Germany painting
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The painting of Germany is that which has been produced in the territory that is part of the German Federal State, or by artists born there. The miniatures made in a German workshop in the Carolingian era can be understood as the initial moment of German painting. The Golden Age of German painting is known as the XVI century, with the work of two leading painters, such as Alberto Dürer and Hans Holbein the Younger, and many other notable masters such as Lucas Cranach the Elder and Albrecht Altdorfer. In the romantic era, the Nazarenes and landscape painters such as Caspar David Friedrich stood out. Finally, in the XX century, German artists led the expressionist movement, especially in its second generation and are at the origin from other avant-garde currents such as Dadaism or Surrealism.
Middle Ages
Carolingian and Ottonian Art
The earliest pictorial works are found in Carolingian art, particularly its miniatures. Carolingian art was the earliest form of Germanic art. Charlemagne, as the representative of Rome, intended to make a renaissance of Roman art and culture in the West. Distancing himself from the iconoclasm of the Byzantine Empire, Charlemagne admitted the use of images in artistic works, highlighting the importance of the illumination of ancient manuscripts throughout the Carolingian territory. Of all this scope, in what is now Germany, smaller workshops were located in the Hesse area, such as the one in Fulda and the one in Lorsch Abbey (Hesse). In his scriptorium the so-called Codex Aureus of Lorsch (778 - 820) was elaborated.
At the time there were frescoes in churches and palaces, but most of them no longer exist. Charlemagne's Palace in Aachen (North Rhine-Westphalia) contained wall paintings narrating wars in Spain. The Palace of Ludovico Pío in Ingelheim (Rhineland-Palatinate) contained historical images from antiquity and from the time of Charlemagne. Other fragments of paintings can be found in Rhineland-Palatinate (Koblenz and Trier), Hesse (Lorsch and Fulda), and North Rhine-Westphalia (Cologne and Corvey).
A more uniquely German painting developed from the X century with the rise of Ottonian art. Like all Western painting, it was initially marked by the creation of illuminated manuscripts. Princes and the High Clergy promoted this aristocratic artistic creation. This art starts from the Carolingian models, as can be appreciated for their expressiveness, and in details such as the layout of the canons, the gold letters and the purple backgrounds. But, thanks in particular to Empress Theophane, wife of Otto II, the Byzantine influence is received, gaining images in solemnity and expanding the iconography with very careful characters in scenes from the Bible. Splendid manuscripts, enriched with illuminations, were produced in a whole series of monastic schools. The monastery of Reichenau (Island of Lake Constance, in the state of Baden-Württemberg) stands out for its importance, which not only made splendid miniatures, but also bound the works with ivory and precious stones. The Codex Egberti, currently in the Treveris library, and a series of works, such as the Evangeliarios de Otto II, related to the miniaturist Liutardo, belong to this school. There were other desks at this time, such as those in Trier, Cologne (which stood out for its brilliant use of colour), Corvey, Hildesheim (Rhineland-Palatinate), Fulda, Regensburg or Tegernsee (Bavaria). The double influence, Carolingian and Byzantine, can also be found in the wall paintings of the period, although it is true that few are preserved: the frescoes of Saint George in Oberzell in Reichenau (Baden-Württemberg) and in Goldbach near Überlingen also on Lake Constance.
Romanesque
There are also Romanesque wall paintings, with lingering Ottonian and Byzantine influences. One of the centers for mural painting was Regensburg, but few works survived. Of what has remained, the paintings of Schwarzrheindorf (double church near Bonn), Saint Gideon of Cologne and the Last Judgment of Oberzell (Reichenau) deserve to be highlighted.
Gothic
In the XIV century the linear Gothic or Franco-Gothic style was introduced in Germany, examples of which are miniatures such as the Passionary of Cunegonda or the Biblia Pauperum, with rich iconography. But the first panel paintings already appear, such as the diptych of the Virgin in the Berlin Museum. The second phase of Gothic, that of Italian influence, is exemplified in the Hamburg Altarpiece (1379), by the severe master Bertram de Minden.
