Author: April A. Eisman
Publisher: Camden House (NY)
ISBN: 164014031X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 282
Book Description
Introduction : Why Heisig matters -- From the Nazi past to the Cold War present -- Art for an educated nation -- Against the wall : murals, modern art, and controversy -- The contentious emergence of the "Leipzig school"--Portraying workers and revolutionaries -- Conclusion : the quintessential German artist
Bernhard Heisig and the Fight for Modern Art in East Germany
Author: April A. Eisman
Publisher: Camden House (NY)
ISBN: 164014031X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 282
Book Description
Introduction : Why Heisig matters -- From the Nazi past to the Cold War present -- Art for an educated nation -- Against the wall : murals, modern art, and controversy -- The contentious emergence of the "Leipzig school"--Portraying workers and revolutionaries -- Conclusion : the quintessential German artist
Publisher: Camden House (NY)
ISBN: 164014031X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 282
Book Description
Introduction : Why Heisig matters -- From the Nazi past to the Cold War present -- Art for an educated nation -- Against the wall : murals, modern art, and controversy -- The contentious emergence of the "Leipzig school"--Portraying workers and revolutionaries -- Conclusion : the quintessential German artist
Picturing Socialism
Author: J. R. Jenkins
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350067156
Category : Design
Languages : en
Pages : 265
Book Description
This vibrant history of the former German Democratic Republic's public art reveals a barely known but visually and theoretically rich cultural legacy. Picturing Socialism shows how works of art and design in the urban spaces of East Germany were the site of a sustained struggle between practitioners, critics and political leaders. This was not the oft-assumed conflict between artistic freedom and political dogma; at stake was the self-identity of the republic as socialist. Art and its relationship to architecture functioned as the testing ground for East Germany's relationship to socialist realism and modernism against the backdrop of Cold War competition from the neighbouring Federal Republic. Picturing Socialism makes a timely contribution to the recent groundswell of interest in the legacy of East Germany's art and architecture, illuminating and elucidating the public art which has been lost or remains under threat since unification in 1990.
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350067156
Category : Design
Languages : en
Pages : 265
Book Description
This vibrant history of the former German Democratic Republic's public art reveals a barely known but visually and theoretically rich cultural legacy. Picturing Socialism shows how works of art and design in the urban spaces of East Germany were the site of a sustained struggle between practitioners, critics and political leaders. This was not the oft-assumed conflict between artistic freedom and political dogma; at stake was the self-identity of the republic as socialist. Art and its relationship to architecture functioned as the testing ground for East Germany's relationship to socialist realism and modernism against the backdrop of Cold War competition from the neighbouring Federal Republic. Picturing Socialism makes a timely contribution to the recent groundswell of interest in the legacy of East Germany's art and architecture, illuminating and elucidating the public art which has been lost or remains under threat since unification in 1990.
Virtual Walls?
Author: Franziska Lys
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 157113980X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 214
Book Description
A reassessment of the journey Germans in East and West have taken during the past two and a half decades: even today, an open-ended, unfinished journey.
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 157113980X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 214
Book Description
A reassessment of the journey Germans in East and West have taken during the past two and a half decades: even today, an open-ended, unfinished journey.
Prussia in the Historical Culture of the German Democratic Republic
Author: Marcus Colla
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192865900
Category : Germany
Languages : en
Pages : 324
Book Description
No example demonstrates the fluidity of the past within the German Democratic Republic more powerfully than the history of the Prussian state. Initially attacked in East German official histories as the historical engine of German militarism and reaction, Prussia underwent a remarkabletransformation in official and public memory from around the end of the 1970s. This was the so-called 'Prussia-Renaissance', in which, for the first time, the East German state began to recognise and even celebrate figures from Prussian history who had not served a 'progressive' agenda. But the'Prussia-Renaissance' was also a political and cultural phenomenon with a wide public resonance. The 'Prussia-Renaissance' may have been a relatively short-lived phenomenon, but it evidently opened a deep vein in the historical memory of the German Democratic Republic that defied reduction to 'highpolitics' alone. This book asks why.Using the case study of Prussia, Marcus Colla presents a multi-perspective approach to the way that a distinctive 'historical culture' was constructed in the German Democratic Republic. It not only evaluates the roles played by political figures, historians, and cultural elites, but also heritagepreservationists, exhibition curators, heimat museums, television producers, novelists and playwrights, and singers - the purveyors of what we might more generally term 'popular culture'. In essence, Colla poses four fundamental questions for our understanding of life, politics and culture incommunist East Germany: how was history there made? How was it understood? How was it contested? And how was it used?
