Landscape Imagery, Politics and Identity in a Divided Germany, 1968-1989

摘要

In her overview of recent German landscape painting, Catherine Wilkins has delivered an unusual study that is readily accessible to the non-specialist. Wilkins's underlying argument is that landscape painting, as a form of cultural expression rich in symbolic meaning, not only lends itself well to the kind of overt and covert socio-political commentary that has come to characterise our understanding of mid-twentieth century German cultural output, but is itself a particularly German tradition that stretches back to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This premise allows her to compare work by leading exponents of the Duesseldorf and Leipzig schools of painting as part of a wider study into a putative national psyche: Joerg Immendorf, Michael van Ofen, and Michael von Biel in the West, and Guenter Richter, Ursula Mattheuer-Neustaedt and Werner Tuebke in the East. The decision not to include landscape painting by the internationally better-known artists Anselm Kiefer and Gerhard Richter is motivated by the book's twofold desire to establish the depth and spread of what Wilkins is claiming to be a particularly German tradition and approach, as well as to bring these lesser-known artists to an international audience.