On Art

...At the same time, more and more West Berliners—already about 25 per cent of the total population—are drawing pensions instead of actively contributing to the local economy...

...And it is particularly in the plastic arts that the split between the old and the young is evident...

...The work of a young West Berlin artist, Paul Wunderlich, which was exhibited not long ago at the Galerie Diogenes, is indicative of the new rebellion...

...Over the past 15 years, West Berlin has become the ideal city for all officially sponsored exhibitions of the art of the past—however recent—or of established foreign schools of modern art...

...Large numbers of older people, who in any other city might prove less receptive, stream past displays of paintings by Mondrian, Kandinsky or Jackson Pollock without complaint or comment...

...Somewhat anxious over the city's conservative tendencies, West Berlin's cultural leaders not long ago began to promote more up-to-date, "progressive" styles in the visual arts...

...Schroeder-Sonnenstern's astounding display of scurrilous allegories, exhibited at the Galerie Raymond Cordier, excited much comment in Paris...

...Peopled with larval forms that are barely human but still recognizably figurative, Wunderlich's oils and lithographs reveal a nightmarish world of sado-masochistic fantasies akin to those of Goya, Boecklin, Gustave Moreau or Odilon Redon...

...Edouard Roditi, an American poet and art historian now residing in Paris, is author of Dialogues on Art...

...Instead, it was a "Sunday painter," Friedrich Schroeder-Sonnenstern, who in Berlin has often been accused of being either senile or psychopathic...

...A thin trickle of foreign workers, mainly Italians, makes it way to West Berlin, but an increasing number of the city's youth is seeking employment in West Germany as soon as they finish their schooling or their apprenticeship at home...

...Most of the Berlin delegates insisted that the principal task of art education today is to defend the individualistic values of Western civilization by teaching the young to "express themselves" almost exclusively in the more extreme abstract styles...

...Yet it is hardly surprising that a city which is anomalous in every other respect should now at long last affirm its own artistic personality in forms, styles and preoccupations which have little in common with the expectations of the critics...

...For the first time since 1945, West Berlin's artificially primed economy faces a manpower shortage...

...Until the last few years, moreover, most of the city's painters and sculptors were obviously emulating the styles of either the pre-Nazi German avant-garde or of their more successful and widely discussed colleagues in Paris, New York, Rome or London...

...For them, apparently, the city's integration into the pattern of contemporary Western culture depends more on a proper understanding of this kind of abstract art than it does on an intelligent appreciation of the entire range of European art...

...The more actively creative elements here are now suspicious of anything that is proposed or promoted by the local Establishment...

...The peculiarities of the city's prevailing philosophy of the arts were clearly revealed at an international conference of the Fédération de l'Education Artistique which was held here a short while ago...

...The city's anomalous status quo is gradually affecting every aspect of its life...

...Though the Dahlem Museum still shows its world-famous collection of Rembrandt and Watteau masterpieces, such art pundits as Professor Will Grohmann seem to prefer writing and talking about the work of Soulages, Mark Rothko and other artists less generously represented in Berlin...

...But no private gallery here had ever dared to display the artist, and none of the city's established critics had ever taken his work seriously...

...His almost obscene hallucinations, discovered by myself and then launched by André Breton, are now acclaimed in West Germany and abroad as the most genial interpretations of West Berlin's mood that have yet been vouchsafed to us...

...Thus, whether geometrical or "non-formal," abstract art is now taught in West Berlin's official art schools, and widely promoted in exhibitions sponsored by the city's museums and other cultural authorities...

...Only a few hundred refugees now manage to cross the border each month, and some 100,000 East Berliners are no longer able to find employment here...

...Abstraction, the delegates contended, corresponds more truly to the nature of the child's mind than any of the traditional styles...

...Notably, the artist was not one of the numerous imitators of current Western styles who have been lavishly provided with travel grants and other forms of official encouragement from German, American or French sources...

...In the beleaguered city's cultural life, the preponderance of older people, who constitute a none-toomoneyed leisure class, has led to a sharp divergence between "official" culture and those very few expressions of literary or artistic activity that might reveal the presence of a real avant-garde among younger artists and intellectuals...

...The local critics also concentrate on the fashionably modern...

...A majority of West Berlin's sculptors, for example, seemed to be copying Henry Moore, while many painters regressed to a style inspired by Paul Klee...

...The idea was simply to keep up with the fashions prevalent elsewhere in the Western world...

...Another, if somewhat older, local rebel a few months ago made West Berlin's only major contribution to the Paris art world within recent years...

...They seem to react to all this much as they might to a display of modern textiles or furnishings in a department store...

...They have much less in common with the antiseptic abstractions of Hartung, Soulages, Poliakoff and other contemporary masters whom Professor Grohmann so readily quotes...

...In their eyes, classes after nature or art history courses were obsolete...

...Nor does it come as a shock that the efforts of countless official agencies and cultural do-gooders, and years of steadily administered booster-shots of every element of Western civilization acceptable to the Establishment, should finally be frustrated by a real triumph of the off-beat...

...Today, official Berlin takes a dim view of his international success, afraid to consider the possibility that for years it may have been steadfastly barking up the wrong tree...

...The academic imposition of "progressive" doctrines of modern art—and similar instances could be cited of an institutionalized avant-garde in the city's literary, musical and theatrical life as well— has finally begun to provoke some reactions among West Berlin's younger generation...

...Recently, I overheard one remark, almost dispassionately, "After all, Jerusalem is a divided city too...

...Consequently, they reject the styles of Mondrian, Kandinsky, Soulages and Jackson Pollock, believing these artists represent far more conformist trends then the frankly academic work of some late 19th century romantics who have long been generally condemned as decadent or unhealthily erotic...

...Many West Berliners now view the problematic future of their city with skepticism...

...Unfortunately, little interest was shown in supporting any local school or style of art that might express the city's peculiar mood or character...

...The attendance at such exhibitions is often considerable...

...It is in fact no longer a true enclave at all, but rather a kind of island that cannot be reached directly from the surrounding sea...