People and Environments

Social Realities between Distance and Partisanship

02/03—11/05/25

 

Walter Ballhause, Hans Baluschek, Rudolf Bergander, Günter Brendel, Jutta Damme, Henri Deparade, Andreas Dress, Erich Gerlach, Otto Griebel, George Grosz, Hans Grundig, Lea Grundig, Clemens Gröszer, Ulrich Hachulla, Sella Hasse, Josef Hegenbarth, Albert Hennig, Eugen Hoffmann, Thea Kowař, Bernhard Kretzschmar, Rolf Kuhrt, Wilhelm Lachnit, Max Lingner, Harald Metzkes, Paul Michaelis, Gustav Alfred Müller, Peter Schnürpel, Harald K. Schulze, Joachim Völkner, Doris Ziegler, Heinrich Zille

 

When the Kaiser abdicated in Germany in 1918, he left behind a society in conditions similar to civil war, high mountains of debt and masses of dead and war wounded. The years up to 1923 were dominated by hyperinflation, which plunged large parts of the working class into poverty and misery. These German circumstances of the 1920s had a formative influence on contemporary artists. While young art in the Empire – such as the Berlin Secession – was still dominated by Impressionism, Expressionism and Symbolism, this changed drastically in the Weimar period. For artists such as Hans Grundig, Lea Grundig, George Grosz and Rudolf Bergander, the subject of their art was no longer a subjective experience of the world or the repressed content in the unconscious, but rather the objective social conditions.

 

The exhibition shows exclusively works from the BLMK collection and follows a line of realistic tendencies from the turn of the 19th to the 20th century to the late GDR.

 

During the Weimar period, artists from the SPD and KPD environments typically devoted themselves to social issues in art. In particular, the impressions in the streets and alleys of the impoverished urban working-class milieus were portrayed. The damp and dark dwellings, the rampant unemployment, war wounds and also the arduous housework of women thus become motifs in New Objectivity and Critical Realism. The respective artistic attitude can range from an objective description to cynical criticism.

 

These artists were branded as „degenerate“ during the National Socialist regime and forced into exile or underground. Some later took on teaching positions in the art institutions of the young GDR and worked on developing new visual worlds. However, the form and content of the works changed significantly; The subject of the works was no longer social contradictions. Rather, the depictions strive to harmonize social subsystems such as politics, work, technology and private life. The focus is on the ideal of a well-educated worker in socialism who exercises control over complex machines, discusses things and pursues carefree leisure activities.

 

In the course of the 1970s, a new generation of artists emerged in the GDR who now took a distanced look at their social environment. Artists such as Henri Deparade and Joachim Völkner still depict scenes from social life, but use an overall more open and enigmatic visual language. Clemens Gröszer takes up veristic tendencies again, both stylistically and in terms of content. Typical of this is the thematization of social outsiders, as well as a nihilistic urbanity that is covered by an ecstatic surface.