Quotes of the Day

As an icon of escape, Wolfgang Mattheuer's Die Flucht des Sisyphos (The Flight of Sisyphus), from 1972, is unmistakable. A worker is suspended in mid-stride, fleeing the path of the stone he has been pushing uphill; he's both dodging the plummeting boulder and heading for an idyllic valley. But here's the twist: when he painted it, Mattheuer was an avowed communist coddled by East German apparatchiks, yet the work is an obvious protest at the condition of life for ordinary folk in the G.D.R. — not the sort of thing one expects a state-supported artist to have produced. It is such ambiguity that "Art in the G.D.R.," the new show that runs until Oct. 26 at Berlin's New National Gallery, seeks to reveal. The exhibit, the largest and most wide-ranging demonstration of art from East Germany since the country was reunified almost 13 years ago, includes some 390 works by 145 artists — ghosts of a not-so-distant past.

Since East Germany no longer exists, it may seem obvious to view its culture as a marked-off "period." Many believe its artists can be clearly divided into those who created propaganda for the totalitarian state and those who remained independent and were repressed. But curators Roland März and Eugen Blume demonstrate that many easy assumptions about art in East Germany do not hold up to closer scrutiny. Rather than reinforce the consensus view that this art can only be seen in its social and political context, they let the art speak for itself.

"We consciously refer to art in East Germany and not East German art," says März, as he slices a Wiener schnitzel in the museum restaurant. "Every painting, every object that is presented here, has to stand on its own within the uncompromising walls of this exhibition hall." That's a demanding standard, since the gallery, Mies van der Rohe's glass pavilion, is a monument to Western Modernism, standing guard across from Potsdamer Platz. At the time of its construction, it stood near the Wall. Another irony is that both März and Blume worked as curators in the National Gallery in East Germany.

For März, 64, who sports shoulder-length gray hair and a walrus mustache, the exhibit attempts to distinguish art that stands the test of time from socialist kitsch. That meant excluding some well-known work from the period, such as Walter Womacka's idyllic couple in Junges Paar am Strand (Young Couple at the Beach), a Norman Rockwell-like painting that could once be found in many East German homes. Some critics complain that such exclusions constitute a cleansing of East German art, and play down the intellectual constraints under which artists had to work. But März says he simply dismissed paintings that didn't pass the quality test. They are "illustrations, not art," he says. He also says that the West skewed the image of art in East Germany, because West German galleries adored East German Socialist Realism. "We didn't want to show pictures that simply fit into the West's cliché," he says. "We didn't want to exhibit art from the G.D.R. as it had been shown as an export product for the West."

Instead, the exhibit begins with a series of dark images, such as sketches of bombed-out Dresden after the war by Wilhelm Rudolph, who wandered among the ruins with notepad in hand. Then there is a collection of formalist drawings and paintings with winding lines and bursts of color, not only surprising because of their contrast to Rudolph's work, but also because they defied the Communist Party's diktat against abstraction.

Arbeitspause (Break from Work), from 1959, an early painting by the controversial Willi Sitte, typifies the work of a group of artists that emerged in Halle and Berlin and used elements of Cubism and Expressionism. Sitte's construction worker sits cross-legged on a steel beam reading a book with a meditative expression. "Here you can see how he was intensely working through Picasso," says März, pointing to the typical Cubist angular forms and distortions.

A few years later, Sitte denounced this style and swore allegiance to the party line. He enjoyed a successful career as East Germany's top artist and president of the Artists' Federation of the G.D.R. (He also worked with the Stasi secret police to denounce colleagues.) His 1969 painting of Lenin, Hommage à Lenin, reflects the shift: it is a bombastic explosion of color, celebrating Lenin at a time when the Soviet Union was despised by the people of Eastern Europe.

By the 1980s, the end of the regime was nearing. Cornelia Schleime, a former singer in a Dresden punk band and painter, was forced to leave East Germany in 1984. All of her early work was lost when she left, but her Gelber Horizont (Yellow Horizon) is part of the exhibit. She is nevertheless disappointed in the show. "Everything started to change," she says. "This exhibit is very defensive, and it excludes what was happening between 1980 and 1989."

The show's most distinctive body of work was produced by the Leipzig School, a group of painters led by Bernhard Heisig, Werner Tübke and Mattheuer — artists who walked a tightrope between conformism and independence, and displayed visible links to past masters. Heisig's Beharrlichkeit des Vergessens (Persistence of Forgetting), which deals with German militarism, contains a section from an Otto Dix painting, creating a lineage that transcended art in the G.D.R. Wilfried Wiegand, cultural critic for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, wrote of the Leipzig School: "Even in the G.D.R. quality art, mature enough to be exhibited in museums, was created and deserves to survive in our museums." That admission is the show's real accomplishment: western Germans are beginning to take the culture of their eastern cousins seriously. That might just put some old ghosts to rest.

• WILLIAM BOSTON | Berlin
• A new show in Berlin proves that art from the old East Germany is far more than just socialist kitsch