Dictatorship, war and a divided country
From the Nazis’ exhibition of “degenerate art” to Joseph Beuys’s oaks and Gerhard Richter’s blurred photo-paintings – the art of a country that had to come to terms with its past.
When the Nazis seized power in 1933, the museums were purged of modern art. Artists were dismissed, banned from exhibiting and forced into exile. In 1937 the exhibition Entartete Kunst, degenerate art, was shown in Munich to mock Expressionists, Dadaists and abstract artists. At the same time the Haus der Deutschen Kunst opened with an official art of peasants, soldiers and idealised nude bodies. Jewish artists such as Felix Nussbaum and Charlotte Salomon were murdered in Auschwitz. The war left the cities in ruins.
After 1945 Germany was divided. In the West abstract art became a sign of freedom, and the documenta exhibition in Kassel, which began in 1955, brought modernism back to the country. Joseph Beuys turned felt, fat and conversation into art and spoke of every human being as an artist. In the East the state demanded Socialist Realism, but in Leipzig a distinct school of painting emerged. Vienna had its Actionists, who used the body in shocking performances that went far beyond the canvas.
From the 1960s a new generation confronted Germany’s history. Gerhard Richter painted blurred pictures from photographs, among them one of his uncle in Wehrmacht uniform. Georg Baselitz turned his subjects upside down, and Anselm Kiefer painted vast, scorched landscapes full of myths and memories of the Nazi era. During the 1980s German artists became some of the most talked-about in the world. When the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989, a new era opened for both art and the country.