Modern Art at the Berlin Wall: Demarcating Culture in the Cold War Germanys

At the height of the Cold War, art produced in divided Germany contested the cultural demarcation of East and West. Here Claudia Mesch shows how a wide group of artists struggled to take visual art beyond the crude separations of the "Iron Curtain," and to transcend the first global cultural divide of the twentieth century. Artists in Berlin produced artworks—including painting, performance and film—that engaged critically with imposed national and global identities, and with issues of memory and trauma. Modern Art at the Berlin Wall presents a new picture of the Cold War border between East and West as a dynamic and international cultural space, and is essential for all those interested in art history, modernism, the Cold War and the cultural history of the twentieth century.

At the height of the Cold War, art produced in divided Germany contested the cultural demarcation of East and West. Here Claudia Mesch shows how a wide group of artists struggled to take visual art beyond the crude separations of the "Iron Curtain," and to transcend the first global cultural divide of the twentieth century. Artists in Berlin produced artworks--including painting, performance and film--that engaged critically with imposed national and global identities, and with issues of memory and trauma. Modern Art at the Berlin Wall presents a new picture of the Cold War border between East and West as a dynamic and international cultural space, and is essential for all those interested in art history, modernism, the Cold War and the cultural history of the twentieth century.

Claudia Mesch teaches in the School of Art at Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona. She is the author, with Viola Michely, of Joseph Beuys: The Reader (I.B. Tauris, 2007) and is founding editor of the e-journal Surrealism and the Americas. She writes on diverse topics in twentieth-century and contemporary art, especially postwar modernism, its ties to surrealism, and European intellectual history, and is working on a study of European intellectuals’ and surrealism’s preoccupation with Native American culture. She is a frequent contributor of art and film criticism to Sculpture, caa.reviews and The Art Book.