Being an artist in postwar West Germany meant being part of a “lost generation”. This was on account of a major aesthetic disruption — first, from having been removed from the modernist continuum by Hitler and his cultural commissars, only to be plunged back into it after an extended absence. The past buried twice over. The result was a sense of alienation, of feeling culturally adrift, hopelessly provincial. What to paint in the West Germany of the 1950s? A number of artists opted for Abstract Expressionism, since that was the favored international style of the day. But somehow - what, with all its heroic and romantic and subjective underpinnings - it didn’t feel right. And adopting some mode of art brut-styled shabbiness or art informel neo-primitivism was problematic for a whole different set of reasons. It all seemed dismally inadequate and second-hand. So to be an artist in postwar West Germany meant having to find your own way, devising new methods and means of reconnecting with the surrounding culture — a new iconography for articulating the times.
Interestingly enough, a number of prominent postwar West German artists were defectors from the former East Germany. This was the case with the artists Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter, who - having learned their painterly chops under the state-mandated, institutionalized style of Socialist Realism - met in the early 1960s and began trading ideas. Between the two of them and a third artist by the name of Konrad Lueg, they soon cooked up a platform for their own mode of production — one based in the visual language of advertising, which they christened “Capitalist Realism.” The way they saw it, it all amounted to one form of propaganda or another in the end.
(Source: marathonpacks, via hardcorefornerds)
5 months ago