East Germany

Art from the German Democratic Republic (1949–90): official Socialist Realism, the Leipzig painters, photography and dissenting underground art.

No works indexed yet · 10 related artists

No open-access works for East Germany are in the index yet. They will appear here as more collections are indexed.

About

The German Democratic Republic expected art to serve socialism. In the early 1950s the state campaigned against "formalism" and promoted figurative painting of workers and heroes. Many artists left for the West, among them Gerhard Richter in 1961.

Those who stayed found room within figuration. Painters in Leipzig, notably Werner Tübke, Wolfgang Mattheuer and Bernhard Heisig, developed a dense, allegorical style drawing on Renaissance and Mannerist models; Tübke's enormous panorama of the Peasants' War at Bad Frankenhausen was finished in 1987. Photographers such as Arno Fischer and Sibylle Bergemann made quiet, observant pictures of everyday life. Outside official structures, A. R. Penck in Dresden developed his stick-figure sign language before leaving in 1980, and Cornelia Schleime took part in underground performance and punk circles before emigrating in 1984. After 1990, the reckoning with East German art became a debate in itself.