Norbert Loeffler

Lecturer
Visual Art Theory & History

Norbert Loeffler studied at the University of Melbourne, the Melbourne State College and the American University, Washington DC. An authority on modern and contemporary art, he has taught in Melbourne art schools for 25 years and is well-known as a lecturer in many art institutions. He has lived and travelled extensively in Europe and the USA and has organised and led more than a dozen cultural tours to these places.

Research Interests

Memory and history: German art after World War II
The revival of German art in the 1960s could only occur after some of the worst damage, both material and personal, had been repaired. It also had to await the ability of artists to make connections back to the early 1930s when all forms of modernist art were banned by the Nazis. Furthermore, the artists needed to gain experience and understanding of the new international artistic developments which had taken place since the 1930s.

From the end of World War II through to the 1960s, German art was, quite naturally, in disarray. There was little new art in (West) Germany throughout the 1950s. Instead, the Federal Republic witnessed the stimulating rediscovery of the modernism the Nazis had so spectacularly banned. Modernism, forbidden during the Third Reich, had a major revival with the first Documenta in Kassel in 1955, and it was followed by the appearance of American-style abstract expressionism with the Second Documenta in 1959. But new artistic forms were largely absent, the visual field looked exhausted; the visual imagination in Germany seemed depleted after the visual spectacle of Nazi ceremonies, their clever use of the mass media and the violence of the war.

The visual documentation from the concentration camps shown in Germany from the mid-1950s on, also seemed to have a paralysing effect on the imagination of a whole generation. Artists were mute in the face of the horror and fundamentally unsure as to how German language and images could be used after their contamination by the Nazis. George Steiner (Language and Silence) writes about the German language going dead. Theodor Adorno, the famous sociologist of the Frankfurt School of Social Research, in the 1950s claimed that after Auschwitz lyric poetry, all art was no longer possible. The unimaginable horrors of the Holocaust had irretrievably pushed poetic language, especially that written in German, to the edges of silence.

The 1950s and 1960s saw the economic-political dominance of Western Europe by the United States. This brought with it American art which, like any other product, was seeking a world market. Many German artists succumbed to the powerful influence of American Pop, Minimal and Hard-Edge styles, but they had difficulty integrating the artistic developments into their own native tendencies. Amidst the uninspired work of this time only a few artists were able to create work from a local viewpoint.

The 1960s were heralded as the 'Triumph of American Art' and new developments in Europe were given little attention or publicity. In this period, however, a resurgence of European art began. The disaster of Vietnam and the internal problems of the United States led to a questioning both of the moral authority of America and American art. Concomitantly, the ostensible 'internationalism' of American inspired art, its increasingly formalist and abstract orientation began to be seen as a limitation; too many areas of experience had to be excluded in order that art might function internationally. In addition, the notion of art as a product as promoted by Pop artist such as Andy Warhol was seen as related to the depersonalized standardization of the American consumer society. In consequence, Europe, aided by its gradual recovery from the war and the growth of art institutions, turned more and more to its own traditions and experiences, which had previously been excluded from art. Significantly, this resulted in a new emphasis on history, and the problematic of identity and place in the contemporary world.

For German artists, the change was particularly contentious, given the events of recent German history. Despite this, the art produced became internationally important because of a new orientation and questioning of German identity. The topic of identity is approached from a variety of different perspectives. After the Holocaust, in a divided Germany, the question of identity could only be conceived as a loss and as a possible. The idea of the "national" was only acceptable as a question, not as an answer. It is from this that the pluralism of contemporary art derives.