Research Forum for German Visual Culture

Latest publications in Peter Lang German Visual Culture series. Series editor - Christian Weikop

Brian Cox and Nick Serota discuss Strategy: Get Arts and Richard Demarco

The website documents the work of 35 post-war artists from Düsseldorf, including Joseph Beuys, Gerhard Richter, Stefan Wewerka, Blinky Palermo, Klaus Rinke, and Günther Uecker, who transformed the college into a ‘total work of art’.

Scottish Art News Review  BY NEIL COOPER, 06.10.2021

You can find out more about Strategy Get Arts at the ECA here

THE HARMONISED WHOLE: WASSILY KANDINSKY AND PRINCIPLES IN VISUAL PERCEPTION FROM JUGENDSTIL UNTIL DER BLAUE REITER - PHD Project by Anne Grasselli

‘STAGING THE CARNIVALESQUE: SUBVERSIVE STRATEGIES IN PRINT AND PERFORMANCE FROM SIMPLICISSIMUS TO DADA’  = PHD Project by Lucy Byford

This book presents new research on the histories and legacies of the German Expressionist group, Der Blaue Reiter, the founding force behind modernist abstraction. For the first time Der Blaue Reiter is subjected to a variety of novel inter-disciplinary perspectives, ranging from a philosophical enquiry into its language and visual perception, to analyses of its gender dynamics, its reception at different historical junctures throughout the twentieth century, and its legacies for post-colonial aesthetic practices. The volume offers a new perspective on familiar aspects of Expressionism and abstraction, taking seriously the inheritance of modernism for the twenty-first century in ways that will help to recalibrate the field of Expressionist studies for future scholarship. Der Blaue Reiter still matters, the contributors argue, because the legacies of abstraction are still being debated by artists, writers, philosophers and cultural theorists today.

The Marx Collection – 40 Works is the first publication on the collection to present and take a detailed look at individual works. Spanning from the early 1960s to the present, the selection of works covers one of the most exciting periods in art history. An illustrated timeline provides background information on the historical context of the Marx Collection and its presentation in the Nationalgalerie.

This issue offers new perspectives on the work of Joseph Beuys and his engagement with European history, mythology and geopolitics during the 1970s and 1980s. Subjects covered include the work he made in response to a devastating earthquake in Italy in 1980; the legacies of his counter-educational Free International University; Beuys’s interest in the notion of Eurasia; his collaboration with Danish composer Henning Christiansen; and his involvement in the exhibition Strategy: Get Arts, held in Edinburgh in 1970. Other articles in this issue include a technical study of Frank Bowling’s materials and techniques, and an exploration of Antony Hill’s semiotic approach to concrete painting in the 1950s.

German Visual Culture invites research on German art across different periods, geographical locations, and political contexts. Books in the series engage with aesthetic and ideological continuities as well as ruptures and divergences between individual artists, movements, systems of art education, art institutions, and cultures of display. Challenging scholarship that interrogates and updates existing orthodoxies in the field is desirable.