In the following century, the art of creating illuminations declined and the making of stained glass windows developed considerably. The main event of this century is the expansion of painted altarpieces throughout the territory, in a wide variety of styles. Individual names of great artists begin to be known, framed in the International Gothic style. In the first half of the century, Conrad Soest appears, a cultivator of the soft style, who worked in Westphalia and whose Niederwildungen altarpiece can be highlighted. In Hamburg he worked under master Francke, whose Altarpiece of the Navigators stands out. At this time, the city of Cologne stood out as an artistic center, to the point that there is talk of a "Cologne School", with painters such as the Master of Veronica (fl. around 1400) and, above all, Stefan Lochner. Lochner showed in his delicate works in which the influence of Flemish painting is evident, especially Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden. His two best-known works are in Cologne: the Virgin of the Rose Garden in the Wallraf-Richartz Museum and the triptych of the Adoration of the Kings (1440) in Cologne Cathedral.
After Lochner, Cologne received a strong Flemish influence, seen in the Master of the Life of the Virgin (fl. c. 1460-1480) and the Master of the Legend of Saint Ursula (fl. around 1500).
Already within the last phase of Gothic, which is the Flemish style, it is worth mentioning Hans Memling, who is believed to be German by birth and trained in the Rhineland, but developed the main part of his career in Bruges and his style it is clearly flamenco, reiterating the forms and compositions of previous artists.
From Swabia were Lukas Moser, with his remarkable altarpiece of Santa Magdalena (1431) by Tiefenbronn and Konrad Witz, in a style similar to that of the Spanish Fernando Gallego and who worked in Basel (Switzerland) from 1434 until his death; de Witz highlights the realism in the landscape that can be seen in his altarpieces. Other important artists of this period were Hans Multscher who worked in Ulm; Hans Holbein the Elder in Augsburg; the Tyrolean Michael Pacher, very close to the Italian style of the time, probably a connoisseur of Mantegna and, finally, we must mention the painter and engraver Michael Wolgemut, Dürer's teacher.
In this century XV should be highlighted the development of the art of engraving on wood, xylography, which was enormously successful after throughout the history of German painting. Two anonymous teachers, Master E.S. (fl. 1450-1467) and the Master of the Cabinet of Amsterdam are the immediate predecessors of Martin Schongauer, the most famous and most influential of engravers. Schongauer (1448-1491) developed a more individual style, characterized by delicate, curved lines, creating Mannerist, sometimes ornate images that were copied by later artists. He was also a painter, as can be seen in his Virgen de la Rosaleda .
Modern Age
Renaissance
With the Renaissance, a peculiar type of art arose in Germany, in contrast to the works created in Italy. Thus began the so-called Golden Age of German painting, with painters such as Grünewald (1470-1528), Hans Holbein, Albrecht Dürer and Lucas Cranach the Elder. The German Gothic tradition, expressionist and pathetic, is now joined by the Italian influence and the arrival of the Protestant Reformation, which causes a painting with its own personality.
The one most closely linked to the earlier Gothic tradition is Grünewald, and for this reason he is sometimes classified among the Gothic painters, or said to be somewhere between Gothic and Renaissance painting, when in fact he is a strict contemporary of Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528). Grünewald prolonged Gothic conceptions over time, in paintings that maintain the typical pathos of the primitive Germans, with rapturous attitudes and intense lights. The most notable work of this artist, described as "strange" or "visionary", is the Isemheim Altarpiece (1510), kept in the Unterlinden Museum in Colmar, with images of the Crucifixion with strange lighting and images of meats. almost rotten.
But the two internationally famous figures who stand out from the rest are Albrecht Dürer and Hans Holbein the Younger. Dürer is the quintessential German artist. Trained in Nuremberg, he travels to Italy, where he knows Venetian painting, particularly the work of Mantegna and Giovanni Bellini. Thus, in his works he merges the German Gothic style with Italian Renaissance painting. He cultivates various genres, such as religious painting (The four apostles of Munich) and nudes (Adan and Eve del Prado), as well as portraits of great psychological penetration, highlighting the self-portraits that he was making throughout his life.. In addition to oil painting, Dürer cultivated engraving, creating an infinite number of plates and images that were later widely disseminated and copied: Melancholy, the Apocalypse, the Rhinoceros, etc. Likewise, it is worth mentioning his numerous watercolors of landscapes, animals and plants, with great detail and realism, being one of the first artists of pure landscapes, that is, urban or rural scenes without the pretext of telling a story.
