Walking Through Two Germanys

One of the things I like about the exhibition is that it upends our preconceptions, and there is ambiguity. If I could feel that there are a couple of contributions the show would make, one is to bust open the familiar binaries. The other is to [challenge the belief] that all 20th-century German art is expressionist in nature. It’s also not all about painting. I think those are three things I hope that the show challenges.

This room [No. 2] was the hardest to install, and it has become, in a way, my favorite room just because you see all the threads right here. We’re now in the 1950s. You now have an East and a West, two different states, two different countries. You have the utopian East bringing together workers in this kind of intense activity to build up the city. [For example, Otto Nagel’s Junger Maurer (Mauerlehrling Wolfgang Plath), (Young Bricklayer {Apprentice Wolfgang Plath}) (1953)] We’ve seen the destruction in the previous room. Suddenly these Socialist Realist paintings, which have been the untouchable, you know, that’s the stuff that nobody ever really wanted to look at. Suddenly it doesn’t look quite so evil or threatening. You begin to look at it and you say, “Well, how different is this from some American art in the 1930s?”

Wolfgang Mattheuer, Kain (Cain) (1965)

Werner TÅbke, Lebenserinnerungen des Dr. jur. Schulze III 2

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More About

• Gerhard Richter
• Auschwitz-Birkenau
• Dresden
• Visual Arts
• Cultural History

I was going to say, what does this remind of? It looks like ...

Norman Rockwell. Some of it is a little bit more heroic than others, but it’s not the bogeyman everybody has kind of been making it out to be. That’s going on in the East. In the West you’ve got a number of artists finding a kind of existential abstract nothingness, if you will, looking to France to art that’s familiar. So you have works like this [Karl Otto Götz, 16.12.52 (1952)] or [Gerhard Hoehme, Essor en Décline (Progress in Decline) (1958)]. Then we have some things that kind of bust it open. My favorite is Herman Glöckner, who I didn’t know about and found while looking in Dresden in the ’80s [Hermann Glöckner, View of Installation of Glöckner objects as exhibited at LACMA, 2008].

Are these the secret pieces?

Yes. There was no unemployment in East Germany, so basically his job was doing little decorations on buildings, but this was his private work. I call them sketches, sculptural sketches. They’re not intended as maquettes for bigger works — but it’s keeping the brain nimble. It’s keeping the fingers nimble. Whether it’s made out of matchbooks or letters, wood, some of it comes out of constructivist sensibility. Some of it comes out of the Dada sensibility, and some of it’s just the sheer practicality of what materials are at hand whether it’s a laundry detergent box, eyeglasses, string, wire, coffeepot.

This was just in a box?

It was in this big cabinet. You opened the door and it was like almost falling out. I just thought, “I want to bring this to Los Angeles,” and what I love is that it totally upends the expectation. It was going on at the same time that this stuff is being made and it’s as powerful and as poignant and as experimental as one could be. It just confounds one’s expectations. By the same token, when you go to the West, there’s a painter like Konrad Klapheck, who, as most artists were working like this [expressionistically], takes these household objects, which are from the mid-’50s, and elevates them, puts them on these plain backgrounds and celebrates them [Der Wille zur Macht (The Will to Power) (1959) and Die gekränkte Braut (The Offended Bride) (1957)]. For him, this is like a male-female thing. Also if you look at the title of this, it’s called The Will to Power, which of course is a kind of perversion of Nietzsche. Certainly when it was made, this is 10 years after the end of the war, there’s no question that when people looked at these things [the keyboard] they saw the kind of formations you would see in Leni Riefenstahl films.

Is he reacting against the sort of expressionist work being done in West Germany?

Yes, he’s totally reacting against it. He said, “I’m not interested in that.”

Did he ever do any?

Yes, he did. I found some early material. He was born in ’35 so he’s not old. He’s in his late 20s when he’s doing this, so there’s kind of what I’d call student work that looks like [expressionism]. He did his first one of these in 1955.

It’s so wildly different from everything else we’re seeing.

I think photography is another really powerful part of the show. This is West German photography in the 1950s at the time of the so-called economic miracle, when it was infused by money from the Marshall Plan. Everybody suddenly was flush and buying all kinds of things. This guy Chargesheimermade this slightly critical photography in the 1950s, and again it’s really interesting [Beim Einkaufen (While Shopping) (1958)]. This is East German photography, same time.