The Goethe Institute
3 December 2013
Reaching a good understanding of the art of a country or period can takes years of study. The Goethe Institute did its best to set Alec and his fellow students on the right track in three months through a series of gallery visits and one set-piece lecture on 3 December 2013 entitled “Art in the DDR [Deutsche Democratische Republic – East Germany]: Art outside the Official Guidelines.”
From this and his own research Alec concluded that artists in the DDR had been active in four periods, in three principal cities and at three overlapping levels: the official, the tolerated and the underground.
Zero hour
The first period lasting from the end of the Second World War in 1945 until the foundation of the DDR in 1949, referred to by the Institute as Zero Hour, saw a fairly relaxed attitude by the Soviet authorities towards artists. There were practical reasons for this. First, they had better things to do getting the country back on its feet. Secondly, if artists portrayed life as grim – which they did – the situation could be blamed on the Nazis or the damage caused by Allied bombing, as in Dresden, one of East Germany’s artistic centres.
Wilhelm Rudolph
Epitomising this period was the painter and woodcutter Wilhelm Rudolph (1889-1982), who had had a complicated artistic and political life before the war, being at different times a member of both the Nazi and Communist parties. The transformative event of Rudolph’s life occurred on 13 and 14 February 1945, when Allied forces dropped bombs and incendiary devices on Dresden, destroying 15 square kilometres of the city centre. Rudolph’s work and living space, located just across the River Elbe, burned to the ground. Most of his work was completely destroyed. He later estimated the loss at about 70 paintings and 200 woodblocks worked on both sides. Once the fires were extinguished Rudolph went out and began drawing. The first of these drawings pictured the ruins that had been his home.
After the Red Army occupied the city, Rudolph procured a provisional permit that allowed him to continue drawing the ruins. He recorded the destruction street by street and produced more than 100 woodcuts of the destruction of Dresden. According to the journal Art in Print, the woodcuts present concrete documents of specific streets that still exist; considered as a group, however, the seemingly endless succession of similar views approaches an abstraction. Rudolph clearly understood that much of the work’s impact was rooted in the pervasive repetition—the levelling effects of destruction, reducing difference and denying distinction. He refused to show this vast drawing and print series in anything but its entirety.
Rudolph was able to exhibit his woodcuts in East Germany from the late 1940s until the 1970s. From the 1950s he returned to the animals, landscapes, portraits, and nudes of his early pre-war work and became a successful portraitist of East German notables including the country’s leader, Walter Ulbricht. But he wouldn’t have anything to do with the DDR’s intensively propagandized urban reconstruction projects.
Karl Hofer
Karl Hofer (1878-1955) was another who had had an uneasy relationship with the Nazis; his Expressionist figurative paintings and landscapes were declared degenerate and exhibited in an exhibition of degenerate art staged by the Nazis in Munich.
After the war, in East Germany, he painted pictures that reflected the events of those times, with titles such as “Night of Ruins” and “Reconstruction.” A figurative work like “Married Couple” reflected the destruction of the age in the faces of the people. His later figurative work showed the influence of Cubism.
Hofer managed to stay in the Communists’ good graces without prostituting his art in the service of the regime. Apart from in the immediate aftermath of the war, when he depicted its destruction, he stuck to generally uncontroversial and non-political figurative work. At the same time, he became highly regarded in the West, and by the time of his death was considered one of Germany’s greatest artists. His works can be found in galleries around the world, including in New York and Chicago.
Erich Gerlach
Erich Gerlach (1909-2000) was different. He seemed willing to produce works like “Professional Training” in the tradition of Soviet Realism. Though Alec was unable to find out any more about this particular mural it fits the description of another that Gerlach created for a factory in Dresden, of which the authors Elaine Kelly and Amy Wlodarski say in ‘Art Outside the Lines’, their book on art in the DDR: ‘The mural offers a picture of an idealised socialist working environment with people of different ages and sexes unified around a table and working harmoniously together; it represents an embodiment of the well-known DDR slogan ‘Work together, plan together, govern together.”
Gerlach was born in Dresden, studied there, worked there, and died there and seems to have had good relations with the East German regime; in 1952 he worked on a mural for government offices in Berlin. He made study visits to other Communist countries – Bulgaria, Romania, and the USSR. In 1974 he received the Art Prize of the DDR, followed by the National Prize in 1977.
