Socialist Realism : Germany

Whereas artists in the Federal Republic of Germany were able to pick up the thread of existing traditions and draw on all the new artistic currents in Western Europe and the United States, their colleagues in the former GDR soon found their hands tied by the “Socialist Realism” prescribed for them. They were permitted to do nothing more than convey a favorable picture of the socialist society and its kind of people. Until the late 1960s, the artwork promoted by the GDR regime’s functionaries was predominantly a portrayal of working life under the socialist system.

New trends in Socialist Realist painting came mainly from the Leipzig Academy of Art. Among its best-known artists were Werner Tubke (born in 1929) and Bernhard Heisig (born in 1925), whose monumental paintings, though still tied to historical or social themes, shed the sterility of the style of the 1950s and 1960s. One member of the Leipzig Academy, Wolfgang Mattheuer (born in 1927), went one step farther in his efforts to derive more from realistic painting. His pictures, such as Snow White as the Statue of Liberty, are more a synthesis of post-Expressionist New Objectivity and “Magic Realism” than an evocation of socialist reality. A.R. Penck (born in 1 939), who left the GDR jn 1980 and achieved fame in western Germany, chose idols of the Stone Age as his theme. With symbols such as crosses and squares as well as his anarchic figures, he seeks to create a universal language which any person can immediately understand. Starting in the late 1970s, Penck’s works and those of his eastern German colleagues were very much in demand by Western galleries as well.