This exhibition will present the art of former East and West Germany in the United States for the first time. It is financially supported by Germany’s foundation for culture and by the German lottery. Starting in January 2009, it will be the first special exhibition to be presented in the newly built Broad Contemporary Art Museum, and is being organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Kulturprojekte Berlin GmbH.
On 23rd May 2009 the exhibition will open in the “Germanisches Nationalmuseum” in Nuremburg to mark the 60th anniversary of the foundation of the Federal Republic of Germany; it will be on display in Berlin from 3rd October 2009. There, it will be at the centre of events celebrating the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall, when the Cold War came to an end.
The exhibition shows how much the two art histories were fused with one another despite their extreme ideological differences. Memorial competitions took place in the early fifties and late eighties to mark the beginning and end of the Cold War. In 1953 there were competitions for the “unknown political prisoners” in the West (Bernhard Heiliger took part amongst others), and for the victims of Buchenwald concentration camp in the East (Fritz Cemer). At the end of the Cold War, the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic were united in artistic projects that looked to discover an identification of their respective state’s creation: Werner Tübke with his panorama of the Peasant War in Bad Frankenhausen, and Johannes Grützke with his depiction of the “Peoples’ Representative in the 1848 revolution” in the Paulskirche in Frankfurt am Main.
The confrontation between opposing images of humanity at the start of the fifties has turned into a coexistence of self-critical discussion about the historical legends of the two Germanys.
Kulturprojekte Berlin [2010] The Art of the Two Germanys during the Cold War / Deutsche Kunst im Kalten Krieg.
BmB (2009) Art of Two Germanys Exhibition. [Online]
