Date of Submission
Spring 2016
Academic Programs and Concentrations
Art History
Project Advisor 1
Laurie Dahlberg
Abstract/Artist's Statement
In the aftermath of World War II, as nations with shared pasts and polarized ideologies, the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic imagined that the greatest means of recovery could be implemented through the construction of international alliances through ideology and aesthetics. This paper is an examination of the adaptation of socialist realism in the East German 1953 Third German Art Exhibition and the non-representational avant-garde in the West German 1955 Documenta, as well as within the 1957 MoMA exhibit on German Art of the Twentieth Century. As state-sanctioned exhibitions, these three collections sought to present an image of divided Germany in its progressive emancipation from the legacy of the National Socialist regime.
Access Agreement
Open Access
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Rust, Isabelle Woods, "The Curation of Identity: Aesthetics of National Division in German Art during the 1950s" (2016). Senior Projects Spring 2016. 359.
https://digitalcommons.bard.edu/senproj_s2016/359
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