By Tara Kyle
DNAinfo Reporter/Producer
MANHATTAN — In an age when top New York artists earn fame and hefty incomes for their work, a new exhibit is highlighting prints produced by East Germans who struggle to eke out a living.
"Künstlerplakate: Artists Posters from 1967-1990," now showing at NYU's Grey Art Gallery, is the first American showing of posters created behind the Berlin Wall, in the art centers of Dresden, Leipzig and Chemnitz (nee Karl-Marx-Stadt).
"If you were working in East Germany, you had to do it because you were really driven to it," said Gallery Director Lynn Gumpert. "These artists were doing it out of pure love for the art."
While painting was maligned by Communist party leaders as the product of bourgeois elitism, posters — as long as fewer than 100 copies were printed — were "seen as art for many people, art for the masses," Gumpert said.
German artists who produced posters were often able to evade strict oversight by censors, although they lost out on the cost of living stipend offered to the official state-sponsored artists.
Many artists created posters to advertise their work or the work of other state-sponsored artists, and in doing so, created a poster that was a work of art in its own right.
One artist included in the NYU exhibit, Holger Fickelscherer, promoted his 1990 show at a Leipzig Gallery by putting a crowd of Mickey Mouses inside a train printed in the black, white and red hues of early Communist propaganda.
Much more vibrant colors are visible in a poster by an unknown artist for a 1976 show by Gerhard Altenbourg, one of the most prominent figures in the East German art scene. Because these bright shades suggested the influence of contemporary Western art, local Communist party leaders nearly cancelled the show.
Because limited information about modern Western ideas permeated the country, many artists drew instead on the tradition of German expressionism. Lutz Fleischer's 1985 ad for a young artists' exhibit in Berlin features a roughly sketched woman’s face amid black and blue scratches and scribbles.
The collective diversity and inventiveness reflected in the 120 posters on view, all made available by Germany’s Chemnitz Art Gallery, took Gumpert by surprise.
"We're seeing for the first time how lively the East German scene was despite being under a repressive regime," she said. "This became a very vital means of artistic expression for them."
"Künstlerplakate: Artists Posters from 1967-1990" will run through December 4 at the Grey Art Gallery, 100 Washington Square East.