Hans Holbein the Younger was the son of the eponymous painter called "the Elder" of the Gothic period. In addition to the German tradition, Holbein was introduced to the work of Raphael, whose influence is evident in his Madonna paintings, such as the Burgomaster Meyer's Madonna. But if he excelled at anything, it was as a portrait painter. She spent much of his career in England, at the court of Henry VIII, photographing him, some of his wives, and courtiers such as Thomas More. His work influenced later Elizabethan portraiture that imitated his style.
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Although Hans Holbein was part of reformist circles, coming to deal with Erasmus, the German artist most closely linked to the Protestant Reformation was Lucas Cranach the Elder, a friend of some of the reformists such as Melanchthon and Luther, whom he portrayed. Apart from these portraits, the best known of his production are mythological or classical subjects, with numerous Venuses, especially when she was at the court of Saxony. These nudes are quite different from the Italian models, and are close to the Germanic Gothic representation of elongated and linear figures.
This eroticism can also be seen in the richly colored work of Hans Baldung Grien. This engraver, a disciple of Dürer, shaped a personal style, very different from that of his teacher. An engraver was also Hans Burgkmair, a disciple of Martin Schongauer who, from 1508, spent most of his time working on woodcut projects for Emperor Maximilian I until his death in 1519. He made almost half of the 135 prints of the Triumph of Maximilian.
Far away from Dürer's style and findings is Albrecht Altdorfer, founder of the so-called Danube school, who stands out above all for his way of treating the landscape, with enormous panoramic perspectives. It is, at the same time, fantastic and a bit medieval.
17th century
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Faced with the richness and diversity of painting from the previous century, in the 17th century German painting had much less importance, undoubtedly due to historical circumstances, with a Thirty Years' War (1618-1648), which devastated the German territory, reducing its population by 30%. A center of artistic production at the turn of the century was the court of Emperor Rudolf II in Prague. Artists of various nationalities worked there, including Germans trained in Italy: Johann Andreas von Düwens, Hans von Aachen and Hans Rottenhammer.
But the two most prominent artists of the time lived in Italy. Adam Elsheimer, perhaps the best known of them and whose work was admired by Pedro Pablo Rubens, worked in Rome and was influenced by Caravagism. He highlights his technique of chiaroscuro applied to the landscape of religious scenes, in which he studies the various atmospheric effects and the different lights, such as that of the Moon. In Venice lived and worked Johann Liss, trained in the Netherlands and Rome; When he moved to Venice in the early 1620s, his style changed, but it was one of the first outposts of the Baroque style in the Republic. One of his best-known works is the altarpiece of Saint Jerome inspired by the angel (1627, San Niccolò da Tolentino).
18th century
In the Rococo period, frescoes were produced above all, used as decoration in churches and palaces, influenced by Italian Baroque models and French Rococo. German Rococo architecture offered numerous opportunities for this type of illusionistic painting, especially in vaults that are often authentic trompe l'oeil, thanks to the use of stucco and gilding. In order to coherently integrate architecture, sculpture and painting, the construction and its decoration were designed at the same time; this occurred in the great Catholic churches, as well as in the palaces of princes, whether Protestant or Catholic. This decorative painting was introduced into the Central European arena thanks to the work of foreign artists, such as Andrea Pozzo who worked in Vienna and whose illusionistic frescoes strongly influenced Viennese Baroque art, with followers throughout Hungary, Bohemia, Moravia and Poland. In Germany it is worth mentioning Tiepolo, who painted in the Wurzburg residence.
But soon there were autochthonous painters who did this kind of painting. Sometimes, they were closely related to the building architect of the work or the stucco sculptor. Thus, the painter Cosmas Damian Asam could be seen working alongside his brother, the sculptor Egidio Quirino, or Johann Baptist Zimmermann alongside his brother, the architect Dominikus. There were also families of painters, such as Johannes Zick, a painter active in southern Germany, e.g. in the Bruchsal palace, and who was the father of Januarius, also a painter, who worked in the Wiblingen abbey near Ulm and in Vienna; Anton Franz Maulpertsch also worked there. Another important decorator was Matthäus Günther.
