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Excerpts from the original press kit for the exhibition and catalog:
From November 6, 2014, the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt will be presenting a broad panorama of Pop Art in its specifically German variant for the first time in a major survey exhibition – an art-historical phenomenon that has received little attention to date. Pop, which began in Great Britain and the USA and quickly established itself there as a universal culture across genres, experienced an original artistic form in the still young Federal Republic of Germany in the 1960s. Artists living in West Germany such as Thomas Bayrle, Christa Dichgans, K. H. Hödicke, Konrad Klapheck, Ferdinand Kriwet, Uwe Lausen, Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter–in contrast to their Anglo-American colleagues with their often bold and glamorous vocabulary–dealt in their works with the less grandiose banalities of everyday German life. The phase of the Wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle) was followed by one of political reappraisal of the then recent German past. The visual arts were not only searching for a new concept of art and a new identity, they were also undergoing a process of democratization.
The exhibition highlights the four major centers of Pop Art in Germany: Düsseldorf, Berlin, Munich and Frankfurt am Main. They brought Pop Art to fruition as a metropolitan art form in its own right. “German Pop” brings together around 150 works of art and documentary material by 34 artists, including both established and long-forgotten and largely unknown protagonists of German Pop Art. The exhibition features impressive and surprising works, some of which have not been exhibited for decades or have never even been publicly accessible. “German Pop” sees itself as an archaeology of a decade – the 1960s to early 1970s – that takes stock of German Pop Art with paintings, objects and sculptures, films, collages and graphics. The collected works come primarily from private estates and collections, but also from numerous well-known art institutions such as the Museum Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf, the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich and the ZKM in Karlsruhe.
The pop generation of the 1960s to early 1970s aimed directly at the sensitivities of the massively emerging consumer society. In Germany, pop culture became an instrument for expressing cultural difference, which aimed to distance itself from the escapist Art Informel of the post-war years. Beginning with Konrad Klapheck, who was one of the first artists to show an interest in representational painting again, Kapitalistischer Realismus (Capitalist Realism) emerged in Düsseldorf in 1963 in the spirit of Pop with Manfred Kuttner, Konrad Lueg, Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter. In addition, the Rhineland scene developed with the artists HP Alvermann, Peter Brüning and Winfred Gaul. An exhibition organized by Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke, Konrad Lueg and Manfred Kuttner in 1963 in a former butcher’s shop – billed as the “first exhibition of German Pop Art” – can be seen as one of the beginnings of this art scene. It was also in this context that Gerhard Richter used the term “German Pop” for the first time.
With the graduates of the Düsseldorf Art Academy, Wolf Vostell, KP Brehmer and Herbert Kaufmann, who moved to Berlin, the German pop wave came to the so-called “island of the free world”. Berlin, which at the beginning of the 1960s had a rather tranquil cultural existence, joined the new movement with two notable initiatives: K. H. Hödicke, Lambert Maria Wintersberger and several other painters founded a producers’ gallery in 1964, uniting artists in their departure from Art Informel and Tachism and in their striving for representationalism in painting. In the same year, 22-year-old René Block opened his gallery with the programmatic exhibition “Neodada, Pop, Décollage, Kapitalistischer Realismus” and showed young Germans such as KP Brehmer and Wolf Vostell. Block, who saw his gallery as a kind of corrective instrument, says himself that he deliberately dispensed with an international program and thus propagated equality with American Pop Art, albeit only with modest means.
Frankfurt am Main was not really an art city at the time, but with the European Headquarters of the US Army, the first America House, the first shopping mall based on the American model, the economic miracle mile Zeil, the airport, the banks and the stock exchange, it was somehow more American than other cities. And so German Pop quickly arrived in Frankfurt. However, with the two Frankfurt artists Thomas Bayrle and Peter Roehr–two of the most important and influential representatives of German Pop Art–it clearly set itself apart from the centers of Düsseldorf and Berlin. Roehr and Bayrle cast their analytical gaze on advertising–for shampoo, instant coffee, household appliances–which both exposed as a propaganda machine.
Pop’s all-encompassing character also influenced existing artist groups such as the Munich-based SPUR, WIR and GEFLECHT. Although they were suspicious of the new movement, they were also fascinated by it. They had an affinity for certain artistic elements such as comic-like speech bubbles and also questioned the role of the classic artist as a solitary genius. Instead, they advocated communication and discussion as a unifying element. From 1965 at the latest, Lothar Fischer, Heimrad Prem and Helmut Sturm experimented with the motifs and aesthetics of Pop Art. In Munich, Uwe Lausen and Michael Langer also explored the new movement.
The German artists developed their own form of Pop Art, which also meant a break with German high culture: ironing boards became motifs for painting. Pop is everyday life and reflects it, above all capitalist commodity and consumer culture and its forms of presentation. Even though America was the center of the art world at the time and everyone’s gaze wandered there, German Pop remained specific with its historical and cultural background.