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192865900
Category : Germany
Languages : en
Pages : 324
Book Description
No example demonstrates the fluidity of the past within the German Democratic Republic more powerfully than the history of the Prussian state. Initially attacked in East German official histories as the historical engine of German militarism and reaction, Prussia underwent a remarkabletransformation in official and public memory from around the end of the 1970s. This was the so-called 'Prussia-Renaissance', in which, for the first time, the East German state began to recognise and even celebrate figures from Prussian history who had not served a 'progressive' agenda. But the'Prussia-Renaissance' was also a political and cultural phenomenon with a wide public resonance. The 'Prussia-Renaissance' may have been a relatively short-lived phenomenon, but it evidently opened a deep vein in the historical memory of the German Democratic Republic that defied reduction to 'highpolitics' alone. This book asks why.Using the case study of Prussia, Marcus Colla presents a multi-perspective approach to the way that a distinctive 'historical culture' was constructed in the German Democratic Republic. It not only evaluates the roles played by political figures, historians, and cultural elites, but also heritagepreservationists, exhibition curators, heimat museums, television producers, novelists and playwrights, and singers - the purveyors of what we might more generally term 'popular culture'. In essence, Colla poses four fundamental questions for our understanding of life, politics and culture incommunist East Germany: how was history there made? How was it understood? How was it contested? And how was it used?
German Division as Shared Experience
Author: Erica Carter
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1789202434
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 318
Book Description
Despite the nearly three decades since German reunification, there remains little understanding of the ways in which experiences overlapped across East-West divides. German Division as Shared Experience considers everyday life across the two Germanies, using perspectives from history, literary and cultural studies, anthropology and art history to explore how interconnections as well as fractures between East and West Germany after 1945 were experienced, lived and felt. Through its novel approach to historical method, the volume points to new understandings of the place of narrative, form and lived sensibility in shaping Germans’ simultaneously shared and separate experiences of belonging during forty years of division from 1945 to 1990.
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1789202434
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 318
Book Description
Despite the nearly three decades since German reunification, there remains little understanding of the ways in which experiences overlapped across East-West divides. German Division as Shared Experience considers everyday life across the two Germanies, using perspectives from history, literary and cultural studies, anthropology and art history to explore how interconnections as well as fractures between East and West Germany after 1945 were experienced, lived and felt. Through its novel approach to historical method, the volume points to new understandings of the place of narrative, form and lived sensibility in shaping Germans’ simultaneously shared and separate experiences of belonging during forty years of division from 1945 to 1990.
Free Berlin
Author: Briana J. Smith
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262047195
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 329
Book Description
An alternative history of art in Berlin, detaching artistic innovation from art world narratives and connecting it instead to collective creativity and social solidarity. In pre- and post-reunification Berlin, socially engaged artists championed collective art making and creativity over individual advancement, transforming urban space and civic life in the process. During the Cold War, the city’s state of exception invited artists on both sides of the Wall to detour from artistic tradition; post-Wall, art became a tool of resistance against the orthodoxy of economic growth. In Free Berlin, Briana Smith explores the everyday peculiarities, collective joys, and grassroots provocations of experimental artists in late Cold War Berlin and their legacy in today’s city. These artists worked intentionally outside the art market, believing that art should be everywhere, freed from its confinement in museums and galleries. They used art as a way to imagine new forms of social and creative life. Smith introduces little-known artists including West Berlin feminist collective Black Chocolate, the artist duo paint the town red (p.t.t.r), and the Office for Unusual Events, creators of satirical urban political theater, as well as East Berlin action art and urban interventionists Erhard Monden, Kurt Buchwald, and others. Artists and artist-led urban coalitions in 1990s Berlin carried on the participatory spirit of the late Cold War, with more overt forms of protest and collaboration at the neighborhood level. The temperament lives on in twenty-first century Berlin, animating artists’ resolve to work outside the market and citizens’ spirited defenses of green spaces, affordable housing, and collectivist projects. With Free Berlin, Smith offers an alternative history of art in Berlin, detaching artistic innovation from art world narratives and connecting it instead to Berliners’ historic embrace of care, solidarity, and cooperation.
