless it is setting explicitly political texts. But here we have tended to celebrate Eastern bloc composers, such as Shostakovich, who like the visual artists you discuss here, had a more complicated and nuanced relationship with the regimes they laboured under.
What a great article and what comes through that is your passion for East German art 👏👏, it’s a very personal sense of what is good / bad in types of art , I mean do we all agree what picture should be hanging where in the home ?? There’s no job vacancy for that in our house 😀, there must still be some absolute belters hidden/ forgotten about in peoples attics or barns .
Thank you for this interesting article, Katja. It feels like Chapter 2 of Germany's troubled relationship with art, as I recently have seen several exhibits of paintings from the late 1800s--early 1900s that were confiscated and deemed "degenerate" art by the Nazis. This tagged even what look like innocent landscapes and portraits. It's heartbreaking to think how many were burned (ca. 5,000 at least). Later works were indeed political, and thankfully, many artists emigrated from the chaos. I was glad some of the wall labels accompanying artworks explained this history and the piece's provenance; it's important to remember this history (isn't it always?).
While official GDR art was ideologically driven and often considered dull, the technical facility required to produce figurative/realist artworks was in many ways better than what was being taught and produced in the West, IMO. My understanding is that as state-sanctioned art followed socialist realism, there was a thriving underground scene producing figurative works that ran opposite the official style. When many of these artists emigrated to the West, for instance Gerhard Richter, they had the technical facility and conceptual understanding to produce works exploring themes like gender, power, and dissent.
I feel so enriched every time I read your articles. This was one of the special ones because it was nothing I thought about, but once I finished it I felt smarter and so much more informed. Thank you for that. I don’t say it enough to you.
In my tours at Tate Modern, I usually include the Cage paintings by Gerhard Richter. Part of his story is that he was dissatisfied with creating art in the East with the limitations imposed on him by the State authorities. Also Günther Uecker, famous for his Nail Paintings, from Wendorf originally, who became part of the Gruppe Zero in Düsseldorf.
I quite like the murals from the DDR days for instance the ones in Eisenhuttenstadt ,showing workers united in the socialist paradise. Now these most have been created by artists and paid by the state ,how did the more independently minded artists view these state sponsored artists or was a case of a jobs a job.
Another fascinating read with my Sunday morning coffee. It reminded me of your earlier article about the collection at Spandau Castle (https://open.substack.com/pub/katjahoyer/p/from-hitlers-horses-to-lenins-head?r=1flx1b&utm_medium=ios). I suppose it was inevitable that the ‘victorious’ BRD would want to belittle, dismiss, and remove the public art of the former DDR. As with all erstwhile authoritarian regimes there are examples of state sponsored art of little merit yet even there, historians can trace the progress or otherwise of the former regime. Last year I read a book (difficult read) about the challenges faced in the former USSR to politically correctly memorialise the Second World War. It neatly encapsulated the fiery hoops the artists had to jump through to cleave to the official line of the moment. The art from the former DDR may not be to our taste yet it helps to complete the picture of a vanished state and failed political system.
Fascinating. It's making me wonder about music too - were DDR composers also shunned after reunification? It is harder to identify the form and content of music with politics unless it is setting explicitly political texts. But here we have tended to celebrate Eastern bloc composers, such as Shostakovich, who like the visual artists you discuss here, had a more complicated and nuanced relationship with the regimes they laboured under.
What a great article and what comes through that is your passion for East German art 👏👏, it’s a very personal sense of what is good / bad in types of art , I mean do we all agree what picture should be hanging where in the home ?? There’s no job vacancy for that in our house 😀, there must still be some absolute belters hidden/ forgotten about in peoples attics or barns .
Thank you for this interesting article, Katja. It feels like Chapter 2 of Germany's troubled relationship with art, as I recently have seen several exhibits of paintings from the late 1800s--early 1900s that were confiscated and deemed "degenerate" art by the Nazis. This tagged even what look like innocent landscapes and portraits. It's heartbreaking to think how many were burned (ca. 5,000 at least). Later works were indeed political, and thankfully, many artists emigrated from the chaos. I was glad some of the wall labels accompanying artworks explained this history and the piece's provenance; it's important to remember this history (isn't it always?).
While official GDR art was ideologically driven and often considered dull, the technical facility required to produce figurative/realist artworks was in many ways better than what was being taught and produced in the West, IMO. My understanding is that as state-sanctioned art followed socialist realism, there was a thriving underground scene producing figurative works that ran opposite the official style. When many of these artists emigrated to the West, for instance Gerhard Richter, they had the technical facility and conceptual understanding to produce works exploring themes like gender, power, and dissent.
I feel so enriched every time I read your articles. This was one of the special ones because it was nothing I thought about, but once I finished it I felt smarter and so much more informed. Thank you for that. I don’t say it enough to you.
Richtig!
Here’s an interesting article about GDR artists:
https://thecritic.co.uk/issues/march-2025/art-from-the-gdr/
It’s good to be reminded of those artists who stayed in the GDR and managed to preserve their integrity.
In my tours at Tate Modern, I usually include the Cage paintings by Gerhard Richter. Part of his story is that he was dissatisfied with creating art in the East with the limitations imposed on him by the State authorities. Also Günther Uecker, famous for his Nail Paintings, from Wendorf originally, who became part of the Gruppe Zero in Düsseldorf.
I quite like the murals from the DDR days for instance the ones in Eisenhuttenstadt ,showing workers united in the socialist paradise. Now these most have been created by artists and paid by the state ,how did the more independently minded artists view these state sponsored artists or was a case of a jobs a job.