The peculiar historical experience of the Communist period in East Germany (1949-1989) gave rise to some specific artistic practices. While, within the context of twentieth-century authoritarian regimes, there was nothing especially original about the directives that artists mobilize and educate the masses, the way in which a large proportion of painters entered into lasting contact with various social groups was more so. Behind the official slogans of proximity to the people (Volksverbundenheit), complex relationships were indeed interwoven between, on the one hand, the world of work and, on the other, artists who did not cease to hold high social positions in Communist countries as members of the Intelligenz. What we wish to ask here is how the artworks of that era bear witness to such experiences, experiences that could be quite far removed from those described by the official institutions (party, union, administration). We also wish to inquire into the meaning of artistic commitment in such a context. These artistic practices, while specific, should nonetheless not be considered isolated cases; they raised again problems that had existed before 1949 (and that lasted after 1989). It is therefore necessary to set them within the context of a broader chronology.

Adolph Menzel and Social Depth

        Encouraged by the political authorities who wanted to emphasize “the old masters,” many East German artists set out to explore nineteenth-century Realism, in particular the realism of Adolph Menzel (1815-1905). Far from being a protest artist, Menzel was a court artist who built his reputation on commissions for Prussian historical paintings. Nonetheless, as early as the late 1840s he took an interest in the world of factories, which he visited in order to observe the workers. From this experience he drew a seminal work, The Forge (1875), which has been construed as the founding act of German social art. The uniqueness of this work stems, first of all, from the conditions under which it was produced: a very large-sized work (158 x 254 cm) that was not a commission, The Forge was undertaken by Menzel on his own following a series of studies done in the forges of Königshütte in Upper Silesia in 1872. But the uniqueness of this work stems above all from its way of giving figure to social positions. The canvas represents the entirety of a complex industrial process--rolling--but, unlike the industrial paintings of that period, which divided into several small vignettes the various phases of the industrial process, Menzel’s work unrealistically concentrated all these operations into a single site. As constructed by Menzel, the space of the factory is therefore an imaginary space, a space that is constructed by the gaze of the viewer and is alien to the workers laboring there. Moreover, Menzel floods this site with smoke and hazy lighting, giving it a density, a depth, thereby rendering visible everything that separates him from the workers. What this picture portrays in the first place is social distance. This theme of distance is suggested by the representation of a foreman, the only character who is not a proletarian. He is to be found at the back left, recognizable by his hat and coat. The pictorial space is therefore bounded by two figures of the bourgeoisie, the foreman and the viewer, both of them removed from the world of work.

Karl Völker and Social Incision

        Abandonment of Menzel’s realism took nothing away from the desire of those artists who succeeded him to represent social differences. The problem was taken up again to a great extent by twentieth-century artists close to Social Democracy and Communism, where an artistic project was coupled with the radical political one of transforming social relations. The paintings of Karl Völker (1889-1962) offer some examples that were later exhibited in the DDR and tolerated by the authorities as testimony for “critical realism.” During the 1920s, Völker was the Communist Party’s painter from Halle in Saxony-Anhalt. Making a living from sales to a few individual buyers and from a few public commissions, he regularly visited the chemical industry plants of Leuna and workers’ circles. In Industrial Image (1924), distance is explicitly the heart of the picture. Between the indistinct mass of men and women in the background and the man in the foreground, with tilted neck in his green suit, there is a footbridge represented in its full length from a daring perspective that is accentuated by the representation of railroad tracks under the bridge and of the ridges on top of industrial buildings. Where Menzel represented social differences by rendering his picture more opaque, Völker chooses the curtness of lines to dramatically hollow out the site. The Communist newspaper Klassenkampf got it right, celebrating the picture as the most accomplished expression of class antagonisms.