He did not, however, produce only murals in the Socialist Realism tradition. He also painted works in the mainstream European artistic tradition including landscapes and history painting based on biblical stories and classical mythology.
The first artistic generation of the DDR
Walter Womacka
While the artists mentioned so far started working before the formal establishment of the DDR, others who came slightly later, but overlapping, are sometimes referred to as the first artistic generation, covering the period to 1960. Principal among them, officially if not necessarily artistically, was Walter Womacka (1925-2010).
Womacka was a Socialist Realist artist who remained loyal to the ideals of the East German Communist regime even after the fall of Communism in 1989. He is thus perhaps one of the best to study for those who want an idea of what officially approved art was like in the DDR.
He was born in the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia and studied as a painter and decorator in Bohemia before being called up for military service. After the war he studied art first in West Germany and then moved to Weimar in East Germany, and then to Dresden, where he studied in 1951 and 1952; it was there that the ideals of Socialist Realism were instilled in him.
Throughout his subsequent career he admired the state, and it admired him; he lived in East Berlin for most of his subsequent life and was the head of the School of Art and Design there from 1968 until 1988. He joined the East German Communist Party in 1952, was allowed to travel abroad to study, including to the USSR, and won the official prizes and awards that one might expect, including one in Moscow.
Between 1959 and 1988 he was also vice-president of the VBK, the Association of Visual Artists, the union that all artists had to join to work. Some were expelled and even arrested during this period. Among those expelled for their dangerous work during Womacka’s vice-presidency were Roger Loewig and Bärbel Bohley, who we will meet in Part 18.
Womacka’s painting “On the Beach” became probably the work of art seen by more people in East Germany than any other – even the big murals. It was reproduced on calendars, postcards and even in 1969 a stamp.
After the fall of the Communist regime Womacka suffered the indignity of seeing some of his major works destroyed or dismantled, though his mural for the House of Teachers, an educational building in Alexanderplatz, was still there the last time Alec visited Berlin. Womacka continued to support Communism all his life, and in his autobiography in 2004 declared that capitalism was the dictatorship of big money.
Hans Grundig
Hans Grundig (1901-1958) was a painter and graphic artist who was born in Dresden, was apprenticed to an interior decorator, and then attended art schools there and started producing paintings during the 1920s.
He was influenced by the renowned German artist Otto Dix and produced works like “Unemployed Cigarette Workers” in the New Objectivity style (Part 13). He was politically active and joined the Communist Party in 1926. When the Nazis came to power Grundig’s work was declared degenerate. He was arrested twice and sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp in 1938, where he remained until 1944.
At the end of the war he went to Moscow, where he attended the anti-fascist school. During this period, he produced a work entitled “To the Victims of Fascism.” When he returned, he was appointed Professor of Painting at Dresden. One of his last works, if not the last, was “Against Nuclear Death”. Judging by his pre-war history, Grundig was a sincere Communist and he seems to have had no problem adapting his work to the politics of post-war East Germany.
Wilhelm Lachnit
Wilhelm Lachnit was born near Dresden in 1899 and moved to the city with his family in 1906. He died there is 1962. He studied art in Dresden and, like Grundig, was influenced by Otto Dix. He joined the Communist Party in 1924 and was active in producing various forms of agitprop throughout the 1920s. He co-founded the so-called New Group with others including Grundig and enjoyed successful exhibitions in Paris, Düsseldorf, Amsterdam, and Dresden.
After the Nazis seized power in 1933, Lachnit landscapes and figurative paintings were declared degenerate and confiscated. Much of this confiscated work was destroyed during the February 1945 firebombing of Dresden. However, though the Nazis may have branded Lachnit’s work degenerate in public, in private they obviously though it might be valuable. His 1923 watercolours Girl and a Table and Man and Woman in the Window were found in 2012 when a hoard of Nazi loot was discovered.
Lachnit continued to paint after the end of the Second World War and in 1947 was appointed a professor at the Dresden Art Academy. His works were generally politically non-controversial and as far as Alec could see Lachnit kept his head down and stayed out of trouble. He died of a heart attack in 1963 and is buried in Dresden.
Join Alec next time as he learns about later generations of East German artists.
Meanwhile, don’t forget to sign Parliamentary petition calling on the Government to make it easier for schools to organise European trips.
