White is a color that modern painting, for once, has borrowed from architecture.

In the twenties by the Bauhaus consciously used against the joy of color of past architectural styles from the Middle Ages to Art Nouveau, in which ninety-nine percent of the existing building stock was immersed, white houses stood for moderate asceticism as well as for purity and a new beginning after the catastrophe of the First World War.

That has lasted: The National Socialists, with a grotesque fading out of this color iconology, defamed the Stuttgart Weissenhofsiedlung, which is kept all in white - an exhibition of modern building - as an “Arab village” because the white facades reminded some of the ill-willed of the sun-reflecting cube houses in North Africa, which never happened in the north was a reason for white.

Stefan Trinks

Editor in the features section.

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After 1945 almost all the buildings were painted white again, like white flags of surrender that were hoisted too late, with which the innocence during and during the war should be demonstratively emphasized.

All metaphors of the "zero hour", the pure linen cloth of covering, the cotton wool fog of quick oblivion as well as the immaculate new beginning in Germany are white;

There are even

tabulae rasae

painted in white

and as the only country in the world a linguistic separation between “old buildings” and “new buildings”, sensible with the year 1945 as the demarcation line.

White, not red, is by far the most political of all colors in the “West”, and the only thing that could be chalked up against the excellently equipped show on the color white in modern art at the Berlin Academy of the Arts on Hanseatenweg is that the Curators Wulf Herzogenrath and Anke Hervol only touch on this color psychology of washing clean implicitly based on the works that speak for themselves.

There is only more white under the white

The starting point of the exhibition is the white monochrome and the associated new meaning of the material surface, which connects the art scenes in Germany, Europe and the United States (the latter have something to do with the dogged adherence of some of their archaeologists to a "white antiquity" in a double sense marble-white images of people currently have another problem with political white). That was in the fifties and sixties, i.e. precisely in the post-war period, when the pictures themselves, unlike before in the colored galleries, were exhibited in so-called white cubes, square-practically pure battery packs of asceticism. The slit white canvases of Lucio Fontana stand before your eyes,the monochromes of Raimund Girkes or Ellsworth Kellys - all gathered in the Akademie der Künste under the title “Nothingtoseeness”, borrowed from John Cage, who in a sense translated Caspar David Friedrich's “Wanderer in the Sea of ​​Fog” into music: His legendary toneless piece of music "4'33" from 1952 consists of a good four and a half minutes of white noise, and since silence and the meditative turn to the inside are traditionally associated with the color white, Cage composed a sea of ​​fog of music here.His legendary toneless piece of music "4'33" from 1952 consists of a good four and a half minutes of white noise, and since silence and the meditative turn to the inside are traditionally associated with the color white, Cage composed a sea of ​​fog of music here.His legendary toneless piece of music "4'33" from 1952 consists of a good four and a half minutes of white noise, and since silence and the meditative turn to the inside are traditionally associated with the color white, Cage composed a sea of ​​fog of music here.

And speaking of the sea: Yves Klein is also there.

In terms of stereotypes, only sea blue is expected from him in the color “International Klein Blue” (IKB), which he himself created;

Long before his “Tiefsee / h” pictures, however, he had dealt intensively in a series with the shallow and mostly opaque white.

His “Untitled White Monochrome (M 33, 1958)” is just as meditative as Günther Uecker's Zen experiments with the long-lasting surface reflection of white, Gotthard Graubner or Nam June Paik's “Zen for Film” from 1964: Paik lets in on an old projector Loop through an unexposed film.

Even lively moving images can be empty - except for the many oversized fluff and scratches in the celluloid.