When Joseph Beuys launched his campaign “Beuys recommends raising the Berlin Wall by 5 cm (better proportion!)” In 1964, he was met with a lot of hatred.
The pictures of Peter Fechter bleeding to death in the death strip and other victims were too painful and too close.
But Beuys had done what perhaps only art can: to reduce the horror by distancing itself.
By increasing the wall according to the rules of proportion, with this ironic gesture he succeeded in overcoming its significance as a wall of horror and thus making it smaller.
Similar minimizations through critical aestheticization were the painting, planting or spraying by artists such as Keith Haring or the recently deceased Ben Wagin.
Despite the apparent insurmountability of the wall, the east-west divan of artistic exchange processes continued - across the death strip.
The art of wrapping the critical in a metaphorically coded form made it possible for painters in the GDR, in particular, to be a bit more free and critical than the literature in the East that was read line by line by the censors and put on the gold scales.
Reimport from the east
An artist like AR Penck from Dresden moved for exhibitions in both East and West, his primeval imagery with coded abbreviations for man, animal and world can be seen as a synthesis of abstract western expressionism à la Pollock and eastern figuration. Exactly this inoculation of the figurative and figurative elements of Western art, which had long been under American influence, came as a reimport from the East: The Saxon triumvirate of Gerhard Richter, Georg Baselitz and Sigmar Polke stands for the triumph of figurative painting, which continues to this day.
Hermann Raum, an art historian and caricaturist who is hardly known today in the GDR, has also linked both worlds since the 1970s. Born in Franconia in 1924, Raum moved to the GDR in 1955 after studying in Leipzig. If one ignores some of the judgments that seem strange today, two of his publications, "The Fine Art of the FRG and West Berlin", published in Leipzig in 1977, and one year later the "Fine Art in the GDR - The Other Modern Age", already bear witness to the fact that here someone notoriously looked over the edge of the wall. His last works on Beuys, written during the GDR era, even seem as if they were written after 1989. But Raum “the West” was even more surprising with its curation of the GDR's first biennial pavilion in Venice in 1982. What was shown to the stunned audience at the time,was the continuity of a critical expressionism from the twenties, for example with Sighard Gille's monumental work “Brigadefeier - Gerüstbauer”, which could also have come from Geraer Dix. Like Hannibal, who crossed the Alps, the curator bypassed the wall by taking a detour via Italy.
Most strongly in the tradition of Beuys' storm of wall paintings by affirmation was the Council of Europe exhibition “Seduction Freedom - Art in Europe since 1945”, organized by the art historian Monika Flacke who died in 2019. It was shown in 2012 in the German Historical Museum in Berlin, then in Milan, Tallinn and Krakow. The posters and the cover of the catalog with a work of art by Aurora Reinhard provoked with a spread of opposites: rubber gloves from the household that fanned out were provided with luminous nail polish on the tips, so that the sober reality of the working world of cleaning staff with that of the tempting temptation to form a bouquet was tied together.
One of the central theses was that the iron curtain between eastern and western Europe did not exist in the perception of the cross-border artists' republic, so that the wall had also been covered over by art.
Beuys, for example, donated eight hundred of his works to the Sztuki Museum in Lodz, by way of state policy, thereby building a bridge from Poland to his contribution to the Venice Biennale of the same year.
Monika Flacke called on Reinhart Koselleck's book “Criticism and Crisis” as the key witness for all these minimization of the Wall, in which the historian regarded an unbourgeois, enlightened sphere of detachment as indispensable for phases of precarious upheaval, as undoubtedly suited artists in West and East.
Trained freedom fighters
No question: all the subversions lived from 1961 to 1989 were potentially life-threatening, but many of the artists in the East were just trained freedom fighters. The realm of art was thus able to remain a medium of freedom. The triumph of the so-called New Leipzig School, which began around 1993 with its all-German “Neo-Romanticism”, was then only the official recognition for undermining the built shame out of the spirit of a culture that was inviolable in this regard.