Art: German Expressionism Lives

A resurgence of powerful images by five exemplary figures

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 a way out of the cul-de-sac in which German painting and sculpture found themselves after 1945. Hitler had trashed the avantgarde, driving modernism into exile or up the chimney. For a quarter of a century after that, German artists wore the virtuous American uniform of abstract art, as proof of their denazification. Now they breathe easier among their inherited imagery. At the same time, although there have been many dealers' shows of recent German art in America, museums have been slow to react to it. Consequently the exhibition that opened in June at the St. Louis Art Museum, and will go to New York City's PS. 1, a gallery housed in a former public school, in September, is of great interest: it is the first systematic museum show of this material in America. Art Historian Jack Cowart, who assembled it, wisely refrained from trying to cover everyone. Instead, he chose five "exemplary" figures, the most influential and (although his catalogue essay waffles on this point) the aesthetically superior ones: Georg Baselitz, Jörg Immendorff, Anselm Kiefer, Markus Lüpertz and A.R. Penck.