Retrospective on the GDR artist Willi Sitte – Culture

He would have been a hundred years old this year, and thirty years ago that he disappeared into oblivion, in disgrace and disgrace: Willi Sitte, reviled as a “state artist” of the GDR, in the end more power-conscious functionary than painter, chairman of the association Visual artist and himself a member of the Central Committee of the SED, East German concrete head, who made use of his privilege on trips to the West at any time, and full of unrepentant defiance even after 1989.

Now the Moritzburg Museum in Halle, where Sitte lived and worked for more than sixty years, has dared to show a comprehensive overview of Sitte’s work curated by Thomas Bauer-Friedrich. This is not undisputed – no West German museum wanted to take over the exhibition afterwards – but it is meritorious. Whatever you think of the artist, you can see him again now, for the first time in decades and for the first time ever so completely.

Willi Sitte: self-portrait, 1947, watercolor, 41.5 x 30 cm, loan from private collection.

(Photo: Lepkowski Studios / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2021)

It’s not about rehabilitating him, on the contrary. During the research for the retrospective, things came to light that speak very much to Sitte’s disadvantage, such as the fact that he simply lied when he claimed to have joined the partisans in Italy in 1944. A by no means harmless lie, because it contributed significantly to his position in the workers ‘and peasants’ state.

Sitte, born in 1921 into a proletarian family in the predominantly German-populated part of Czechoslovakia, showed a talent for drawing at an early age and was accepted into the Hermann Göring Master School. He rebelled against the school system, was punished on the Eastern Front, later transferred to Italy and then ended up in the Soviet zone of occupation. His early work indicated that technically he was as good as done, but did not know what to do with such skill.

The accusation of “western decandence” accompanied him for a long time

Pages like his “Fascist Dance of Death” or the “Allegory of Existentialism” seem vaguely old German, Dürer and Altdorfer are not far, the Symbolists have done it to him too. But he also soaks up newer influences; Many of the later pictures show which star of classical modernism he last saw, with Picasso and Fernand Léger playing prominent roles. With this he naturally offended the GDR; the aesthetic reproach of “bourgeois formalism” and the moral one of “western decadence” accompanied him for many years. Again and again he had to face the bitter and inexperienced criticism of the working people – our people do not look that sluggish, and where is the positive anyway! – and he was not spared the ritual of self-criticism. Then you can see a kink in his work, suddenly he was painting more well in the socialist style. So one cannot say that his art can be neatly separated from his personal opportunism.

SITTES WORLD Willi Sitte (c) VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2021: The retrospective October 3rd, 2021 - January 9th, 2022

Willi Sitte: Thoughts of a Former Formalist, 1993, oil on canvas, on cardboard, 50 x 60 cm, private collection.

(Photo: Falk Wenzel / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2021)

And yet Sitte has painted some amazing pictures in the deforming vector field of private and social influences. “Our youth” from 1961: the title does not bode well. But in this large six-part piece, the eye is immediately drawn to the dancing couple. The gentleman and lady present themselves like two floating statues, but the lady with her cheeky short hairstyle is inspired by the blissful grace of her smile and the swing of her short dress, which lags behind by the rapid turns of half a second and so the whole dance contains in itself: the epitome of the “fertile moment” as Lessing postulated it for the visual arts. In addition, the moon of the saxophone funnel rises like an abbreviation of the wicked nightlife, in front there is the delightful still life of a champagne bottle and two slim glasses, which rounds things off. 1961, the year the Berlin Wall was built and von Sitte’s personal crisis, he was attacked by the authorities, two women put pressure on him, he should finally make a decision, he made two suicide attempts. And yet this picture was created.

The later custom, from the seventies, then went to the monumental. The bodies became heavy and colorful, sometimes they look as if they were skinned. The form of the triptych is now used for political issues, to condemn the Vietnam War and to justify the invasion of the Warsaw Pact states in 1968 in Prague. Regardless of the massive painterly means, the result is rather pale-allegorical, the evildoers act with swords and lances, although napalm was actually used, and the apologetics of violence on the “right” side, with portraits of Franz Josef Strauss and image-Headlines, upset by trumpeting insincerity. Sometimes custom escapes the truth unintentionally: In the painting “Friendship”, the Soviet brother clasps his German counterpart with such bear paws that his shirt bursts and blood is apparently splattered, which the artist does not seem to notice.

Hands always play a special role in custom

With the same brushstroke, custom goes into the private sphere, takes care of the athlete, the nude and the lovers. But he is recovering from the political. The “swimmer” is based on an unbelievable invention of images, half above, half under water. A naked couple is having fun together in a narrow GDR bathroom. It is very tangible (hands always play a special role in custom), yes, one could almost assume that violence is involved here – but the woman laughs at it; she has everything under control, she is clearly the main character. Today, nudes are not unjustifiably under suspicion of surrendering the female body to the male gaze; and it is instructive to see the different fates that this gaze can experience in Sitte’s pictures. He has repeatedly accepted the “judgment of Paris”. It starts with the classic meat inspection of the three goddesses, as this topic has always been treated. But then the perspective changes, and you can see the three women, unconcerned among themselves, as they burst out laughing at the presumptuous judge and the bone of contention, which now resembles an ordinary boskop.

SITTES WORLD Willi Sitte (c) VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2021: The retrospective October 3rd, 2021 - January 9th, 2022

Willi Sitte: “Self-portrait”, 1963, ink, pen, 63.8 x 47.6 cm, loan from the Willi Sitte estate.

(Photo: Kulturstiftung Sachsen-Anhalt / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2021)

One does not have to love this custom, neither the person nor the artist. But the exhibition offers the opportunity to deal with both – and custom is interesting for two reasons: because of his exemplary career in the collapsed German state, with everything that went with it, especially the unpleasant; and because of its overflowing productivity, the result of which is still awaiting sighting. There are few other artists where the completely unsuccessful is so blatantly next to the most surprising and happy finds. From this pile it is important to first pick a work in the narrower sense. If you want to discover something really new, you should travel to Halle.

Moritzburg Halle, until January 9, 2022.

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