Within easel painting, mention should be made of Anton Rafael Mengs, trained in Italy and who worked both in Rome and Madrid. He cultivates various genres: the typically rococo portrait, mythological and religious scenes. Mengs is already considered as an advance of Neoclassicism. He influenced German, Italian and Spanish painting.
Contemporary age
19th century
It is not easy to separate neoclassical from romantic painting, since the transition from one to the other is not easy to determine in Germany. Asmus Jacob Carstens, for example, is considered neoclassical, but his works are rather eclectic. There is a marked predilection for the landscape genre. There were landscape painters who favored peaceful, classical landscapes, such as Joseph Anton Koch, a neoclassical artist who produced numerous paintings of mountains, his Schmadribach Waterfalls being famous.
It is possible to differentiate between the Catholic romanticism of the south and the romanticism that could be called Protestant of the north of Germany. Within the first is a group of German painters who were not within the German territory but in Rome: they are the Nazarenes. It is about a group of painters born around the year 1785 and who arrived in Rome in 1810, living in community. They tried to express their own moral and religious ideals and to revive a painting alien to academicism, receiving to varying degrees the influence of painters such as Fra Angélico, Perugino or Raphael. Overbeck and Peter von Cornelius stand out in this group and collaborated on collective works such as the fresco decoration of the house of the Prussian consul in Rome or the Villa Massimi. Over time, most of the Nazarenes returned to Germany, integrating into academic institutions, holding official positions, and creating large mural works. Thus, Wilhelm von Schadow taught in Düsseldorf and Philipp Veit in Frankfurt am Main. Only Overbeck remained in Italy.
There was, however, a second line of romanticism, that of northern Germany, symbolized in artists such as Philipp Otto Runge or Caspar David Friedrich who reflected in their paintings an immense landscape in which man is diminished, thus pretending to create a religious painting in which the greatness of divinity is evidenced. Both took as their model not the classical Italian landscape, but that of North Germany in general and the Pomeranian plains in particular. Friedrich also populated his compositions with typically romantic elements, such as ruins or cemeteries. In their time, the Nazarenes had much greater relevance and acceptance than these Heimatkünstler or "painters of the earth"; Currently, however, they are considerably appreciated.
Romanticism and realism merge in the work of Moritz von Schwind and Carl Spitzweg; the latter gives a certain humorous touch to his compositions. Erwin Speckter painted decorative works. Other notable German painters of the 19th century included Adolph von Menzel, Wilhelm Leibl, Anselm Feuerbach and Hans von Marées. Menzel was a prolific painter who cultivated various themes such as Frederick the Great's Prussia or the environment of William I's Berlin; but he reached great heights in more intimate and simple paintings, such as his Balcony Room (1845) or Gymnasium Theater (1846). On his part, Leibl is considered the most faithful follower of Courbet in Germany; At a certain point in his life, he retired to live in the countryside and portrayed rural life in the Dachau region on his canvases. Feuerbach and von Marées are among the so-called Germano-Romans, who combined classicism and romanticism, allowing themselves to be inspired by ideal environments and a certain nostalgia for Antiquity.
Within the line of a committed realism but with romantic reminiscences, is the work of Hans Thoma. There are other genres considered minor in which there was a certain development, such as xylography, in which the series on the Dance of the Dead by Alfred Rethel stood out, who, on the other hand, is the only painter outstanding of the school of historical painting of the time. He experienced the rise of the illustration of stories, highlighting Ludwig Richter and the aforementioned von Schwind.
Although other painters also cultivated the portrait, the most famous of the time, to which great figures such as William I or Bismarck resorted, was Franz von Lenbach.
French Impressionism was well received by the German public. German painters, however, were more reluctant to submerge this representation of the landscape without giving it their personal expression. Thus only one German painter is considered truly impressionist: Max Liebermann, draftsman and engraver. Sometimes Lovis Corinth and Max Slevogt are also placed within this trend.
