1980년 전후 유럽 내의 독일 미술 전시들, 무엇을 어떻게 무대에 올렸는가? = What and how staged the exhibitions of German new art in Europe about 1980?

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

During some years around 1980, a series of exhibitions of European art were shown in England, Netherlands, France and West Germany. These exhibitions tried to rewrite or to revaluate the European art of the 20th century including the newest one. However the American art critics like Benjamin D. H. Buchloh and Douglas Crimp who wrote for the renowned marxist art magazine October attacked vehemently those exhibitions as strateges to bring the new German art to the international artstage and artmarket. The “new” German art was for them above all the figurative painting that they called as Neoexpressionism.
The marxist critics saw the painting as a medium which has represented the bourgeois ideology after its birth. They declared the figurative painting as regressive, even fascist. Thus they favoured Photography and the Conceptual Art which were considerd as main art streams in the last two decades before the 80s while the traditional media painting was relatively retreated in the big international exibition events. Thus they defined the rise of painting in the 80s as “return of painting”. Moreover they brought to related the rise of the expressionist painting in Germany with the rise of the economic reconstruction of that country after the Ⅱ World War.
But the authentic reason of their hostility to the rise of the new German painting lay in the angst about the ‘return’ of the European art tradition and its ‘hegemony’ in art world. It was also the fear about the German Historicism and the ‘power’ of the ‘spirit’, namely ‘Geist’.
That angst of the American critics was not without reason. The rise of “new” German art and the ‘return’ of the painting were developed and resulted from various projects of specific exhibition-makers in Europe.
The first exhibition of this symptom was the solo exhibition of Georg Baselitz organized in 1979 by a Dutchman, Rudi Fuchs, who three years later became a general director for the 7th Kassel documenta. The British capital London played very important role to bring the new German art to the international art stage. The most effectful event of the shows was the “A New Spirit in Painting” which was organized by Nicolas Serota, Norman Rosenthal and a in Berlin living Greek curator Christos Joachimides at the Royal Academy of Arts, London in 1981. The last two curators organized together in 1982 the legendary exhibition “Zeitgeist” at the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin. The process of the rise of the new German art was supported by various international art exhibitions in Europe such as the 39th Venice Biennale in 1980, the 7th Kassel documenta in 1982, the series big exhibitions at the Centre de Pompidou in Paris etc.
Art works as well as exhibitions are never only that are seen. An art work is never aseptic. The space or site of exhibition, and the order of display are never neutral. They all represent a certain ideology of their producers or institutions just like art criticism. The art works, exhibitions and art criticisms in the symptom of the ‘return’ of the painting in Germany around 1980 demonstrate such institutional concept of museum which was born after the Enlightenment.
In this paper I showed how, why and by whom the new German painting was brought to the international art stage, and why and how it was criticized.

목차 (Table of Contents)

• Ⅰ. 독일의 형상적 회화와 그것에 대한 비판: “역사주의” vs 아방가르디즘
• Ⅱ. 회화에 집중된 유럽 전시들 양상과 의도
• Ⅲ. 독일 회화에 대한 비판과 옹호의 입장
• 참고문헌
• Abstract