Reconstructing the Subject:
Modernist Painting in Western Germany, 1945-1950
Yule F. Heibel

Cloth | 1995 | This edition is out of print | ISBN13: 978-0-691-03646-5
268 pp. | 6 x 9 | 8 color illus. 25 b&w illus.

Through an exploration of the reception of modernist painting, Yule Heibel discusses how West German artists, intellectuals, and audiences attempted to fashion a secure "image of man" in the wake of the most serious and radical crisis in modern history: Nazism and the Holocaust. In the period from 1945 to about 1950, expressive and "unbeautiful" elements in abstract painting were discursively and practically purged, mainly because expression was a reminder of dangerous and traumatized subjectivity. This purging resulted in a hegemony of "harmonious" abstract art, which critics to date have viewed primarily as a decorative art and thus an avoidance of Germany's twentieth-century history. Until now, no one has analyzed the discursive maneuvers of the late 1940s that encouraged painting to develop in this way.

Focusing on political, aesthetic, and theoretical issues, this book is an inquiry into the instability of subjectivity in Germany and its implications for the development of abstract painting. Drawing on the critical theory of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Heibel addresses such topics as the politicization of expression in light of Cold War rhetoric, the liberal model of social management of violence, and the U.S. contribution to postwar reconstruction and its relation to individualism. Key figures include painters E. W. Nay, Willi Baumeister, Theodor Werner, Fritz Winter, Werner Heldt, and Carl Hofer, and the critic Will Grohmann.

Review:

"Intellectually challenging and covering in depth a highly focused and previously neglected area of research, Heibel's study is a most welcome addition to the literature on modern art."--Choice

Endorsements:

"Yule Heibel's text is a finely crafted, well presented, and extensively documented argument that demonstrates the close linkage of German art and the ideological positions emerging after 1945. Heibel maps the artistic manifestations against the cultural and political, as well as art critical, discourses of the time. . . . an example of excellent and innovative scholarship, . . it is profoundly interdisciplinary, extending its audience to cultural studies, history, and the critique of ideology."--Reinhold Heller

"A compelling analysis of the complex of issues surrounding post-war abstract painting in Germany. This book presents much previously unknown and significant material for the history of art and other historical disciplines."--Maria Makela

Table of Contents:

	Acknowledgments
	List of illustrations
	Introduction: Subjects and Objects	1
Ch. I	First Voices, Initial Assessments: 1945 to 1949	10
Ch. II	The Marginalization of Expression	45
Ch. III	Agendas for Re-Engaging the West	81
Ch. IV	Toward the Social Management of Violence	116
	Notes	145
	Bibliography	189
	Index	205

Subject Area:

• Art and Architecture

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