Sis that what freedom looks like? Like a protein whose molecular cells are colored? Like the picture that Ernst Wilhelm Nay painted in 1956? Everything round, everything colourful, everything invented. Inventing a figure is the artist’s freedom, enjoying it is the viewer’s freedom. There was a lot of talk about freedom back then in the decade after the great war.
Freedom also needs its form. A large epochal exhibition in the Potsdam Museum Barberini commemorates the international triumphs of non-representational painting. For the younger ones, who were art socialized with Hito Steyerl, Anne Imhof and Maria Eichhorn, it is like traveling back in time, a visit to a venerable museum full of distant things, where their fathers and grandfathers were still largely to themselves. Ancestors like the painter Ernst Wilhelm Nay, who called his colorfully circling picture “Hour Ypsilon”. Others remember the time as “zero hour”.
Even if the cities were still in ruins and the booming economy was as little squeamish as before, and the already self-satisfied society had no trouble granting shelter to the surviving Nazis – in art at least there had to be a huge and, above all, visible break , so demanded the advanced zeitgeist of the young Federal Republic. In West Germany in particular, recognition from a world that had become skeptical could only be achieved if painting and sculpture were freed from all representational heritage, from the seductive content that had been so discredited in the hubris of the 1930s tyranny. Especially since in East Germany the old realism numbers should continue to apply and art without a politically correct definition violated state doctrine. Non-representational painting was a declaration of integration into the western alliance, mental rearmament in the Cold War.
Worldless Sign
The word “abstraction” had long since entered the bourgeois vocabulary. It is not known who invented it. But since the 1910s, it has been one of the explanatory patterns of the arts that have become complicated. When painters were still painting rulers in armour, transfigured saints and sunsets, things were clear and at most one had to distinguish styles. It only became difficult when there were pictures that clearly showed neither rulers in armor nor glorified saints nor even sunsets. What do you call pictures that seem to rise above their objects, freed from mimesis, from the compulsion to represent, as it has been since the beginning? What would an art of free forms, worldless signs, self-sufficient colors, inaccessible gestures be called?
This new art, which took all liberties, has gone down in word history as “abstract”. “Abstraction” is what needs constant explanation, constant justification. A black square is nothing other than perfect emptiness and only becomes a spiritual symbol because Kasimir Malevich has claimed with full conviction that he is finally closer to infinity than anyone before him. And nobody would know when Nay’s “hour upsilon” would strike if the artist hadn’t repeated his mantra over and over again: “against geometry, against illusion, against myth”.
When abstraction became the dress code of the art business after 1945 and was to remain so for more than a decade, it was nothing less than a deliberate recourse to the heroic chapter of early modernism that has now become a museum. In fact, the abstractions with which the public was still shocked in the 1910s had already died out in the First World War and had given way to a new, more representational style of painting. In order to reflect on the social contradictions that had opened up, the Weimar Republic needed argumentative pictures, paintings that interfered aggressively and sarcastically and called things as they are. The fact that objects degenerated into the banal during the fascist era made it easy for abstraction to triumph after 1945.
Jackson Pollock’s 1947 Enchanted Forest
Source: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York/ David Heald/Pollock Krasner Foundation/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2022
It’s a bit like a march, like a visit to a former front when you walk through the mighty panorama of the Potsdam exhibition. And if the German “abstracts” in the circle of European and American beautiful figure as if the free forms, worldless signs, self-sufficient colors, inaccessible gestures had not just been despised and forbidden in Hitler’s Germany. In any case, the speed of learning can still surprise you. And when you see Winfred Gaul, Rupprecht Geiger next to Arshile Gorky and Adolf Gottlieb, Karl Otto Götz, Gerhard Hoehme together with Lee Krasner or Willem de Kooning, when there is always only one by George Mathieu, Alberto Burri, Jean Dubuffet or Jean-Paul Riopelle few steps to Mark Rothko and Ad Reinhardt, if you rediscover how confidently Bernard Schultze presents himself next to the triumphant pictures of Sam Francis and the lyrically tender ones of Helen Frankenthaler, then the picture of the phalanx is really compelling.
You hardly need an audio guide for a tour of the overwhelmingly furnished world of images. What should also be told, explained, what one does not recognize oneself and does not recognize immediately, this unconditional claim to world art of a once dominant art fashion, which made German painters capable of satisfaction again and made art the stage for – Western – freedom claims.
cultural protective power
Even more so than in France, Italy and above all in the USA, the works of the German abstract artists were associated with utopian ideas of autonomy. The less painting wanted to mean, the more it was considered an application of unbridled freedom. The fact that the art direction is also handed down as “informal painting” is just another word for the “form of freedom”. And quite unlike the politically critical painting of the 1920s, the non-representational West Germans did not need to justify themselves. The fact that they were on the right side of freedom could be proven before the whole world: on the one hand in resistance against the hostile artificial language of socialist realism and on the other hand faithfully on the side of the cultural protecting power USA – under the supervision of the American abstract expressionists, who as world leaders the represent Western cultural superiority.
With a hegemonic attitude, these American painters set out to take over the fortunes of modernism. They, who in their early works all paid homage to a surreal objectivity, to patterns which they had borrowed from Europe, now tied all their umbilical cords to the avant-garde of the old continent, appeared as self-confident freethinkers of painting who conjured up abstract wonders on their wide-open pictorial stages, that seemed like an inexhaustible care package to post-war Europe.
Perhaps it was the first and the last time that art appeared as a world language. Although, given the political situation, it could only be half the world practicing the international idiom. Its reach ended at the Iron Curtain. But on this side it was like an abstract general weather situation that spread to Latin America, mainly thanks to the Bauhaus emigrants. And the enormous attraction can probably only be understood if one realizes how no other aesthetic practice – neither music, nor literature, nor film – is able to reinvent itself in such a radical way as painting.
“Giverny III” by Karl Otto Goetz
Source: Kunstpalast /LVR-ZMB /Stefan Arendt/VG Bildkunst, Bonn 2022
This is what the history of abstraction tells: about the form of freedom, about the glorious occupation of Western art, about images that seem a little cold in their inaccessible absoluteness. There is no play anywhere like Picasso, no castles in the air like Miró lived in. Nowhere breaks, fragments, inversions. The wounded, the incurable, it remains hidden as much as possible. Still an ornament, this abstract suit. And yet he has also been a perfect camouflage in all private costumes.
The form of freedom. Museum Barberini Potsdam, June 4th – September 25th