The Grandchildren of Grosz and Kirchner: Realism and Violence in Postwar Berlin Art

Abstract

Exhibitions of recent paintings from West as well as East Germany have met with head-shaking and astonishment in both Western and Eastern Europe. When the exhibition Ugly Realism was shown at the ICA (Institute of Contemporary Arts, London) in 1978, English art critics backed away from the aggressive attacks of the Berlin painters and pointed out how basically different the English art tradition was. As one reviewer put it, “Never deprived of the democratic outlets of criticism and constitutional control, the English nation and her artists could afford the dangerous luxury of being apolitical. Things are quite different for Germany.... The politically committed artist seems to be a figure of the Weimar Republic but can, in fact, be traced back at least to the lampooning in Luther’s time.... British art, to this day, is landscape-oriented, with all that implies space, slowness, calm; even our townscapes are apt to be versions of landscape.”1* John Willett, in his study of the culture of the Weimar Republic, The New Sobriety (London, 1978), writes: “Such intensification of conflict, the emphasizing of differences rather than reconciliation, is, for better or worse, a very German way of looking at things.”