Before the Wall Cracked : Rapidly changing times date a show of 12 East German artists at UCLA’s Wight Gallery

The tumultuous epidemic of freedom erupted of late in Eastern Europe should make UCLA’s current exhibition as timely as the headlines. Titled “Twelve Artists from the German Democratic Republic” the show is the first of its kind in the U.S. and purports to act as a revelation for any citizen laboring under the delusion that art behind the Berlin Wall is nothing more than slavish Soviet-style Socialist Realism with its illustrative superman Stakhanovites and amazons in babushkas.

Actually the rush of real events races so far in front of the two- or three-year lag-time required to organize an international traveling exhibition that time conspires to make any such contemporary art show obsolete before it gets on the wall. Art is fueling itself on extra-artistic shtick these days. It may pack in the viewers but artistic quality is suffering thereby. Anybody who looks outside our borders has known for several years that GDR artists have not been under aesthetic constraints since the ‘50s and have been pretty well free to do their own thing since the ‘70s.

Those who put themselves to the trouble of a little puddle-jumper jet ride to San Francisco recently saw a show at that city’s Museum of Modern Art called “10 + 10” which proved that even Soviet artists don’t do Socialist Realism these days, if they don’t feel like it.

Thus the trendiness issue is partly a red herring in these shows. But they do contribute to the general realization that, if all this keeps up, we may have to rejigger our mental map of the world and recast our interior certainties about who the good and bad guys are and who practices which aesthetic. After all, our currently fashionable media-based art in the Museum of Contemporary Art’s recent “A Forest of Signs” or the Whitney’s “Image World” can plausibly be construed as a form of social if not Socialist realism with its heavy cultural and political commentary. Maybe all this real-world stuff is happening because as they become more like us, we become more like them. There are significant infusions of old Russian avant-garde agitprop and German Dada yuppie-fied in current American work. Maybe it is an omen.

Transformative events move so rapidly in the GDR that the dozen-from-Deutschland show at UCLA’s Wight Gallery (to Jan. 21) might carry the invisible subtitle, “The Way We Were.” Organized by the Busch-Reisinger Museum at Harvard University, it was selected by its curator Peter Nisbet, veteran critic Dore Ashton and historian Peter Selz. Their catalogue essays combine to contribute to the feeling that this art had slipped into the past even before The Wall was breached.

There is something reassuring about the ensemble at first blush. It harks back to artistic attitudes held here 30 years ago when careers in art were virtually non-existent and people who wanted to be serious were perfectly willing to take modest teaching posts and work like austere monks, nourishing art on history and literature, the concerts and plays on campus, their private lives and secret emotions.

The GDR work carries this kind of intellectual sobriety and dedication to obscurity. Significantly the works are all painting and graphics searching for the individual frisson in traditional form. It shows very little overt political or social commentary given that German art is traditionally soaked with Kunstpolitik . The closest approach is in the painting of Thomas Ziegler, a handsome guy of 42, who lives in Schwerin and owns a dog who looks like Spuds MacKenzie.

His “Soviet Soldiers” is a four-panel quartet of portraits joined by Soviet-scarlet backgrounds, baby blue frames and a kind of teeter-totter bench painted through the four panels. The big-headed soldiers pose in uniform looking suitably intense but not threatening. What might be caricature is transformed into humanism even touched with sentimentality. Just an Expressionist figurative artist doing his thing.

Read between paint-strokes and this art does reveal life in the GDR. During the period of the greatest forced artistic conformity, the hot artists in the West were mainly in the mold of England’s Francis Bacon. It seems these East block artists wanted nothing better than to be able to probe this forbidden manner and to get back the native German styles proscribed by Hitler’s “Degenerate Art” campaign--the pioneering art that began with Dresden’s Die Bruecke (The Bridge) and ended with the late left-wing Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity).

There is something touching in the modest aspiration to practice in the shadow of artists that represented the good old days. Veteran septuagenarian Willi Sitte perpetuates a predecessor in his “Homage to Lovis Corinth” but the original’s animal charge gives way to a tenacious weariness.

Francis Bacon pops up again in the black paintings of Berlin’s Heinrich Tessmer whose brooding self-portraits alternate with drawn “rat sheets” where pairs of rodents become metaphors of the relations between the sexes. The work recalls what happened to the city of Alfred Doblin’s novel “Berlin Alexanderplatz” after it was pulverized by the war and everybody lived in ruined cellars.

Echos of post-war Existential Paris echo in another Berlin artist, Walter Libuda. There are bits of Jean Dubuffet here along with an upside-down hat tipped to his successful west-end colleague George Baselitz and hints of British kitchen-sink humanists like Leon Kossoff.

Funny. At 39 Libuda is one of the youngest artists represented but his work has spiritual contact with the senior figure, Dresden’s 88-year-old Theodor Rosenhauer. Both make an art about lives lived in quiet desperation. Rosenhauer’s seasoned vision sees a cemetery landscape in winter and brings it an aura of metaphysical resignation. Desperation still makes Libuda a little crazy.

Viewed artistically the Angst that joins all this work must come from its shared awareness of stagnation. Everybody here works with shards and tatters of German Expressionism whose great days ended a half-century ago. Leipzig’s Sighard Gille tries to get one more drop of juice out of a pastiche of Nolde, Beckmann and Dix in the Christ-complex fantasy, “Party in Leipzig.” Miraculously he succeeds in patches where the paint is as sexy as the subjects. Veteran fellow Leipziger Bernhard Heisig paints nightmare war fantasies and a fascinating double-read picture that is both a memento mori still life and a skeleton playing a trumpet.

In some ways Dresdener Max Uhlig sums up the problem. He makes figures by painting with the abstract stabs and skeins of a Jackson Pollock. He works well as do most of these artists--too well. Results looks like they were painted by a sleepwalker motel artist, skillful but bored silly.

Old German Expressionism grew out of a very bad patch in history but it was also a time of immense creativity from the Danube to the Kurfurstendamm and it crackled with sarcasm, jazz and tango. The GDR work is dignified and discouraged behind its professorial caricature.

Several artists have drifted into near-autistic spiritual isolation. Gerhard Altenbourg makes wispy works on paper that are heads becoming progressively invisible. Carlfreidrich Claus does philosophical landscapes made up of handwriting. Michael Morgner makes dark splash abstractions with gridded figures of the crucified Christ. Wolfgang Smy makes innocent bathing figures that add a touch of the sinister to Max Pechstein.

All seem close to running on empty while calmly aware of their plight. You like these guys for sticking to their guns but you get the feeling they are aimed at crumbling bastions whose disappearance may create a newness more frightening that the dreary comfort of the familiar.