The German Genius

had one unfortunate side effect, forcing neglect on some German artists, which eventually provoked a group of painters in Düsseldorf in 1957 to mount a series of exhibitions in the studio of Otto Piene. Düsseldorf had emerged as the leading school, with artists from East Germany such as Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke moving there in the late 1950s and early 1960s to create their blend of kitsch and Pop Art, known satirically as Capitalist Realism. (Richter’s father-in-law had been responsible for overseeing the mass sterilization of women, including the painter’s own aunt, under the Nazis.)
    The group around Piene, much influenced by Yves Klein and his doctrine that art is about ideas rather than any one view of reality, took the name Zero. 64 Their objective was to “strike out reality,” notably by denying form, producing images (often in monochrome, or as explorations of whiteness) that had no physical presence other than sheer energy. Piene’s 1963 Venus of Willendorf is the defining work here, along with Günther Uecker’s Hunsrückenstrasse , a whole street painted entirely white. The developments of the Zero group were accompanied by an important private initiative that turned into one of the more successful elements of the late twentieth-century art world. This was the establishment of Documenta in Kassel, which has evolved into one of the great forums for contemporary art.
    J OSEF B EUYS’S D IALOGUE WITH T IME
     
    All this was overshadowed by the advent of Joseph Beuys, who stands apart (and, for many people, above) all else in German postwar art. Beuys, born in Krefeld in 1921, never deviated from his conviction that his artistic aim was to find a new visual language that would come to terms with the war and at the same time find a way forward that did not ignore all that had happened.
    The work of art, Beuys believed, exists in “eternal time, historical time, and personal time.” 65 Having himself been shot down over Russia as a Luftwaffe pilot in the Second World War, he was treated for frostbite by his Russian captors, who used felt and fat, which became the materials Beuys used in (some of) his art, fused with other, less personal substances. 66 He felt the spectator should be aware of what these materials meant to the artist, adding a level of consciousness to the aesthetic experience: the artist is a person with a past, part of the national past. His famous piece Strassenbahnhaltestelle ( Tram Stop ) fuses his own experience (as a boy he used a tram stop near an important monument), with the national past, featuring railway lines to remind the viewer what railways were used for in Nazi Germany. But , his lines were slightly curved, to hint at progress, a way forward, and up . In experiencing the present-day beauty of his sculptures, Beuys is saying, we must relive past events—this is his dialogue with time. 67
    Beuys exerted an influence through his pupils, notably Jörg Immendorf and Anselm Kiefer, though a younger generation—Markus Lüpertz, Georg Baselitz, and A. R. Penck—has reacted against the high-culture associations that even Beuys’s work displayed. Kiefer’s materials include sand, straw, and burnt wood, and they often superimpose one simple image floating above the landscape below—denser, more damaged, more chaotic. This, for Kiefer, is the level of shame. 68 Baselitz, influenced by Munch, is a painter of monumental images that are, in his own words, an attempt to create an “aggressive disharmony” of color, though he too incorporates his own experiences—of the Wall and of the rebellions of 1968—into his work. Penck’s stick figures mix cave painting and graffiti, the lurid, the sensual, the abuse and pathology of intimacy, which was, for him, the Nazis’ greatest crime. 69
    In the works of the latest generation, Rainer Fetting, Helmut Mid-dendorf, and Jiri Georg Dokupil, all high-culture trappings have been abandoned in favor of rock culture “at its most frenzied,” so that there is an (all too postmodern) ironic distance between the artists and the issues depicted. 70 Here the iconic work is Immendorf’s great series of Café Deutschland paintings, produced in the 1970s, in which the main elements of German political history take place in discotheques and druggy, cross-dressing cabarets, even on the flight decks of airplanes. Painting, in the words of Irit Rogoff, has become (and this too is a Germany we haven’t seen before) “raucously