20th century
Until 1945
The first decade of the 20th century saw the emergence of a whole series of avant-garde pictorial trends throughout Europe, as an expression of the desire to surpass the tastes of bourgeois society. The spiritual crisis is accentuated with the outbreak of the First World War. By then, expressionism had already emerged, around 1910, although there are precedents such as the portraits painted by Paula Modersohn-Becker (†1907). It is not a style with a clear center nor was it a self-conscious tendency or a unique way of doing things. In various ways, expressionism developed in Germany from then until the arrival of Nazism. Although it had a great boom in this country, the transcendental contributions of foreign painters such as Edvard Munch or Vasili Kandinski cannot be ignored. The diversity of the groups makes expressionism a peculiar avant-garde, with a great variety of styles. There is a first expressionism clearly derived from fauvism, another that is close to cubism or futurism. But some common traits can be recognized that make it possible to identify works of great power and intensity as expressionists, and this derives from morbid or forbidden themes, sometimes recreating in solitude or poverty and the subjective treatment of the theme, generally tragic but also tragic. the very technique adopted by the artists, who harden the features, apply a thick pictorial paste, which produces a sensation of intensity, sometimes even violence.
Within the first expressionist generation, Emil Nolde stands out, with violent canvases in bright colors. He was part of the group Die Brücke ("The Bridge", 1905-1913) for a time by Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and Fritz Bleyl. This group, created in Dresden and later moved to Berlin, promoted a certain return to craft techniques, emphasizing their recovery of xylography; he was influenced first by fauvism and then by cubism.
Der Blaue Reiter ("The Blue Rider", 1911-1914), is a slightly later Expressionist group, created in Munich as a result of a split from the Neue Künstler Vereiningung ("New Association of Artists"), in turn the result of other secession and reactions to previous groups. It arose around the work of Kandinski and in it the cubist and futurist features predominated more. Two young painters who died in the First World War were part of it: August Macke († 1914) and Franz Marc († 1916). Another member of the group was the Russian Alekséi von Jawlensky, who worked in Germany. He singles out this group for having given theoretical support to the expressionist movement and, furthermore, for having allowed it to deepen the path that ultimately led to abstraction. Later, some artists who were in the orbit of Blau Reiter entered the Bauhaus (Lyonel Feininger, Klee and Oskar Schlemmer).
After the brutality of World War I, the idealism of the Expressionists was rejected, adopting, as artists, two divergent paths. The first, based on the fact that after the brutality of the war, nothing had its own meaning or value, and art less than anything, led to defending the unreal, the absurd, the ridiculous or the shocking, would be the path of Dadaism. The second defended a politically compromised art: it was necessary to represent society, coldly, with distance, in all its rawness: it is the path that led, from expressionism, towards the New Objectivity. Within the various Dada groups, the one in Berlin coincided in time with the Spartacist movement and highlights a greater degree of anti-capitalist and anti-fascist political commitment than their contemporaries in other countries. The Berlin Dadaist Manifesto itself stated that in Germany "dada has taken on a certain political character" (1918). Among the new artistic methods adopted by Dada, in Berlin he highlighted the use of photomontage and painting-sculpture cultivated by Kurt Schwitters. Schwitters created a type of work that he called Merz, collages from found objects. The most original of his work were the Merzbau, columns created with plaster and other objects; The first of them was done in 1925 at his house in Hannover. In general, surrealism did not take root in Germany, although it did contribute a leading figure in the movement, such as Max Ernst; also Hans Bellmer and Richard Oelze were surrealists. Less international than all these currents was the New Objectivity, which emerged in Germany around 1922. Its leading figures were George Grosz, a former Dadaist, and Otto Dix, who painted pictures of great brutality. Dix's work influenced Hans Grundig, who mainly painted portraits of the working class. Throughout the 1920s Anton Räderscheidt painted solitary couples, posing stretched out, usually with his features and those of his wife, the painter Marta Hegemann. The influence of metaphysical painting is evident in the way the figures are raised, similar to mannequins, distanced from each other, and also from the environment.
