Rediscovered: Otto Nagel, artist of the GDR and “socialist realist against his will” | free press

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Artists from the GDR are gradually being re-examined and appreciated, including the painter Otto Nagel – with new insights into their biographies.

Art.

He was considered one of the flagship artists of the young GDR: Otto Nagel, celebrated by the country’s official cultural policy as the “painter of the oppressed”, as a representative of “proletarian realism”, according to the art historian Kurt Winkler, who made good use of “formalistic tendencies”. let. But the life and work of the Berlin painter are not so easy to classify, as a small exhibition in the Eberswalde Museum and a catalog that has been published make clear.

A life in different systems

Born in 1894 into a social-democratic family, Otto Nagel trained as a mosaic and glass painter and worked in various professions. In 1912 he joined the SPD himself. He was drafted into the military, but refused military service, was sent to a penal battalion and was interned. In 1918 he joined the soldiers’ council, returned to Berlin and became a member of the newly founded KPD. He paints as an autodidact, in 1921 he has his first solo exhibition. In 1924, like Otto Dix, George Grosz, and John Heartfield, he became a member of the communist artist association Rote Gruppe, organized art exhibitions in the Soviet Union, and was close friends with Käthe Kollwitz and Heinrich Zille. Neither Otto Nagel nor his second wife Valentina Nikitina commented in detail about his life during the Nazi dictatorship, without doubts arising as to the sincerity of the artist. The authors of the catalog can prove that they were imprisoned for a few days in Sachsenhausen concentration camp, some paintings that fell victim to the Nazi action “Degenerate Art”, presumably contact with a left-wing resistance group. Nevertheless, Nagel, who was officially recognized in the GDR as a “victim of the Nazi regime”, was also represented in several exhibitions between 1933 and 1943.

Debates about the nature of art

After the war, Otto Nagel became a member of the SED as part of the forced unification of the KPD and SPD and quickly became a respected cultural functionary. Like Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, he is involved in the “Culture Association for the Democratic Renewal of Germany”, holds leading positions in the Association of Visual Artists in Germany and the German Academy of Arts. But although the GDR showered him with honors, Otto Nagel did not fully adapt to their political guidelines. On the one hand, he dares to criticize the allegations of formalism against some artists, advocates a non-ideological, truthful art, on the other hand, according to art historian Eckhart Gillen, he becomes a “reluctant socialist realist”, but also defends himself against, according to Gillen, “Socialist Realism imported from the Soviet Union, which … by no means offers the expected corrective to Nazi art”, which had also been staged naturalistically. As President of the Academy, Nagel tried to establish contact with artists in West Germany such as Otto Dix and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, and promoted young artists – not to the delight of the SED cultural politicians, which ultimately led to his resignation and further quarrels.

Exhibitions in West Berlin

Otto Nagel must have been happier for two exhibitions in West Berlin in 1966 shortly before his death, which received a positive response in the West German press. Otto Nagel died on July 12, 1967 in Berlin, the city that he had explored in his pictures down to the darkest corners. He was the painter of the “little people”, the misery of the interwar period, related to the artists of the New Objectivity. That is why he was also represented in an exhibition in 2019 in the Gunzenhauser Museum in Chemnitz. He also proved how well he knew people in the novel “The White Dove or The Wet Triangle”, better known as the film “One Goes to the Dogs”. In it, an unemployed man becomes a thief, is accused and convicted. Otto Nagel has the judge say: “The defendant’s unemployment and hardship cannot be used as a mitigating factor. The defendant cannot invoke a particular hardship, but only shares the fate of two million Germans… Therefore: with all due respect the tragedy of unemployment, crimes that have arisen from it must be punished with tangible punishment”, and the author comments that the accused should now “atone by serving his sentence for what society had done to him in terms of enormous injustice!! !” You couldn’t write it any better today.

The exhibition “Otto Nagel: Seeker and Socialist” can be seen in the Eberswalde Museum until April 2nd. Eckhart Gillen’s 114-page catalog has many illustrations. » museum-eberswalde.de

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