Word: malerei
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...said right off that, in America at least, Richter was easy to miss. Think the words "new German art," and you think "neo-Expressionism." Think that, and the heart sinks. Heftige malerei, the German critics used to call it, "heavyweight painting," and it was certainly crude enough for three drunken gnomes and a village woodcutter. Inch-thick paint (the stuff that used to mean "sincerity" in the 1980s, remember?) and sculptures mutilated from tree roots with chain saws. All this rhetoric, now so comic, had its equivalents in the States (think of Julian Schnabel and his pretensions), but Germany...
...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...
Neoexpressionism, New Figuration, heftige Malerei-whatever the name may be-German figurative painting is at present the most hotly disputed stock on the Big Board of art. The arguments about it are going to go on for quite a while, partly because few generalizations hold across a field of painters whose work varies so wildly in meaning and quality. What can be said of raucous ephemerids like Rainer Petting that will also apply to deeper men like Anselm Kiefer? The Germans, understandably, have extolled all of it because the resurgence of expressionist figuration offers...
...LECTURE. "Geschichte der deutschen Kunst im XIX. Jahrhundert. IX. Die moderne religiose Malerei." Professor Paul Clemen. Lecture Room of the Fogg Museum...
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