The Artist, An Interclass Individual

        Following the example of Völker, who went to the Leuna industrial site, numerous artists from this era sought to confront with social circles that were not (or were no longer) their own. That was the case with Otto Nagel, who settled in the working-class neighborhood of Wedding, and Martha Schrag, who visited the factories of Chemnitz. Parallel to the constitution of a bourgeois habitus, which in that age remained more than at any other time connected with the definition of the artist, there was a desire to have the artist enter into a social space where he was not meant to go. Nonetheless, the artists of that age most often remained outside the worlds they frequented, and they observed, as was the case with Herbert Gute and Wilhelm Lachnit, who entered into contact with the working-class population only at the factory gates in Dresden while selling low-priced wood engravings. The peculiar social position of these artists was expressed on a theoretical level in an essay written by John Heartfield’s brother, Wieland Herzfelde. Herzfelde explains in this 1921 text, Gesellschaft, Künstler und Kommunismus, that the Communist artist, who remains a bourgeois despite his political commitment, makes himself at home in the social tension that separates him from other classes. The point is not to deny distances or to proclaim some kind of contrived proximity; it is to explain that the artist’s political commitment lies precisely in the confrontation with other social worlds. Such a conception was taken up again after 1945--in particular by Herbert Gute, who, at the artists’ union’s 1947 congress, defined the artist in Communist society as an “individual who situates himself between classes.” He is not above classes; on the contrary, he fully belongs to the Intelligenz, yet he traverses the entire social body.

The Socialization of Artists After 1945

        In the Soviet occupation zone, some artists spontaneously grouped together to fulfill what they considered to be their “social responsibility” (in Dresden, in the group “The Call” in 1945 and “The Bridge” in 1947; in Halle, in the group “The Ferry” in 1947). These groups organized traveling exhibitions in factories and agricultural cooperatives and attempted to organize discussions around their works. In the early 1950s, relations between artists and the world of production became standardized and were institutionalized under pressure from the political authorities and under the impact of the new economic system that was being set in place. Indeed, on account of the dismantling of the art market, commissions from firms and political organizations became the main sources of income for artists and above all were a point of social crystallization around which artists, cultural officials, and workers invited to give their opinion on various plans, drafts, and completed projects converged. “Friendly contracts” entered into between artists and business firms set the obligations on each side: firms committed themselves to guaranteeing the artists a stable income while artists committed themselves to fulfilling regular commissions and to enlivening cultural life in the factories by involving workers in the creation of commissioned works and by overseeing the education of amateurs. The world of professional artists was divided between those who put their effort into this kind of project and those who refused to accept such an opening up of the artistic field.

Distances and Tensions Within the Artistic Field

        The policy of bringing different social spaces face to face within the artistic field was not without its problems. It created a confrontation among individuals who were pursuing different agendas and who, above all, did not occupy the same social positions. It rendered social inequalities visible in a society that was otherwise experiencing strong egalitarian tendencies. Professional artists were indeed part of the most privileged professions (very high incomes, easy access to goods, and travel opportunities, including to the West). Amateur artists belonged to a very eclectic set of social circles, but the majority were workers practicing para-artistic trades (building painters, poster painters, typographers, etc.) who had been trying in vain to achieve the status of professionals. In archives one can find evidence of the tensions this situation generated: amateurs contesting professional artists’ monopoly on commissions, professionals refusing to exhibit alongside amateurs or to submit to the judgments of workers, cultural officials in firms lamenting that the artist was neglecting his obligations or describing him as a “foreign body” (Fremdkörper) in the factory, artists complaining about being used as “maids of all work” (Mädchen für alles) in the shops. These were so many concrete situations in which distances were negotiated and social positions were forged. As a whole, workers did indeed prove to keep their distance from the creative works of artists, signaling a lack of interest that was perhaps less a rejection of art than a form of response to this particular social configuration.

Hermann Bruse and Social Melancholy

        Most painters produced work in this context and engaged in a kind of class collaboration, the ambiguities and pretenses of which they quickly came to know. The case of Hermann Bruse (1904-1953) offers a good illustration. A member of the KPD since 1932 and a member of antifascist clandestine groups in Magdeburg under Nazism, after 1945 he was very active in East German cultural politics as a professor at the Humboldt University of Berlin, an outpost of the fight against formalism (his 1953 article, “Formalism: Art’s Enemy,” served as an enduring reference for the political authorities). In 1951, he was working in the big Berlin-area Karl Liebknecht transformer factory, with which he was connected via a “friendly contract” and where he became the leader of the first circle of amateur artists in March 1952. It was within that framework that Factory Worker saw the light of day in 1952. This painting is interesting on account of the way in which it annexes the aesthetic canons set down by the Communist regime, the directive to represent the victorious worker, the new master of society, who is to dominate the space of the canvas. But Bruse’s worker differs appreciably from the workers shown on propaganda posters: his emaciated and melancholic face is far from triumphant. He is not represented in front of his work tools, as was often the case for images of that era, but rather in front of a site that is circumscribed, as in Menzel, by social figures, two engineers on his left and men caught up in hard work on his right. The picture’s colors are not the bright ones found on Stalinist posters; the shades of white and yellow have the depth of Menzel’s colors. Bruse thus seems to have wanted to fit into the realist tradition of representing social distances, as if he were expressing, in the silence of these images, his own social experiences.

