60 Years-60 Works at the Martin Gropius Bau

Today, Berlin celebrates the sixtieth birthday of the constitution of the Federal Republic of Germany, and the city is having a grand birthday bash at the Brandenburger Tor, where half a million people and celebrities from the worlds of politics, journalism, music and entertainment have gathered.

Happy Birthday at the Martin Gropius Bau

If you've missed the party at the Brandenburger Tor, you can still take part in a quieter celebration at the Martin Gropius Bau - a celebration of the 60 years of the Federal Republic as reflected in the works of 60 artists. 


Elephants and Rhinoceros

The exhibition, which opened on May 1, has been controversial. Sixty years, 60 works. How can one work speak for an entire year in the often tumultuous six decades between 1949 and 2009? Besides, railed the leftist media and some vitriolic critics, why did the curators leave out former East German artists (except those who fled to the BRD) and once again throw up a dividing wall between East and West?

Simple, said curator Peter Iden, at a roundtable discussion I attended last week at the Martin Gropius Bau. This is an exhibition of art in the Federal Republic. To demand a more inclusive approach is like having the rhinoceros complain they are not featured in an exhibition on elephants.

"Sechzig Jahre-Sechzig Werke"

German media have played up the irony of housing an exhibition that underscores the East/West divide in the  the Martin-Gropius Bau, the beautiful Renaissance-style exhibition hall that stands on a site across which the Berlin Wall once cut.

But regardless of  the political debate, "Sechzig Jahre-Sechzig Werke" is still a landmark retrospective and a collection of wonderful pieces.

The works do not march in a straight chronological line (as one might expect): art from different years are placed in counterpoint. Other lines, too, are blurred: the lines between photography and painting in Gerhard Richter's mysterious "Tiger" or between video images and the medieval art of woodcuts in Christine Baumgartner's intriguing "Luftbild."

Besides paintings there are sculptures, installations, graphic art and photography. Limiting the choice to 60 works means, of course, that the choice is subjective -- and exactly this keeps the viewer curious and questioning. An evenly balanced, politically correct selection would have been far less interesting.

Not a History Parade

This isn't a parade of "representational" works, with easy one-to-one relationships between the work of art and the year in which it appears. That, too, makes it more interesting.

Chronology is worked out elsewhere: in six interactive screens that juxtapose a time line against paintings and their commentary -- and in 60 short films that show historic footage from six decades of political, social and cultural events. It's up to you as viewer to carry these images in your head as you move back out into the exhibition spaces.

Sechzig Jahre. Sechzig Werke shows every day (including holidays) till June 14, 2009,  from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. at the Martin Gropius Bau, Niederkirchner Straße 7, 10963 Berlin. U-2 or S-Bahn 1, 2, or 25 to Potsdamer Platz. Admission is 7 EUR (reduced fee: 5 EUR). More information is at www.gropiusbau.de or www.60jahre-60werke.de

The exhibition is an initiative of the Foundation for Art and Culture, Bonn and supported by the Ministry of Internal Affairs.

NB   "Kunst und Kalter Krieg 1945-89" (Art in the time of the Cold War), curated by Stephanie Barron, chief curator of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, opens in Berlin's Deutsches Historisches Museum on October 3, 2009. In direct contrast to "60 Jahre-60 Werke" this exhibition focuses on the intrinsic relationship between art on either side of the former West/East divide. The exhibition is part of the commemoration of the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.