ABSTRACT

Holocaust survivor Herbert Sandberg not only contributed to the visual identity of the GDR with many popular images, caricatures, and cartoons, but as editor of Bildende Kunst he was a central figure in the formalist debate of the 1950s. His unenthusiastic response to the Soviet art on display ultimately cost him the editorship of Bildende Kunst. In terms of numbers, abstract works obviously prevailed because the art market of the Western nations is dominated by a world that hails every piece of “pretentious tin by Mr. Calder” or the “black on black” diagonals painted by Soulages as the emperor’s new clothes. The Soviet artists, following a twenty-two-year absence by the USSR, produced a surfeit of scenes painted in an academic style. Painters such as Ioganson, Plastov, and Gerasimov, and even the masterful sculptors Mukhina and Tomsky came across as Romantic and outdated.