ART CITIES: Berlin-The Cool & The Cold

Peter and Irene Ludwig were among the first collectors in the world to collect art from the United States and the Soviet Union at the same time. Their extensive collection offers a critical juxtaposition of paintings from the two opposing sides of the East-West conflict. “The Cool and the Cold: Painting in the USA and the USSR 1960–1990. Ludwig Collection”, is a substantial group exhibition bringing together art from the Cold War’s two duelling global powers, exploring the relationship between East and West from the perspective of art history.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Gropius Bau Archive

The exhibition “The Cool and the Cold: Painting in the USA and the USSR 1960–1990. Ludwig Collection”, presents about 125 works by 80 artists from the Ludwig Collection held in six museums of international calibre. Among them are Jo Baer, Erik Bulatov, Ivan Chuikov, Helen Frankenthaler, Jasper Johns, Ilya Kabakov, Lee Lozano, Natalia Nesterova, Viktor Pivovarov, Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol. The dual line-up, occupying the entire ground floor of the Gropius Bau – which looks onto remnants of the Berlin Wall and the memorial museum Topography of Terror – illustrates continuities and contradictions in artistic thought and practice. The exhibition examines how Cold War-era artists responded to the political and aesthetic issues of their time, negotiating ideas of personal and social freedoms. Caught between the styles, isms and philosophies of three decades, these works can also be read as expressing and commenting on ideologies. The exhibition brings together art from the two global power centres of the Cold War and places it within a critical juxtaposition, reminding us how geography and politics relate to individual and collective freedom. It is of course too simple to speak of “US art” and “Soviet art.” The art production on both sides is too diverse for that. There are very interesting parallels, for instance in subject matter. In the sum total of individual observations, however, there are also myriad differences in approach and, of course, in the conditions of art production, which the exhibition highlights. It is very revealing to see, for example, how differently the expression of feelings such as suffering or sadness is dealt with in painting. A painter like Boris Nemenskiy depicts them with a sensitivity and directness that can be almost painful for viewers. The Americans, on the other hand, tend to avoid this immediacy. They work more subtly. When Andy Warhol portrays a grieving Jackie Kennedy, he does it circuitously via a collage of press photos. The painting can always revert back to a level of “self-referentiality” or “media criticism” if the image subject becomes overly evocative. When evaluating these differences, many factors obviously come into play: the socialization of viewers, for instance, or the narratives of a very Western-oriented art criticism. For an audience educated in US aesthetics, the approach of a Nemenskiy quickly falls under the general suspicion of “kitsch.” But what does this term actually mean? Are Roy Lichtenstein’s tearful, comic-strip beauties less kitschy because they are presented as pictorial quotations? Do they really negotiate the exaggerated depiction of feelings on a meta-level, or are they not loved by audiences precisely for their de facto sentimentality? And if we follow this line of thinking further, we brush aside the accusation of “political propaganda” tied to a presumed work of Socialist Realism. With Nemenskiy in particular this becomes very exciting. As a brilliant painter with a biography as a Red Army soldier, he discovered his life’s theme, namely the senselessness of war, and depicted it over and over again in different ways. He painted a young Wehrmacht soldier not as an enemy, but instead depicted both dead figures as a single entity and victims of political systems they had been placed into as individuals. In light of the atrocities of the Second World War, which are also associated with the Wehrmacht, this pictorial political commentary is quite remarkable and no longer has anything to do with the presumed propaganda painting that may appear at first glance. This is a good example for reflecting on the ambiguities in many of the paintings.

Works by: Yuri Albert, Richard Artschwager, Donald Baechler, Jo Baer, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Robert Bechtle, Erik Bulatov, Aleksandr Kharitonov, Chuck Close, Ivan Chuykov, Mark Dagley, Yuri Dyshlenko, Gia Edzgveradze, Richard Estes, Semyon Faibisovich, Andrey Filippov, Eric Fischl, Helen Frankenthaler, Igor Ganikovsky, Ralph Goings, Nancy Graves, Arman Grigoryan, Sven Gundlach, Keith Haring, Jenny Holzer, Robert Indiana,  Aleksandr Ishin, Vladimir Yakovlev, Vladimir Yankilevsky, Neil Jenney, Jasper Johns, Ilya Kabakov, Vyacheslav Kalinin, Maksim Kantor, Alex Katz, Ronald B. Kitaj, Franz Josef Kline, Komar & Melamid – Vitaly Komar, Aleksandr Melamid, Yuri Korolyov, Lee Krasner, Lady Pink (Sandra Fabara), Valeriy Laskarzhevskiy, Roy Lichtenstein,  Richard Lindner, Morris Louis, Lee Lozano, Ivan Lubennikov, Sergey Mironenko, Malcolm Morley, Sarkis Muradyan, Dmitriy Nalbandyan, Togrul Narimanbekov, Galina Neledva, Boris Nemenskiy, Vladimir Nemuchin, Lowell Nesbitt, Natalya Nesterova, NOC 167 (Melvin Samuels), ) Lev Nusberg, Igor Obrosov, Nikolay Ovchinnikov, Raymond Pettibon, Viktor Pivovarov, Jackson Pollock, Igor Popov, Dmitriy Prigov, Lee Quiñones, Robert Rauschenberg, Larisa Rezun-Zvezdochetova, Andrey Royter, David Salle, Ülo Sooster, Eduard Steinberg, Frank Stella, Maija Tabaka, Andres Tolts, Oleg Vasilev, Ants Viidalepp,  Andrey Volkov, Andy Warhol, Tom Wesselmann, Vadim Zakharov, Robert Zakanitch and Joe Zucker.

Photo: Ralph Goings, Airstream, 1970, Oil on canvas, 152 x 214 cm, © Ralph Goings, photo: mumok – Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, loan of the Peter and Irene Ludwig Foundation

Info: Curators: Benjamin Dodenhoff and Brigitte Franzen, Gropius Bau, Niederkirchnerstraße 7, Berlin, Germany, Duration: 24/9/2021-9/1/2022, Days & Hours: Mon & Wed-Sun 10:00-19:00, www.berlinerfestspiele.de