Utopia and Decline: East German art finally comes in from the cold

Unlike their western counterparts, artists in East Germany could make a good living painting – as long as they painted what the state wanted. William Cook is in Dusseldorf for an exhibition of these rare and long-forgotten works

‘The Red Bull’, 1944-1961, by Elisabeth Voigt (Museum der bildenden Künste Leipzig)

In the Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf, a grand Art Deco gallery beside the River Rhine, German president Frank-Walter Steinmeier is opening an exhibition of East German Art. The huge hall is crowded with sleek Teutonic VIPs. Thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, this is the first major survey of East German Art mounted since German reunification. But why is it happening here, in one of Germany’s most westerly cities, so far from Eastern Germany? And why have we had to wait so long to see this forgotten, forbidden art?

Growing up half German in Cold War Britain, the child of two artists, from my earliest years I was immersed in German art. My uncle was an artist too, a student at the Düsseldorf Kunstakademie (one of Germany’s leading art schools) under the great German artist and iconoclast Joseph Beuys. From what my parents told me, I soon became aware that there was a revolution sweeping through German art. Young West German artists (particularly at Düsseldorf’s Kunstakademie) were confronting the horrors of the Third Reich and the guilty amnesia of the postwar years, in which Germans worked hard, lived the good life and tried to forget about their awful past.

The result of this uneasy toil was the Wirtschaftswunder (Economic Miracle) which transformed West Germany from a pile of rubble into Europe’s most prosperous nation. Yet something important got lost along the way. West Germans had embraced materialism, aping the brash consumerism of the United States, in an attempt to forget about what happened between 1933 and 1945. A new generation of West German artists were now addressing this omission, especially in Düsseldorf. Many of these artists (Georg Baselitz, Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke…) had fled here from the East.