postwar German art

The Surrealist artist Richard Oelze's post-war enterprise was one of inner reflection and personal questioning linked to the broader project of coming to terms with the past. This essay takes a critical view of his artworks and his automatist Wortskizzen to assess the manner and extent to which Oelze utilizes his artistic practice as a mode of working through his, and Germany's, complicity with the Nazi regime. Analysis of the Wortskizzen exposes how verbal probing informs Oelze's visual expression of inner turmoil, while implied gaps and voids in paintings and drawings puncture space as well as time, illuminating memory and blending the past with the present. Oelze's serious play with word and image in turn invites his viewers to release repressed memories through reflective contemplation.

Hans Hartung (1904-1989) is regarded as one of the founders of gestural painting in Europe, a variety of expressive or lyrical abstraction, the first truly ‘international style’ to dominate art on both sides of the Atlantic in the mid-twentieth century. The adjectives ‘lyrical’ or ‘expressive’ suggest a direct, almost physical painterly approach to material, canvas and form. However, the process of organizing the studio inventory after the artist’s death revealed that for every painting, seemingly the result of a largely expressionistic and uncontrolled working  process, there was a preparatory drawing, patently contradicting the superficial appearance of the painting and the ‘expressionistic’ or ‘lyrical’ clichés attached to it. The contradiction between the stereotypes dominating the discourse and the reality behind them was known to critics of the 1950, but they wouldn’t bother about drawing the inevitable conclusion that their discourse was wrong and misleading. Even when the evidence again turned up after the artist’s death, a well-known gallery advised the foundation representing the artist’s estate to destroy the evidence in order to protect the artist’s market.
This text focuses on this strange and still not well-known aspect of the artist’s reception as a case study for art criticism’s notorious tendency to base its discourse on misleading stereotypes. It was written for the compilation Hartung – 10 Perspectives, edited by Anne Pontégnie and published by 5 Continents Editions srl. Milan in 2006.

This article looks at the impact that East Germany’s gender policies had on the visual arts and especially women painters across four decades. The first two sections focus on women’s participation in the national art exhibitions in Dresden during the Ulbricht and Honecker years, looking at how their artwork responded to official gender policies, and at the emergence of three women—Heidrun Hegewald, Gudrun Brüne, and Doris Ziegler—as nationally prominent painters. The third section focuses on the paintings and agitations of Angela Hampel in the 1980s as an example of a new phase in the pursuit of gender equality in East Germany, one abruptly cut short by the unification process. Ultimately this article argues that East Germany’s gender policies, despite not having achieved the stated goal of true equality, had a positive impact on women artists, and especially painters, in East Germany, increasing the number of women included in major exhibitions, encouraging greater complexity in their work, and ultimately fostering a socialist-feminist critique of lingering patriarchal biases.

Examines the early photo paintings of Gerhard Richter in light of his experiences as an East German immigrant.  Connects these works to the little-known abstract and expressionist works that preceded them.  Presents a new reading of Richter's blurring technique related to his impersonal understanding of Art Informel.

This article focuses on Heidrun Hegewald, one of East Germany's best-known female artists. Known in particular for drawings, prints, and paintings of women and children that often raised unsettling questions about family life or global issues, Hegewald received many awards for her work in East Germany. Since unification, however, she has largely disappeared from the art scene, the result of her double marginality as a woman and an East German. This article focuses on a handful of her paintings and their reception in East Germany in order to show the importance of her work for the study of both East German art and women artists more generally. In particular, it examines the theme of the family as it appears in her paintings and how she used this theme, and especially mothers and children, as a lens from which to discuss political issues important to East Germany on both a national and global scale.

In the frame of the exhibition series „Classic Contemporary art from Germany” launched and curated by Kinga Bódi and Alexander Tolnay in the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest.


Baselitz. Preview with Review (2017) was the third part of the Museum of Fine Arts – Hungarian National Gallery’s exhibition series “Classical Contemporary Art from Germany”, which was launched in 2012 with Material Becomes Picture, presenting Günther Uecker’s art, and was followed in 2014 by Long Live Painting! featuring Jörg Immendorff. The shows, organised every two to three years, are designed to acquaint the Hungarian public with the various trends in post-World War (West) German fine art through solo exhibitions showcasing a defining phenomenon or a leading art trend.

Poised between document and picture, it can be difficult to conceptualize the thought-like possibilities of the photographic image. Nineteenth-century discourse largely decried photography as a mechanical process, while currents within twentieth-century aesthetics have sought to define it as a mind independent medium. Although deeply problematic, these arguments nonetheless call into question how photographs could be said “to think.” Another strand of theory has highlighted the photographic image’s indeterminacy when it comes to meaning, that its “thought” needs to be pinned down through supplementary material such as captions.   

Given such difficult conditions, this paper will discuss the German photographer Michael Schmidt and photo-essays such as Ein-Heit and Lebensmittel. Eschewing supplementary text and using photography alone, Schmidt has developed a practice that encompasses what Sarah James describes as “complex seeing” in order to examine themes such as German unification and the food industry.  Schmidt’s projects have long been outputted in two distinct formats: the exhibition and the photobook. Both outputs utilize the same photographs, but assemble them in very different arrangements thereby indicating relations of contingency and provisionality between his images—showing different modes of photographic thinking.

This paper shall contend that Schmidt establishes a productive tension between the photo-book and the photo-essay; the possibility of an alternative arrangement suggested by the exhibition adds a contingency into the photo-essay that is at odds with the physical limits typically imposed by the photobook. Because of this contingency, Schmidt’s multi-photograph projects are mobile “constellations” that underscore a different model of photographic thinking.