Dealing With Pain of Oppression--in Abstract : Art: Lecturer Jeanne Willette discusses Germans, American who take some oblique hits at politics in their works.

“So much political art is didactic, but sometimes when the political situation is very intense (and) crimes are very great . . . (artists) need to be indirect,” art historian Jeanne Willette remarked to a small audience gathered in a hotel meeting room Tuesday night.

In the third installment of her “Art in Context” series being sponsored by the Newport Harbor Art Museum, Willette focused on just three artists to make her case: the major contemporary German figures Joseph Beuys and Anselm Kiefer, and an American friend of hers, James Higginson.

She spoke fluidly, but with the disconcertingly perky emphasis of someone reading a story to a small child. Willette just earned her doctorate in art history from UC Santa Barbara and has been a lecturer at several Southern California colleges.

“Imagine having vision and being unable to see . . . having a voice and being mute, having a history and being unable to look back in the past,” she said. “That was the situation of German artists following World War II.”

With a culture and a country politicized by fascist politics, German artists retreated from dealing with substantive issues in their work, Willette said. Instead, they turned to the American style of Abstract Expressionism, “a safe, reliable way to paint.” After World War II, “the silence that fell over the land of Germany was something new, the unnatural estrangement of art and politics.”

The Nazis had appropriated philosophy and the arts--even music and folk culture--for their own uses. Social realist artists painted glowing images of Aryan life. Dachau, once an artist’s colony, became the site of a concentration camp. Daily life became militarized, with ordinary people wearing swastikas as they went about.

Beuys, a former Luftwaffe pilot who had belonged to Hitler Youth, was “the German artist who healed Germany,” Willette said. “He was the shaman, the leader, able to deal with very political questions.”

Legend has it that after Beuys’ plane crashed in the Crimea, he was rescued by nomads who salved his wounds with fat and wrapped his body in felt to keep it warm. Although some have questioned the veracity of this poetic tale, Willette said, “I think it is important that Beuys is a myth of his own making. Like a phoenix, he rises from his own ashes.”

Rather than deal specifically with war crimes or the Nazi Holocaust in his performances and installations, Beuys obliquely addressed the politics of his own time, a Germany divided into east and west, with a “healing” perspective in Willette’s view.

The small brown crosses that Beuys placed on objects, for example, were his way of “remaking the land, putting his own mark with his own hand (on objects formerly emblazoned with swastikas) to make them sacred once more,” Willette said.

Felt and fat figured in many of his performances. “Felt is animal hair tamed, brought under control to insulate and support,” Willette explained. “Fat . . . can take different forms, can be refashioned, refabricated.”

For “I Like America and America Likes Me,” a performance at a gallery in New York, Beuys arrived and left wrapped in a roll of felt. At the gallery, he existed within his felt cocoon, accompanied by a coyote and a shepherd’s crook, another frequent prop. The point of the piece, Willette said, was that the United States also has a “stain” on its history: The hunting and extermination of Americans Indians, once officially considered a form of vermin much the same way as the coyote, or the Jews in Nazi Germany.

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Kiefer--a German born in 1945, after the war--played a different role in the re-politicalization of his country. “He had no (war) guilt,” Willette said. Feeling “the heaviness of nothing being said” about his country’s Nazi past, he made an early series of photographs (“Occupations”) in which he appears in militaristic poses.

But his major works are massive paintings for which he went back to the history of German art--not only German Expressionist painting of the early 20th Century but also the pantheistic 19th-Century tradition of such artists as Kaspar David Friedrich--to express the inexpressible.

Widely credited for helping to bring back “big” painting, Kiefer also is important for reinvesting art with a “spiritual, meaningful” quality, Willette said. She showed a slide of “Zimzum,” a mixed-media painting by Kiefer from 1990 whose title, from the mystical writings of the Jewish cabala, is the word for the moment in the creation of the universe when God drew in his breath, allowing the creation to continue.

Unlike Beuys’ soft felt, the strips of lead affixed to the canvas are cold, hard and potentially toxic--representing the way “the countryside was toxified by the presence of Hitler,” Willette said.

The lead buckles “as if from internal pressure” as a result of the deliberate manhandling (with a blowtorch and sledgehammer) to which Kiefer subjected it. A sprinkling of ashes symbolizes death and destruction. In this work, according to Willette, Kiefer tacitly asks why God withdrew, permitting the Chosen People to die in the Holocaust. “And if God has withdrawn, why live?”

By making work of this searching nature, Kiefer asserts that “the only way to go forward is to stare at the past,” Willette added.

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The remainder of the program was devoted to a discussion of Higginson’s collaboration with a painter “in a very far-away place called China” during the ill-fated summer of 1989, the time of the Tien An Men massacre. The work they produced in Guelin (which Higginson was on hand to show) dealt with the forces of social and political repression in metaphorical ways. (“China Doll,” for example, depicts a woman’s doll-like severed head; “Fireworks Over China” is a churning landscape on which tiny red soldiers march single file.)

Nevertheless, Willette said she felt it prudent to suppress an essay she wrote about the works for a show at the Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena last year after a Chinese government official condemned it. In the People’s Republic, Willette said, “Tien An Men Square never happened.”

She won’t reveal the name of the Chinese artist in question--previously banished to the countryside for seven years after painting something displeasing to authorities--for fear of retaliation by the Chinese government.

“The artist is a human being,” she reminded her listeners. “Every work of art is the product of its own time and space.”

*Jean Willette’s “Art in Context” series concludes Aug. 3 at the Four Seasons Hotel, 690 Newport Center Drive, Newport Beach. The final lecture, “Difficult Paintings--How to Make Heads or Tails of the Hard Stuff,” will start at 6 p.m. Tickets: $15, $12 for seniors and students. Information: (714) 759-1122.