The rise of Nazism to power in 1933 brought a brutal end to all this avant-garde art in Germany. They did not authorize the reopening of the Bauhaus if Kandinsky was not expelled, and they coined the term degenerate art (entartete kunst) as an excuse to designate all avant-garde art that the regime rejected. These works were expelled from museums, sold abroad or destroyed. Its cultivators were persecuted and prohibited from teaching and exposing their works. This caused exile, internal or external.
Later Trends
After World War II, Germany was divided into two states, the German Federal Republic in the west, capitalist, and the German Democratic Republic in the east, under the Soviet orbit; part of the eastern territory ceased to be German, becoming part of Poland or the USSR, which determined migrations from the east to the west. While socialist realism spread in communist Germany, in the West the trends of international art were followed, such as abstract art or conceptual art. The existence of official art did not prevent some Eastern artists from seeking a more personal expression. Werner Tübke (1929-2004) was one of the most prominent painters of the GDR, best known for his Bauernkriegspanorama ("Panorama of the Peasant Revolt") in Bad Frankenhausen, considered the largest painting in the world with 1,722 square meters of surface. Tübke recovered the forms of the Italian Renaissance to narrate the socialist history. Two painters and graphic artists from the Leipzig School, Bernhard Heisig (b. 1925) and Wolfgang Mattheuer (1927-2004), also stood out in East Germany. Heisig, one of the most notable Oriental painters, reacted to Socialist Realism with an aggressive style. He defended the rights of artists, and denounced the corruption of the GDR, which caused him problems with the authorities. Of his work, the enormous mural Ikarus stands out, painted for the Palast der Republik in East Berlin (1975). Wolfgang Mattheuer, for his part, is considered a leading figure of critical realism, receiving the influence of expressionism, the New Objectivity and magical realism. Finally, it should not be forgotten that many famous painters in West Germany were originally from the GDR (A. R. Penck, Georg Baselitz, Sigmar Polke or Gerhard Richter).
In post-war West Germany, the abstract current predominated intensely, first of all in the work of painters who were mythical figures who were considered degenerate art, lived through the war and did not submit to the impositions of Nazism. Prominent among them were Willi Baumeister (1889-1955), who founded Üecht, a group of artists from Stuttgart, which was part of Cercle et Carré and Abstraction-Création, and Carl Buchheister (1890-1964). Also Fritz Winter (1905-1976) saw how his art was considered degenerate and he was forbidden to exhibit his works. He fought on the Russian front, where he was taken prisoner and was not released until 1949. Ernst Wilhelm Nay (1902-1968), oriented towards surrealism in the 1930s, was also prohibited from exhibiting.
Shortly after his return, Fritz Winter co-founded the group Zen 49, which joined the European avant-garde movements. This group was created in Munich in July 1949, initially under the name Gruppe der Ungegenständlichen. The seven founding members were the aforementioned W. Baumeister and F. Winter, as well as Rolf Cavael, Gerhard Fietz, Rupprecht Geiger, Willy Hempel and Brigitte Meier-Denninghoff. Informalist Bernard Schultze (1915-2005) joined the Zen 49 group in 1955. They exhibited between 1950 and 1957. R. Geiger (b. 1908), had worked as an architect before the war, later dedicating himself to radical abstraction, and later becoming the highest representative in Germany of the painting of the color fields.
In postwar Germany, informalist currents predominated within abstract painting. They produced large canvases with “calligraphic” linear signs, with a certain automatism in the manner of the surrealists. He is represented, first of all, by two émigrés, Wols (Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze, 1913-1951), who followed the line set by Klee and Hans Hartung (1904-1989) in the mid-fifties. The painter and photographer Wols produced "automatic" oil paintings under the influence of drugs and alcohol. For his part, the German-French Hartung is one of the most prominent members of the School of Paris, which, moving away from the abstract expressionism in vogue, is inserted into informalism.
