Art history is a messy business. And the urge to clean it up is irresistible, especially in the period of the Cold War in Germany.
No surprise, then, that the most common shorthand for art produced in the divided nation goes something like this: East German artists made retrograde figurative work in the service of a repressive government; West Germans produced progressive abstractions under the freedom of democracy.
"That's the binary that has governed so much of the discussion," says Stephanie Barron, senior curator of modern art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. "The other familiar trope is that everything from Germany is Expressionism -- the notion that the loaded brush, the Expressionist gesture, is all that connotes German art."
Such stereotypes disintegrate in "Art of Two Germanys/Cold War Cultures," opening today at LACMA's Broad Contemporary Art Museum. Barron and her German co-curator, Eckhart Gillen of Kulturprojekte Berlin GmbH, have selected about 300 works by 125 artists -- paintings, sculptures, photographs, multiples, videos, installations and books -- that blur national borders and upend art historical assumptions.
The third landmark exhibition of German 20th century art that Barron has organized for the museum in the last 20 years, "Two Germanys" is rooted in " 'Degenerate Art': The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany," a 1991 examination of an infamous attack on Modern art, and "Exiles and Emigres: The Flight of European Artists From Hitler," a 1997 show that tracked the migration of artists who fled Nazi rule. The latest project presents art from East and West Germany, which shared a devastating history but operated under separate political systems from 1945 to 1989.
Instead of setting up an East-West divide, as might be expected, Barron has taken a chronological approach to what turns out to be a very complicated story. Neither a battle between opposing cultural doctrines nor a unified chorus of Expressionist angst, "Two Germanys" is an outpouring of creative energy and frustration "seen through the lens of the Cold War," she says.
The focus is far from tight, though. Visitors will find Socialist Realist paintings along with abstractions, Constructivist objects, Pop art, assemblage, technical experiments, photographs of ordinary people and relics of the Autoperforationists, a group of Dresden performance artists who used their bodies as art material. The artworks all respond to the legacy of Nazism and postwar political events, but from a variety of perspectives.
