Out of The Wall's Shadow

By ROBERT HUGHES

Some exhibitions might have been better as books, and "Berlinart 1961-1987," the Museum of Modern Art's big summer show that closes Sept. 8 in New York City and reopens Oct. 22 in San Francisco, is one. Its senior curator, Kynaston McShine, took on a large subject, perhaps too large. The re-emergence of Berlin as a major center of the visual arts, after twelve years of Nazi darkness and a decade of limping postwar chaos, is not the only story of post- 1960s art, but it stays up there on the front page. Much against the odds of "internationalist" pieties, German artists in Berlin between 1950 and 1980 helped turn the geographical categories of art around, forcing the art world to lose not only its fixation on New York as late modernism's only imperial center but also its set belief that abstract art was the ultimate style of the 20th century.

Out they come from the shadows cast by the Berlin Wall and the skyscrapers of the postwar "economic miracle," the dissidents and mystagogues of what came to be known as heftige Malerei (violent painting), the political artists, the conceptualists with chips on their shoulders. Some were raised in the divided city; others had been drawn there by the Free University or, more generally, by the anarchic and utopian Bohemia of the '60s: the Fluxus group and its best-known member, Joseph Beuys, with his shaman's wands and dead hares; Eugen Schonebeck, with his images of mutants and cripples; K.H. Hodicke, who made fervently swiped homages to Max Beckmann; and Georg Baselitz, creator of clumsy, wistful figures stumbling about in an apocalyptic landscape.

Once again art was carrying the kind of meanings that abstraction could not convey, and these were picked up by a second generation of artists in the mid- 1970s, such as Rainer Fetting and Helmut Middendorf. By the mid-1980s the Neue Wilde, or new fauves, had become such a market bandwagon, so copious a fount of self-important rhetoric, that the rediscovered anguish of the postwar German soul ran some risk of joining the death of Little Nell as one of those things one could not read about without laughing.

Nevertheless, there is a great deal more to Berlin art than the production of industrial-strength angst. The city's rebirth as a major center of late modernism is now an accomplished fact. In this show -- the first attempt by a U.S. museum at a conspectus of the subject -- Curator McShine has done a good job of setting out, in samples rather than full packages (55 artists are represented), the peculiar mix of political intelligence, sharp irony, antic humor, mythic yearnings, brusque self-doubt and curiously facile pictorial effects that helped define Berlin's cultural temper before Nazism and that came back, with many variations, after the '50s.

The protagonist cannot fit on the walls. Berlin itself is the great metaphor, indeed the cause, of the lack of assurance and wholeness emitted by its postwar art. No city in northern Europe, except London, is more impacted with history; at the same time, none speaks with such dreadful plainness of the fragility of historical memory. You see a featureless tract of new buildings in an American city and merely sigh with boredom; the same tract in Berlin is raised on the rubble and corpses of 1945 -- the new is also a tomb.

One of the reasons the city became such a powerful cultural compressor is that its catastrophic history makes one suspicious of nostalgia, while the emblems of nostalgia are everywhere. Did Albert Speer's architecture contaminate the glories of German neo-classicism as surely as Nazi blood-and- instinct mythology wrecked postwar Germany's contact with its own romantic heritage? The point is succinctly raised by the sculptor Olaf Metzel, with Oak Leaf Studies, 1986, a pair of vitrines containing plaster busts of assorted culture-heroes -- Bach, Schiller, Nietzsche -- ravaged with a chain saw. How much of the past do we need to throw out, and why? The city's traditional role as a moral slide area, a new Mahagonny or Sodom-on-the-Spree, where sexual and political fantasies intersect, is abundantly set forth in the work of Salome and Gunter Brus, the latter coming on like a depraved Arthur Rackham. Above all, there was and is the Wall, the 20th century's main architectural image of political division.

Painting has more use as propaganda west of the Wall than east. It serves as an official metaphor of freedom, whether it issues critiques of capitalism or Communism. The ironies of this situation have not, of course, been lost on Berlin artists. Hence, for instance, Dieter Hacker's The House Painters Begin to Paint Their Own Future, 1976, with its worker rendered in an approved late social-realist style meticulously filling in a black stripe on an early Russian constructivist abstraction.

To underline the contrast between itself and the East, West Berlin's cultural policy has long included hospitality to foreign artists. They in turn have produced such projects as Edward Kienholz's and Nancy Reddin Kienholz's mordant reflections on recent German history, Christo's unrealized ambition to wrap the Reichstag and Jonathan Borofsky's effigy of a naked running man drawn on the Berlin Wall. These and other visitors have their part in the show, but it is minor. Since "Berlinart" is part of the official rumpus West Berlin is making about its freedom in the year of Berlin's 750th anniversary as a city, the main weight is the Berliners themselves.

Berlin painting in the '60s begins with a fearful sense of enclosure, melancholy and disruption. The tone is given by Georg Baselitz, a far better artist then than now, whose paintings of swollen feet -- just feet, nothing else -- rival Philip Guston's pictures of the early '70s in awkward pathos. It is reinforced by Baselitz's colleague in the '60s, Eugen Schonebeck, whose brief career produced some paintings almost worthy of Beckmann, like The Crucified, 1964. Neue Wilde such as Middendorf and Fetting have not matched this visceral intensity; their paintings, with thinly brushed surfaces that seem to have been knocked off in an afternoon, go through gesticulations of hectic passion but are, in fact, wary and cold. The vocabulary of expressionism soon became a matter of conventional dramatics or even, as with Salome's paintings of mincing queens in high heels and leather, of mildly hostile camp.

Just when Berlin painting got hot with collectors in and out of Germany, its expressive energies were diverted into the task of conserving attitudes and maintaining production. Today neoexpressionism, the obsession of the early '80s, has run its course and is nearly as dead as mutton. (Will Baselitz keep painting people upside-down for another decade? Who cares?) But it left behind a small number of masterpieces, some of which are in this show. Neoexpressionism also left behind a quantity of unresolved questions, such as its degree of aesthetic success and its relation to American abstract expressionism, that are scarcely broached in the catalog. Given the scope of its subject, "Berlinart" is only a sketch. One can imagine half a dozen more focused shows spun off from it. But it is certainly worth seeing for its own sake.