Le renouveau de l’enseignement artistique en Allemagne après la Seconde Guerre mondiale

Abstract

Germany after 1945 was a territorial unity that had lost its status as a State and which was divided into four zones of occupation. The program of reform of art education is part of the widespread political and cultural renewal that took place during the subsequent post-War years. The importance of these reforms is a question to consider, with respect to the difficult ethical, historical and ideological context that shaped them. To all appearances, the reopening of many artistic institutions gave birth to an exceptional period of cultural and artistic activity. Indeed, some artists who had lost their right to practice under the Third Reich agreed to come back and teach art at these newly reopened institutions. The present study will focus on those artist-educators who developed the most innovative pedagogical concepts and methods, for example Willi Baumeister (Art Academy in Stuttgart), Karl Otto Gotz (Art Academy in Dusseldorf) and Georg Meistermann (Art Academy in Karlsruhe). In total, the group I wish to investigate taught in eleven higher education institutions across all the four occupation zones; their work continued later, in the post-War states, FRG and GDR. My research methodology includes bibliographic research, archival research, and interviews with former students, many of whom have become artist-educators themselves. My correspondents were the benefactors of an extraordinary kind of teacher-student relationship that stressed an attitude of freedom that contrasted strongly with the previous historical period of the mid-1930s to 1945. The vast majority of German artists who now have an international reputation — including Georg Baselitz, Otto Piene, Gerhard Richter, Gunter Uecker — studied in one or several higher art schools or art academies in the occupied zones (East or West) after 1945.