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EXPERIMENTAL, SLIGHTLY MAD GERMAN ART

What unifies six decades of German post-war art? James Woodall considers a big new show  at Martin-Gropius-Bau as he prepares to leave Berlin, his home for more than a decade ...

Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE

"Sixty Years, Sixty Works, Art from the Federal republic of Germany”, now on at Berlin’s Martin-Gropius-Bau, says more about the inventiveness of post-war Germany than any other show I have seen in my 13 years in the city.

The show traces the history of art in the Federal Republic, from its start in 1949 until now, with a lone influential artwork to reflect each year. Naturally, the idea was controversial: how could one work of art possibly say anything substantial about the state of German art for an entire year? Some quarters of the German press, particularly from the former east, asked more pointedly: where would the German Democratic Republic fit in?

It was a stupid question. Nowhere, is the answer. Yes, there was “art” in the GDR, but it had to be state-sanctioned and most of it was rubbish. “The arts and sciences, as well as research and teaching, shall be free” reads Article five, paragraph three of the Basic Rights of the 1949 Constitution of the Germany that mattered: the Bundesrepublik Deutschland. Nothing was free in the GDR. This is a show about six decades of freedom of expression; the freedom to make, create and dream publicly. Many of the artists featured here were experimental and slightly mad, in dramatic contrast with the mad experimentation of the Nazis. Despite its banal name, this is what “Sixty Years, Sixty Works” ("60 Jahre. 60 Werke") rightly celebrates.

The curators aspire to make a case for a unified sensibility across six decades of German art. But the art of a nation, particularly one as new as the German Federal Republic, eludes easy classification. Artists such as Wols, Georg Baselitz, Rebecca Horn and Anselm Kiefer--all brilliantly represented here--speak for themselves. They happen to be German, but each boasts a force of craft that transcends geopolitical borders.

Decades are divided into multi-roomed sections, but dates are out of sequence, sabotaging expectations of order. This is just right. There’s also at least double the number of works suggested by the show's title. The result is a major retrospective with some interesting themes, such as the particularly wild imagery featured in the work of the 1960s and 1970s, a time when German artists collectively let rip.

Baselitz’s extraordinary "The Big Night from Way Back (Remix)", a 2008 update of “Big Night Down the Drain” (1963), is duly granted a wall of its own. A grotesque, elfish figure with a face that resembles Hitler’s appears to be playing with his outsize phallus. The effect is coarse, fascinating and upsetting. There’s much loathing in modern German art. And for good reason.

At the heart of the show is Joseph Beuys’s "Infiltration-homogen for Grand Piano" (1966), a mysterious, semi-Surrealist, felt-encased concert piano. Never before exhibited outside its home at Paris’s Pompidou Centre, it has the heft of a cold war icon. Still as a rock, it nonetheless sings: a primordial, lyrical installation, at once about perverse secrecy and the need for protection. Perhaps only Germany could have produced someone as magically subversive as Beuys. His spirit is defining.

Post-reunification, painting becomes bright and funky, as in three weird canvases by Neo Rauch. Sculpture is also magnificently crazy, as in Jonathan Meese’s "Alien"-like totem-pole “Totaladler". German artists clearly like to show the finger. Artists from the east are represented, but only with pieces created in a unified Germany.

“Sixty Years, Sixty Works” tells you nothing about modern German history. Instead, it proves that the spirit of creative provocation, which the Nazis had hoped violently to extirpate, has deep roots in this complicated, haunted country. This is the Germany I have come to love.

Sixty Years, Sixty Works, Art from the Federal Republic of Germany, Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, until June 14

Picture credit: Stephan Balkenhol, "Männer auf Bank" (1997); (c) VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

(James Woodall is a writer who spent over a decade in Berlin. He is now back in Britain working on a book about the city. His last piece for More Intelligent Life was an interview with Peter Gabriel.)