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262047195
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 329
Book Description
An alternative history of art in Berlin, detaching artistic innovation from art world narratives and connecting it instead to collective creativity and social solidarity. In pre- and post-reunification Berlin, socially engaged artists championed collective art making and creativity over individual advancement, transforming urban space and civic life in the process. During the Cold War, the city’s state of exception invited artists on both sides of the Wall to detour from artistic tradition; post-Wall, art became a tool of resistance against the orthodoxy of economic growth. In Free Berlin, Briana Smith explores the everyday peculiarities, collective joys, and grassroots provocations of experimental artists in late Cold War Berlin and their legacy in today’s city. These artists worked intentionally outside the art market, believing that art should be everywhere, freed from its confinement in museums and galleries. They used art as a way to imagine new forms of social and creative life. Smith introduces little-known artists including West Berlin feminist collective Black Chocolate, the artist duo paint the town red (p.t.t.r), and the Office for Unusual Events, creators of satirical urban political theater, as well as East Berlin action art and urban interventionists Erhard Monden, Kurt Buchwald, and others. Artists and artist-led urban coalitions in 1990s Berlin carried on the participatory spirit of the late Cold War, with more overt forms of protest and collaboration at the neighborhood level. The temperament lives on in twenty-first century Berlin, animating artists’ resolve to work outside the market and citizens’ spirited defenses of green spaces, affordable housing, and collectivist projects. With Free Berlin, Smith offers an alternative history of art in Berlin, detaching artistic innovation from art world narratives and connecting it instead to Berliners’ historic embrace of care, solidarity, and cooperation.
Paper Revolutions
Author: Sarah E. James
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262046563
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 397
Book Description
The experimental practices of a group of artists in the former East Germany upends assumptions underpinning Western art’s postwar histories. In Paper Revolutions, Sarah James offers a radical rethinking of experimental art in the former East Germany (the GDR). Countering conventional accounts that claim artistic practices in the GDR were isolated and conservative, James introduces a new narrative of neo-avantgarde practice in the Eastern Bloc that subverts many of the assumptions underpinning Western art’s postwar histories. She grounds her argument in the practice of four artists who, uniquely positioned outside academies, museums, and the art market, as these functioned in the West, created art in the blind spots of state censorship. They championed ephemeral practices often marginalized by art history: postcards and letters, maquettes and models, portfolios and artists’ books. Through their “lived modernism,” they produced bodies of work animated by the radical legacies of the interwar avant-garde. James examines the work and daily practices of the constructivist graphic artist, painter, and sculptor Hermann Glöckner; the experimental graphic artist and concrete and sound poet Carlfriedrich Claus; the mail artist, concrete poet, and conceptual artist Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt; and the mail artist, “visual poet,” and installation artist Karla Sachse. She shows that all of these artists rejected the idea of art as a commodity or a rarefied object, and instead believed in the potential of art to create collectivized experiences and change the world. James argues that these artists, entirely neglected by Western art history, produced some of the most significant experimental art to emerge from Germany during the Cold War.
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262046563
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 397
Book Description
The experimental practices of a group of artists in the former East Germany upends assumptions underpinning Western art’s postwar histories. In Paper Revolutions, Sarah James offers a radical rethinking of experimental art in the former East Germany (the GDR). Countering conventional accounts that claim artistic practices in the GDR were isolated and conservative, James introduces a new narrative of neo-avantgarde practice in the Eastern Bloc that subverts many of the assumptions underpinning Western art’s postwar histories. She grounds her argument in the practice of four artists who, uniquely positioned outside academies, museums, and the art market, as these functioned in the West, created art in the blind spots of state censorship. They championed ephemeral practices often marginalized by art history: postcards and letters, maquettes and models, portfolios and artists’ books. Through their “lived modernism,” they produced bodies of work animated by the radical legacies of the interwar avant-garde. James examines the work and daily practices of the constructivist graphic artist, painter, and sculptor Hermann Glöckner; the experimental graphic artist and concrete and sound poet Carlfriedrich Claus; the mail artist, concrete poet, and conceptual artist Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt; and the mail artist, “visual poet,” and installation artist Karla Sachse. She shows that all of these artists rejected the idea of art as a commodity or a rarefied object, and instead believed in the potential of art to create collectivized experiences and change the world. James argues that these artists, entirely neglected by Western art history, produced some of the most significant experimental art to emerge from Germany during the Cold War.
Parallel Public
Author: Sara Blaylock
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262046636
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 329
Book Description
How East German artists made their country’s experimental art scene a form of (counter) public life. Experimental artists in the final years of the German Democratic Republic did not practice their art in the shadows, on the margins, hiding away from the Stasi’s prying eyes. In fact, as Sara Blaylock shows, many cultivated a critical influence over the very bureaucracies meant to keep them in line, undermining state authority through forthright rather than covert projects. In Parallel Public, Blaylock describes how some East German artists made their country’s experimental art scene a form of (counter) public life, creating an alternative to the crumbling collective underpinnings of the state. Blaylock examines the work of artists who used body-based practices—including performance, film, and photography—to create new vocabularies of representation, sharing their projects through independent networks of dissemination and display. From the collective films and fashion shows of Erfurt's Women Artists Group, which fused art with feminist political action, to Gino Hahnemann, the queer filmmaker and poet who set nudes alight in city parks, these creators were as bold in their ventures as they were indifferent to state power. Parallel Public is the first work of its kind on experimental art in East Germany to be written in English. Blaylock draws on extensive interviews with artists, art historians, and organizers; artist-made publications; official reports from the Union of Fine Artists; and Stasi surveillance records. As she recounts the role culture played in the GDR’s rapid decline, she reveals East German artists as dissenters and witnesses, citizens and agents, their work both antidote to and diagnosis of a weakening state.
