Germany Divided: Baselitz and his Generation, British Museum

The British Museum, the Royal Academy, the Courtauld Gallery (twice this year) … everywhere one looks, the Capital’s premier cultural institutions seem to be awash with German art. 

This long run of Germany Divided: Baselitz and his Generation at the British Museum is a chance to see some extraordinary works on paper from a cross section of the post-war, German artistic community, from both sides of the Iron Curtain. Arguably since the Second World War, the significant cultural impact of Germany on the visual arts has been unjustly neglected in British narratives of modernism. Hopefully this show will go some way in readdressing the balance.  

The British Museum is obviously conscious of the distortion. Georg Baseltiz is an exceptional artist who has bestridden the second half of the twentieth century. Working in a multitude of media and always irreverently, Baselitz has tried to turn the conventional rules of representation on their head. Educated in Communist East Germany, Baseltiz moved to the West before the construction of the Berlin Wall, taking his adopted home’s ideologies to an ironic extreme. Remarking on the massive commercial bias for male over female artists, Baseltiz is said to have shrugged ‘as always, the market is right.’

This exhibition focuses on the German experience of living in a divided country. Many of the artists on show were creatures of both East and West, so expect frequent references to the two competing economic systems  – communism and capitalism – and what they meant for art.  Something relatively rare, is the opportunity to approach post-War and post-Holocaust art ‘from the other side’, or rather, 'the inside'. We gain insights into the impact of the war on both a personal level and a collective psyche, through artists who depict sentiments of guilt and remorse for the atrocities committed by their homeland.

The single most exciting aspect has to be to do with media. This is an exhibition of 90 works, all on paper. Drawing is a condensed, even ‘poetic’ art form and it is exciting that these abbreviated expressions are being asked to speak for such weighty themes. The exhibition also brings to the public an important German collection, half of which is by Baselitz. The rest is composed of Mark Lüpertz, A. R. Penck, Sigmar Polke, the colourful abstractionist Blinky Palermo and that other modern German master, Gerhard Richter. Much of it has been donated or loaned by Count Christian Duerckheim, transforming the Museum’s collection of German prints into one that traces a German history on paper; from the very invention of the printing press to the present day. Head to Bloomsbury and break up a heavy afternoon of Vikings with some exceptional art.