Gruppenausstellung
Neuanfang nach 1945
12.07. – 06.09.2015

The National Socialists’ seizure of power in the spring of 1933 marked the end of free intellectual life and critical art beyond the spirit of the times. The artistic avant-garde, which had previously made Berlin a thriving centre of culture in Europe and which had also created something of a touch of “bohemianism” in Bremerhaven, was banned from practising and was vilified as degenerate. Artists of all artistic genres emigrated abroad and those who remained withdrew into internal immigration or fell victim to barbaric racial madness.
And with the restriction of artistic activity opportunities, international exchange in art soon came to an end. Until 1945, Germany remained cut off from international artistic development for more than a decade.
After the war, there was a corresponding lack of art and culture with an international reputation. When the first artists from Germany took part in the Venice Biennale again in 1948, they were well-known old masters of expressionism such as Otto Dix, Max Pechstein and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, who were accompanied by a few contemporary artists categorised as “abstract” such as Willi Baumeister, Ernst Wilhem Nay and Ernst Schumacher.

Beyond these few exceptions, however, contemporary art in the immediate post-war period and the young Federal Republic was a regional and traditional affair. The artists who had survived the war picked up where they had left off before their exhibition bans or continued as before. The departure into regained intellectual freedom thus came in the traditional visual language of impressionism or a moderate expressionism. It was only with a time delay that the artists in Germany reacted to the broken tendencies of modernism or new artistic forms of expression, such as informal art or abstract expressionism and colour field painting, which came to Germany from France and the United States of America.

This development is also understandable for artists from the Bremerhaven area. They began to look for exhibition and sales opportunities again after the war. The Kunstverein, which was re-approved by the American military administration in July 1946, offered them an organizational framework for this. The first exhibition took place in December 1946. In the years to come, such sales exhibitions in the run-up to Christmas became a regular opportunity to present new works, and the Kunstverein also supported the struggling artists as an institution with purchases within the scope of its limited resources. In a small special presentation on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the end of the war and the liberation, the Kunstverein commemorates the difficult new beginning and the slow change in regional art after 1945 with works by Herbert Querfeld (1900-1978), Georg Hillmann (1916-2003), Hans Jacoby (1904-1949), Paul Kunze (1892-1977), Paul Ernst Wilke (1894-1971), Werner Gustav Tegethof (1919-2002), Fritz Hans Marutzky (1923- 1998) and Thea Koch-Giebel (born 1929). In comparison with selected works from the period before 1945, it becomes clear how the local artists also struggled for new artistic forms of expression on their own initiative or at the request of customers and thus gradually “modern”, contemporary, more abstract forms of expression found their way into their oeuvre.