Peter Guth, “Pop Art: American Art from the Ludwig Collection in the Gallery of the Leipzig Academy of Art,” translated from German by Iain Boyd Whyte, originally published as “Amerikanische Kunst aus der Sammlung Ludwig in der Galerie der Leipziger Hochschule,” in Sächsisches Tageblatt, June 13, 1984

Abstract

The art historian Hans-Jurgen Papies was closely involved with the loan of United States (US) art to the National Gallery in East Berlin by the Cologne collector Peter Ludwig. Based on works from this loan, the first exhibition of US Pop art in the GDR took place in Leipzig, where in 1984 the gallery at the Leipzig Academy exhibited forty works by Warhol, Lichtenstein, Johns, Rosenquist, Rauschenberg, and others. Pop art is no longer trumps—or only partially. One goes through the room as if contemplating the art of the Middle Ages. The global political situation and the powerfully worsening situation in the USA have also increasingly posed new questions for the artists. The way in which Pop art emerged from a pretense of progress has necessarily come under scrutiny. The roots of Pop art reach back deep into the Dada and Surrealist movements with a lineage that reaches from Duchamp via Schwitters to Max Ernst.