Bernhard Heisig and the Fight for Modern Art in East Germany by April Eisman (review)

April Eisman's fascinating new monograph focuses on the life and career of one of East Germany's most important painters, Bernhard Heisig, who straddled an almost impossible position between abstract modernism and socialist realism. Eisman's study is as much art history as it is history, because she uses Heisig as a window into the fascinating Spannungsfeld between the SED and its ideological project, on the one hand, and the artistic community in East Germany on the other. Heisig produced interesting and important art, but he also participated in the SED's ideological project both as an artist within the Leipzig art scene, but also as the Director of the Leipzig Academy of Art (1976–1987) and the vice president of the Union of Visual Artists (Verband der Bildenden Künstler). Heisig's life and career, like so many artists in East Germany, fit neither into the dichotomy of "oppressed dissident artist" nor the "illegitimate Party apparatchik." His life, Eisman shows, offers a wider perspective on the reality that even in a "dictatorship," people lived, made art, had to negotiate broader powers and competing claims, and interpreted the world around them through their creativity—and that none of this should be thrown out or delegitimized simply because the GDR state passed out of existence.

Indeed, as Eisman lucidly and very helpfully details in her introduction, Heisig's work in the post-Wende period was part of the Bilderstreit, a roiling controversy played out in the press surrounding the legitimacy and political correctness of including former East Germans' art in prominent exhibitions. Heisig's work landed at the center of this controversy, once he was commissioned to produce a painting (Zeit und Leben, 1999) for the renovated Reichstag building (where it stands to this day). Eisman smartly links the Bilderstreit with the broader lacuna of East German art in the postwar German art historical field—very little academic work has, in fact, been done on East German art, and Eisman argues that this is due in part to a false binary between "socialist realism" and "modern art." Instead, she argues, if there was a binary at work, it was between "socialist realism," on the one hand, and the "Western idea of 'art for art's sake'" on the other. Socialist realism was not antimodern, and Heisig's work illustrates this well. Eisman sees the creation of this false binary as stemming from Cold War perspectives and ideologies which continue to impact the art and art historical world, which is especially problematic since scholars in the Anglo-American world take their cues from (mostly Western) German academics and curators who still carry a strong ideological bias.

Bernhard Heisig and the Fight for Modern Art in East Germany follows Heisig's life chronologically. However, Eisman periodizes his biography, in part, along the lines of various conflicts in which he found himself. Often these conflicts were a result of his attempts to explore modern art while fulfilling commissions to produce art within official spaces. So, for example, during the Fifth Congress of the Union of Visual Artists in Dresden in 1964, Heisig gave a speech attacking dogmatism in art, and implied that socialist realism that did not explore modern trends—for example, cubism—was an insult to the intelligence of the East German people. This kind of language got him into hot water with the party, though he had his defenders as well—he ended up presenting a self-criticism.

Other actual pieces of art earned him sharp rebukes from powerful cultural figures in East Germany, including Alfred Kurella, the GDR's powerful Culture Minister. One of the most interesting parts of Eisman's study is the controversy generated by Heisig's mural paintings for the Hotel Deutschland, a new international hotel built on the Karl-Marx-Platz in central Leipzig in 1965. These murals form perhaps the best example of Heisig's synthesis...