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262046636
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 329
Book Description
How East German artists made their country’s experimental art scene a form of (counter) public life. Experimental artists in the final years of the German Democratic Republic did not practice their art in the shadows, on the margins, hiding away from the Stasi’s prying eyes. In fact, as Sara Blaylock shows, many cultivated a critical influence over the very bureaucracies meant to keep them in line, undermining state authority through forthright rather than covert projects. In Parallel Public, Blaylock describes how some East German artists made their country’s experimental art scene a form of (counter) public life, creating an alternative to the crumbling collective underpinnings of the state. Blaylock examines the work of artists who used body-based practices—including performance, film, and photography—to create new vocabularies of representation, sharing their projects through independent networks of dissemination and display. From the collective films and fashion shows of Erfurt's Women Artists Group, which fused art with feminist political action, to Gino Hahnemann, the queer filmmaker and poet who set nudes alight in city parks, these creators were as bold in their ventures as they were indifferent to state power. Parallel Public is the first work of its kind on experimental art in East Germany to be written in English. Blaylock draws on extensive interviews with artists, art historians, and organizers; artist-made publications; official reports from the Union of Fine Artists; and Stasi surveillance records. As she recounts the role culture played in the GDR’s rapid decline, she reveals East German artists as dissenters and witnesses, citizens and agents, their work both antidote to and diagnosis of a weakening state.
The Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures
Author: Aga Skrodzka
Publisher:
ISBN: 019088553X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 799
Book Description
Looking at monuments, murals, computer games, recycling campaigns, children's books, and other visual artifacts, The Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures reassesses communism's historical and cultural legacy.
Publisher:
ISBN: 019088553X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 799
Book Description
Looking at monuments, murals, computer games, recycling campaigns, children's books, and other visual artifacts, The Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures reassesses communism's historical and cultural legacy.
Entangled Art Histories in Ukraine
Author: Stefaniia Demchuk
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040230598
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 264
Book Description
This book explores ideologies, conflicts and ideas that underpinned art historical writing in Ukraine in the 20th century. Disciplinary beginnings testify both to its deep connection to Krakow, Saint Petersburg and especially Vienna with its school of art history and originality of theoretical thought. Art history started as another imperial project in Ukraine, but ultimately transformed into the means of assertion of national identity. The volume looks closely at the continuity and ruptures in scholarship caused by the establishment of Soviet power and challenges a number of existing stereotypes like total isolation under Communist rule and strict adherence to a Marxist-Leninist methodology. It showcases intellectual exchanges through published work, personal contacts and ways to resist the politically enforced methodology. Despite keeping the focus on one country, it contributes to understanding the development of art history as an academic discipline in Europe more generally. It also uncovers unknown or little-researched personal and academic connections between art historians from Ukraine and their peers abroad. Starting with the 19th-century quest for the method and proceeding by disentangling the complexities of the 20th century, the authors move on to the specifics of historiography after the formal collapse of the USSR. The volume transgresses purely academic boundaries and tackles the development of the discourse in periodicals, exhibition spaces and public discussions. Thus, the findings will be pertinent to all interested in politics, art history, museum studies, intellectual history, historiography and Eastern European studies.
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040230598
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 264
Book Description
This book explores ideologies, conflicts and ideas that underpinned art historical writing in Ukraine in the 20th century. Disciplinary beginnings testify both to its deep connection to Krakow, Saint Petersburg and especially Vienna with its school of art history and originality of theoretical thought. Art history started as another imperial project in Ukraine, but ultimately transformed into the means of assertion of national identity. The volume looks closely at the continuity and ruptures in scholarship caused by the establishment of Soviet power and challenges a number of existing stereotypes like total isolation under Communist rule and strict adherence to a Marxist-Leninist methodology. It showcases intellectual exchanges through published work, personal contacts and ways to resist the politically enforced methodology. Despite keeping the focus on one country, it contributes to understanding the development of art history as an academic discipline in Europe more generally. It also uncovers unknown or little-researched personal and academic connections between art historians from Ukraine and their peers abroad. Starting with the 19th-century quest for the method and proceeding by disentangling the complexities of the 20th century, the authors move on to the specifics of historiography after the formal collapse of the USSR. The volume transgresses purely academic boundaries and tackles the development of the discourse in periodicals, exhibition spaces and public discussions. Thus, the findings will be pertinent to all interested in politics, art history, museum studies, intellectual history, historiography and Eastern European studies.