"The Language of Liberty" and West German Expressionism

In World War II, Hitler organized a campaign of artistic censorship and stylistic re-organization that not only uplifted a hyper-traditional, neo-classical style, but denounced an emerging scene of modernism and expressionism. Abstract art, with its mixture of free-wheeling optimism, poignant vulnerability, bold brushstrokes, and emphasis on ambiguous form, posed a unique threat to the regime. Abstract artists, rather than painting easily discernible subject matter, opted instead for enigmatic objects, representing concepts such as resistance, death, and love. In the eyes of the state, if modernists valued anything as a subject matter, they therefore were placing equal value on these ambiguous, “dangerous,” ideas and the “purity” of the Aryan race. Fast-forwarding to the art scene in West Berlin in the 60s and 70s, in which the artistic censorship of Nazi Germany or Stalin’s GDR were, obviously, virtually nonexistent, but artists had to grapple with a posthumous moment in abstraction. With not much modern art to look back on in Germany, as it had mostly been destroyed, artists of West Germany had to pave a new way for themselves in their development.

Georg Baselitz, West German Expressionist

I recently visited the Berlinische Galerie in Kruezberg, which boasts an excellent collection of German art from the pre-war to post-war eras. Here I wanted to track this development of German postwar art in a moment when most modern collections had been destroyed or sold off. Artists in West Berlin had more freedom of mobility in that there was less political pressure to paint a certain subject matter or in a certain style, but this interestingly left them in an ambiguous moment. To explore this further, I chose to focus on one sub-section of Berlinische’s permanent collection, titled “In the Shadow of the Wall: Painting from the 1960s to the 1980s,” which showcases both East and West German artists who were mainly focused on the anti-bourgeois movement and resisting political authority. The section itself has work by Trak Wendisch, George Baselitz, Eugen Schonebeck, and K.H. Hodicke, all Berlin-based artists from the East and West who produced works in the 60s and 70s.

Trak Wendisch, West Berlin Expressionist

Within the sub-section, I was drawn to a work by Rainer Fetting, who was a prominent figure in the West Berlin art scene. He was the founder of the Galerie am Moritzplatz, which was host to the underground art collective Neue Wilde. This group was interested in not only continuing the legacy of modern art before the disruption that Hitler caused to it, but in dissenting against the mainstream artistic culture of Berlin, which was, at this time, still riddled with Nazi-approved art in the West and Soviet Realism to the East. The work by Fetting is a depiction of the Berlin Wall called “Yellow Wall (Luckauer Straße/Sebastianstraße),” made in 1977. While the work itself is not necessarily a mish-mash of inanimate shapes and forms, and the subject matter is very clear, what is important is the way in which it is painted. It is not a hyper-realistic image - there is a certain softness and subtle haphazardness in the brushstrokes, and each line is softened, as the purple and yellow blocks of color flow between each other. What’s more is the colors themselves, which are obviously not how the Berlin Wall actually looked like to Fettering. He is taking creative liberties through the use of color to create an abstracted depiction of the wall and its moods. In my personal analysis, I see the work, while politically coded, as simple and soft geometric forms coming together in a way which represents a clear image. This is the essence of abstraction.

Fettering, "Yellow Wall (Luckauer Straße/Sebastianstraße)"

West Berlin’s artistic relationship with this style of painting, referred to as Expressionism, is interesting in that expressionism was used as a form which moved German art history forward in one of the only places it could really thrive. Abstraction in West Berlin has been referred to as the “language of liberty:” with a strong history of modern censorship on its heels, and a mainstream culture to the East which denounced abstraction, West Berlin artists were privileged enough to be able to exercise this type of expression. At the same time, West Berlin artists, like the students of the 60s and 70s, were not immune to the draw of resistance and dissent. They resisted their past, the remnants of which still existed in society, and the present plights of the artists in East Berlin who were under severe censorship.