For years, America was an exporter of contemporary art. American styles such as Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, Minimalism, and Conceptualism set the agenda in postwar Europe. In recent years, however, the tide has turned. The early 1980s saw the influx of Italian Neo-Expressionism in American galleries, followed by a wave of new German painters that has rapidly taken the country by storm. What began with a smattering of exhibitions in prominent New York City galleries in 1981-82 has developed into the hottest phenomenon in America's contemporary art scene.
Critics, at first less than enthusiastic about the new German painting, have now largely endorsed it. American museums have offered numerous surveys and one-artist shows, the most recent of which are Refigured Painting: The German Image 1960-88, The BiNATIONALE: German Art of the Late 80s, and retrospectives of the careers of Anselm Kiefer and Gerhard Richter. Sigmar Polke and George Baselitz shows are in the planning stages in San Francisco and New York, indicating that the trend is by no means over.
Commercial galleries in New York--most notably Ileana Sonnabend, Marian Goodman, and Mary Boone--continue to devote significant portions of their exhibition schedules to contemporary German artists, and West Coast galleries have followed suit. Collectors have placed the Germans high on their lists, and prices have risen astoundingly: A large painting by Kiefer, for example, which might have sold for $15,000 seven or eight years ago, now fetches upwards of $250,000.
Who are these painters? Where do they come from? What concerns do their paintings address? And what conditions have led to their tremendous success in the American art world?
New German Painting
When we speak of the new German painting, we are referring to the work of a group of artists roughly between the ages of thirty and fifty who live and work in West Germany. The first generation--including Georg Baselitz, Eugen Schonebeck, Anselm Kiefer, Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter, Karl Horst Hodlicke, A.R. Penck, Markus Lupertz, Jorge Immendorff, Bernd Koberling, and Norbert Tadeusz--emerged during the 1960s and early 1970s in Berlin and Dusseldorf. Their work addressed historical themes in a predominantly figurative, Expressionistic style, though the photo realism and Pop styles of Richter and Polke were exceptions.
In the late seventies and early eighties, a second generation followed the first. These included the Berlin-based Neue Wilde--Rainer Fetting, Helmut Middendorf, Salome, and Bernd Zimmer--and their contemporaries Friedemann Hahn, Albert Oehlen, Rosemarie Trockel, and Jiri Georg Dokoupil. The Neue Wilde and their contemporaries shared the thematic and stylistic predilections of their predecessors, but the Neue Wilde artists, in particular, lacked the degree of sincerity and conviction apparent in the earlier work.
In recent years, a less well known third generation has emerged, including Thomas Huber, Katharina Fritsch, Heiner Blum, Stefan Balkenhol, Michael van Often, Georg Herold, Harald Klingelhoffer, Ludger Gerdes, and others. This third generation encompasses a plurality of styles, ranging from Romantic landscapes to polychrome figure sculptures, Conceptual installations, and a German
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