Page 36 - Studio International - October 1966

Germany : the new generation

John Anthony Thwaites

There is a vogue just now for the New Generation, for
artists around 30 plus or minus. There is almost a genera-
tion-style. Someone has said that in Germany there is a
new generation every ten years. A German who is 60
now was 27 in 1933 and 39 at the end of the war. If he is
50 the figures are 17 and 29; if 40 they are . . . if 30
they are . . . And so on. The first group is essentially
a Weimar product. The second had the first dozen
years of adult life under dictatorship and war. The third
was Nazi-educated; while the last can hardly remember
1945. These are four absolutely different backgrounds.
The art produced reflects this. The elder generation, on
the whole, has never freed itself from an Expressionism of
some kind: (Scholz, Becker, Camaro). The second is
divided. There are some great individualists: Geiger,
Thieler, Schumacher—and many opportunists. The best
of the third generation, ZERO for example, reacted not
only against the Nazis but against the sentimental
Weltschmerz which followed their fall. They created the
first new style to come out of Germany. The rest rushed
into imitating everything from the outside.
Only the last group has enjoyed a more or less normal
life. It alone is quite unburdened by the past. So it has
the same characteristics as art of the same period else-
where: an interest in technology, cool humour, a certain
objectivity, an interest in Form and in new kinds of
figuration, a fascination with everyday environment
which is both amused or satirical. There is one difference,
though. The art of recent years in Europe and America
is a big-city art. But Germany today has no big-city life.
There is nowhere like London or (at one time) Berlin,
which is cut off from surrounding country. Nor has
industrial landscape, even in the Ruhr, replaced the
natural. Antonioni could not produce Red Desert here.
A further factor in this is that major cities are distributed
throughout the length and breadth of the country. Art
has no head, only a crooked spine: Hamburg, Hanover,
Berlin (provincial now), the inimical twins Cologne and
Düsseldorf, then Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Freiburg, Munich.
And this list does not include all the exhibition centres or
all the places where talent can be found. Ruhr towns
like Bochum, backwaters like Brunswick, unknown
corners like Müllheim in Baden have all produced
something. This means that all art is provincial, in the
strict sense of the word. It is not necessarily a handicap.
(In this sense England was provincial from Cotman to
Constable.) But it makes a survey virtually impossible. A
critic can only assay the samples he receives. In some of
the rough groupings I have made, come artists out of R. A. Scholl
many parts of Germany, in others almost all of them Dance of the signs Coloured chalks
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