The Retreat of the Artistic Field, Beginning in the 1960s

        This social configuration began to change, however, as early as the 1960s. The system of commissions remained key, but other sources of income for artists began to make their appearance: points of sale began to multiply under the tutelage of the established political power (which also organized the sale of works to the West). Political leaders assigned to art a new function: artworks were to be, above all, the showcase of the Communist world and a means of acquiring currency. Their primary goal was no longer to set various social groups in confrontation or to be an object of social polarization. In this situation, artists’ legitimacy was no longer defined in terms of their engagement within society, and proximity to the world of work became an increasingly devalued sort of capital. Artists who were reticent about such involvement tended to dominate the field, and it was the second-rate and often older artists who continued to remain in contact with business firms and the artists’ union, younger artists being more and more reluctant to fulfill these roles. The world of professional artists closed upon itself so as to center around specifically artistic issues and drew closer to the Western European art world (participation in Kassel’s Documenta starting in 1977; constitution of East German art collections like that of the Ludwig Gallery in Oberhausen). Parallel with these developments, the world of amateur artists became again a second-rate field of art, clearly distinct from the field of professional artists; amateur art tended more and more to be confused with folk activities (the term used to designate it changed from Laienkunst to Volkskunst).

Axel Wunsch and the Maintenance of Distance

        Born in 1941, Axel Wunsch offers an interesting case that follows certain developments occurring during the last years of the DDR but that also perpetuates earlier practices. Trained as a dyer, Wunsch was one of the rare amateurs to have been able to become a professional. After studying with Wolfgang Mattheuer at the Leipzig Art Academy, he settled in his hometown of Karl-Marx-Stadt (Chemnitz) and there led a circle of amateur painters in the community arts center. He did few commissions and succeeded in making a living on the basis of sales (to museums, individuals, and the West German art market). His relations with the business world are representative of his time: he had no partnerships and no contracts with the working world. And yet he belonged to that faction of artists who continued to feel the need to go into the factories. What had been a Communist commitment at the end of 1940s became a habit in the 1980s. Thus, he did some studies in Zwickau’s Trabant manufacturing factories and in the Karl-Marx-Stadt foundries, but his relations with workers were almost nonexistent: no exchanges with them occurred, and there were no contacts except with the firm’s managers, who authorized his entry on site. It was within this context that he painted Foundry Worker in 1986, which was not a commissioned work and which was purchased by the Karl-Marx-Stadt Art Museum. The confrontation between the figure of the worker and the subject matter of the painting seems to express in the image an awareness of an unbridgeable gap between the two social spaces, that of art and that of production. But the work does not bridge this gap; it leaves it open and continues to express this sensitivity to social distances, which had been the basis for numerous artists’ engagement. The site is here discreetly hollowed out by the ledge on which the worker is seated, drawn here with a simple blurry gray line.

Epilogue: The Unbearable Naturalism of Neo Rauch

        Conversely, most present-day East German artists, such as Neo Rauch, have bridged this gap. Trained in the 1980s in Leipzig and having participated in the last great DDR art exhibition in 1988, after 1989-1990 Rauch totally rejected the experience of Communism, stating that he had done his first worthwhile work only in 1993. Perfectly well integrated into the international art market, thanks in particular to the Eigen Art Gallery, Rauch has declared that any idea of engagement is alien to him. In the late 1990s, he devoted a few canvases to the representation of workers, introducing them into one of his signifier-filled allegories where no signification appears. In Unbearable Naturalism (1998), the image, mounted on several easels and perforated by orange circles, seems repeated to infinity. On the lower half, a character is reloading a rifle in order to shoot at a paper figure already riddled with bullets; on the upper half, a man wearing a green jacket on which the word factory (Werk) is marked, carries toward an easel an object that might be a factory building and blast furnaces. A differentiated space seems to have disappeared here in favor of a purely pictorial one. But the canvas registers the historical ties that have been woven between a technique (painting), an artistic form (figural representation), and a political and social project.