German Art in the 20th Century: Die Bruecke to Baselitz

Overview

When Georg Baselitz and Eugen Schonebeck published their „Pandemonium Manifesto‟ in 1961, days after the closing of the Berlin Wall, they deliberately harked back to a tradition of avant-gardism in Germany initiated by the Expressionist movements of the first decade of the century. The aim of this course is to raise questions about the nature of such continuities. It will plot the emergence of Expressionism and then chart its destiny through the massive upheavals that the country underwent, from Wilhelmine Empire to Weimar Republic, Fascist state to Cold War division. The course will make a particular feature, therefore, of moments of rupture. The reaction of artists to the First World War will be discussed, particularly the manner in which it terminated some of the utopian aspirations of Expressionists and gave rise to the culturally critical Dada groups. Similarly, the emergence of a distinct Nazi discourse in the arts will be tackled, leading up to the Degenerate Art exhibitions of 1937. The final stages of the course will explore the East/West division of Germany post 1945, not only politically but artistically, where socialist realism and abstraction were played off against one another. Here we may consider the significance of the recovery of the artistic past in Neo-Expressionism but also the first attempts by artists, such as Kiefer and Beuys, to address the historical legacy of the avant-garde.

Aims

By the end of the module students should have acquired the following:

• knowledge of the major developments in German art over the course of the 20th Century
• an understanding of the socio-political conditions which gave rise to German modernism, led to its suppression and shaped its subsequent reception and revival
• an awareness of the problems of national, racial and political identities as they pertain to German art in the 20th Century
• an understanding of the methodological problems of tracing continuities in German art across the 20th Century