Page 69 - Studio International - July/August 1967

John Heartfield at the exhibition of his work held this year at Jule Hammer's Theatre and Gallery

middle generation either ruined by thirteen years in the Tiergarten suggest. Before the Kunstverein are long since past. In West Berlin, though the will
of thought-stultifying Nazi rule or else grown took on the job of organizing big exhibitions he is there, the lack of a hinterland and the inadequate
prematurely grey, and a younger generation which staged, with official support, several shows of communications have made it difficult for
cannot emerge because it simply hasn't got the importance, among them a Lovis Corinth retro- change. The situation is partly summed up by
opportunity. Most of the private galleries aren't spective and an impressive exhibition on the theme Kreuzberg, the suburb where a sort of anarchist-
interested in the work of younger artists and the `Art Dictatorship Yesterday and Today'. Cynically bohemia has been self-consciously fostered in recent
public organizations 'spend fortunes on great works he says that the money for this exhibition was only years, and where LSD is taken and hashish is
of art which, in a few years, will simply be presents forthcoming when he suggested drawing parallels smoked in the hope that Kreuzberg will awake one
for Walter Ulbricht anyway'. Wargin himself publi between Nazi and East German art policies but, morning to find itself in Montmartre. Graphic
shes a monthly gallery guide, a single sheet with with a smile, added that he also wanted, less artist Uwe Bremer, who came here from Hamburg,
polemical articles and statements on the back in blatantly, to suggest that the political and careerist says that 'to live in Berlin raises the level of the
the hope that something like vital discussion will interests in the West Berlin cultural set-up would senses almost like LSD. You see more, smell more
once again find a place here in Berlin. He thinks it also end in a kind of dictatorship. and live more intensely than in the supermarket
astounding that the city was completely without a Ben Wargin, in an attempt to get some kind of sanitorium of the Western part of Germany'. Per-
gallery guide of any sort until he dreamed up his discussion moving, recently published an article in haps the unique and unnatural stimulae that this
own, and even now not all galleries are prepared to his newspaper-cum-gallery-guide about Berlin's role ghetto-city is now giving the younger generation
co-operate with him. 'In Prague they do things as an artistic centre and then wrote round to critics of artists will eventually express itself in an exciting
much better, and their fortnightly art newspaper and gallery owners throughout Germany for replies. way on the walls of the private galleries here. At
is far better than anything we could ever hope for Rudolf Zwirner, a Cologne gallery-owner, wrote the moment there is no sign of it. More likely that
here, and this is reckoned to be the bastion of back: 'I am not able to reply because for years now Berlin in the end will simply exist on its few weeks
Western culture.' Ben Wargin claims that he only I have been unable to find any evidence of artistic of festivals and then, like Bournemouth and
stays in Berlin because he wants to do something life in Berlin.' Worthing, will retain its pensioners at the end of
for the life of the city to which he too came as an On the other side of the wall, Socialist Realism the season and stand by and watch as the musicians,
emigrant after the war like so many others. He has rules more absolutely than elsewhere and the days actors and artists pack their bags, say goodbye to
in fact played a much bigger role in the city's art when you could see an exhibition of Schwitters in Berlin and go home.
scene than his basement premises in an old house a private gallery in East Germany (as late as 1949)