Another exponent of the abstract tendencies in postwar Germany is Georg Meistermann (1911-1990), in a line of abstraction that connects with the style of Klee and Miró. Emil Schumacher (1912-1999), for his part, makes relief paintings by adding various materials to the pictorial surface, such as pita, and then hitting them. Wols and Tachisme influence the work of Karl Otto Götz (b. 1914) and Peter Brüning (1929-1970), who represent lyrical abstraction in Germany. Fred Thieler (1916-1999), also a member of the Zen 49 group, is part of abstract neo-expressionism. Gerhard Hoehme (1920-1989) cultivated in the fifties a style close to tachism, then to lyrical abstraction and later he worked on the framework, breaking it, substituting it with other elements, evolving in the seventies towards offenes Bild ("open box"). The style of K. R. H. Sonderborg (Kurt Rudolf Hoffmann, 1923-2008) is also close to French Tachisme.
This predominance of abstraction, particularly tachism and informalism, led to a reaction among the painters themselves towards more figurative paintings. Richard Oelze (1900-1980), who in the thirties came into contact with the surrealists in Paris, supposes a reaction dominated by fantasy. Konrad Klapheck (b. 1935) draws his inspiration from surrealism and also from the New Objectivity, who in his “machine paintings” paints everyday objects such as typewriters or telephones, giving them a monumental and magical air, anticipating pop art. Klapheck calls his style "prosaic super-objectivity."
Conceptual art, which is understood to have emerged in New York in the mid-sixties, found one of its most prominent representatives in Germany: Joseph Beuys (1921-1986). He is an artist who marked his time, with a very particular conception of art that integrated art and life. Beuys resorted to found objects, mixing different materials in his creations, integrating grease and felt. He also stands out in his role as trainer of new artists at the Düsseldorf Academy of Fine Arts. Also the artist Hanne Darboven (1941-2009) who lived in New York in the sixties, represents conceptual trends.
On April 24, 1958, Heinz Mack (b. 1931) and Otto Piene (b. 1928) founded the Düsseldorf artist group called ZERO. In 1961 they were joined by Günther Uecker (b. 1930). This group caught the attention of the public for their happenings. The creativity of these kinetic artists was displayed above all in objects and installations in which light is the predominant element.
The late 1960s saw the development of an abstraction oriented towards problems of defining the nature of the image with Sigmar Polke (b. 1941) and Gerhard Richter (b. 1932). These painters did not renounce tradition and create intermediate works between realism and abstraction. In 1963 they coined the term Kapitalistischer Realismus (capitalist realism), with a certain ironic sense. His work is a critique of the consumer society: they take elements of popular culture and reproduce and manipulate them, imitate the techniques of the mass media, reiterate them, as a way of obtaining distance and showing how the citizen is treated and manipulated as a consumer. Along with this type of work, Gerhard Richter produced other neo-abstract works, experimenting with large canvases in gray tones, performing repetitive series of large gestures reminiscent of informalism or post-war gestural painting.
In the seventies, the art of West Germany reached a great international level, not only because of the many and varied artists who worked there, but also because it became the center of great artistic manifestations, such as the Kassel documenta, founded in 1955, and Art Cologne, an art fair (Kunstmarkt) in Cologne, established in 1967.
Abstraction continued to be cultivated by artists such as Günter Fruhtrunk (1923-1982, painting color fields), Raimund Girke (1930-2002, doing gestural painting in the 1970s), Gotthard Graubner (b. 1930, whose characteristic work are cushions impregnated with paint), Rainer Jochims (b. 1935), Imi Knoebel (pen name of Klaus Wolf Knoebel, Wolf Knoebel, b. 1940, creates installations) and Blinky Palermo (pen name of Peter Heisterkamp, 1943-1977, minimalist and hard edge).
The use of art as an element of social criticism is represented not only by Beuys, but also by other artists who go beyond the mere consideration of painters to be artists who use various means of expression. The first and most prominent of them is Wolf Vostell (1932-1998), painter and sculptor, who created a type of work in the fifties that he called décollage, considered a pioneer of video art and la Installation in the sixties, and which carried out happenings in which political criticism was made. In 1963 Wolf Vostell presented his Installation 6 TV Dé-coll/age at the Smollin Gallery in New York, which is now part of the Museo Reina Sofía collection. Video art found its first manifestation in Germany. It was at the Exposition of Music-Electronic Television in Wuppertal, in 1963, where Nam June Paik exhibited her works for the first time. Wolf Vostell, who is considered the creator of the first videotape in 1963, Sun in your head ("The sun in your head"). A prominent role was played by Fluxus movement with its founders George Maciunas, Nam June Paik, Wolf Vostell, Joseph Beuys, among others, in 1962. Klaus Rinke (b. 1939) dedicated himself to body art and water sculptures. Franz Erhard Walther (b. 1939), who was a student of Götz, makes constructions of the so-called process art.
But expressionism has never ceased to be a presence in German art. It has continued to be the sculptor and painter Horst Antes (b. 1936), even in his first works of a character close to informalism; His work is characterized by the presence of the form Kopffüßler ("cephalopod"), which he discovered around 1960 and which concerned the artist in numerous variations and artistic techniques. The one who best represents neo-expressionist tendencies is Georg Kern, known as Georg Baselitz (b. 1938), who achieved notoriety by making, since 1969, paintings in which people and landscapes are upside down. Baselitz's work is aggressive, always figurative but reconsidering the traditional point of view, since by placing the paintings upside down he forces us to see them more as an object resulting from artistic creation than as a representation of reality.
As a reaction against conceptual art, the figurative was reborn with force at the end of the seventies with neo-expressionism, which sought to intensely express individual feelings, sometimes aggressively, or caricatured, which earned them also be called «new fauves” (Neue Wilde or Junge Wilde). Inspired by previous movements such as fauvism and expressionism, they recovered techniques such as large formats and the violent, intense and arbitrary colors of a Matisse. "Violent painting" or "vehement painting" was the name chosen by some representatives of this neo-expressionism in 1977. His first exhibition was held in Berlin in 1978, highlighting two later ones that had a great impact: New spirit in painting («New spirit in painting») held in London in 1981, and Zeitgeist ("The Spirit of the Times") in Berlin in 1982. One of its main representatives was Rainer Fetting (b. 1949), but three great names in German painting worked along this neo-expressionist line: Jörg Immendorff (1945- 2007) and Markus Lüpertz (b. 1941), in addition to the aforementioned Baselitz. Immendorff made in the sixties happenings and later made genre scenes giving them a moral, social and political intention. Lüppertz, for his part, makes large canvases of objects endowed with a great symbolic charge ( Motiv-Bilder ). Two other prominent neo-expressionists are A. R. Penck (Ralf Winkler, b. 1935) and Anselm Kiefer (b. 1945). Penck, who had problems with the GDR authorities, therefore painted under various pseudonyms; he uses simple forms loaded with symbolism in search of an "anti-style" that was always against the artistic fashion of the moment. For his part, A. Kiefer recovers the landscape, but not as something natural, organic and external to man, but precisely as a cultural landscape resulting from the history of man, especially the violent part that leaves the deepest mark, such as violence and war.
In the 1990s, after Beuys died, the pictorial panorama was characterized by the diversity of artistic tendencies and also by the means used. Artists are no longer just painters or sculptors, but rather the multimedia phenomenon. A generation of video artists after Wolf Vostell and Nam June Paik is represented by Ulrike Rosenbach (b. 1949), Klaus vom Bruch (b. 1952), Marcel Odenbach (b. 1953), and Ingo Gunther (b. 1957). Hans Haacke (b. 1936) is a conceptual artist who builds objects in which physical phenomena can be observed, such as his Condensation Cubes; he also makes installations and works with video Jochen Gerz (b. 1940) and Rebecca Horn (b. 1944) make videos and performances . Martin Kippenberger (1953-1997), who began as one of the neo-expressionist "new savages" and with an anti-art related to the fluxus movement, has not confined himself to the field of painting nor to a single style; there is something provocative in his work in a Dadaist way. Albert Oehlen (b. 1954) created "mirror paintings" in 1984 to ironically integrate the viewer into the work, as a parody of abstract expressionism. Over time, he has been opting for an increasingly abstract work. The painter, sculptor and photographer Günther Förg (b. 1952) represents neo-constructivist trends, combining various media and techniques to reflect on art.
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