The competition for the »Monument to the Unknown Political Prisoner« was probably the most important art competition of the post-war period. More than 3,000 artists from all over the world participated, including sculptors and architects such as Max Bill, Alexander Calder, Naum Gabo, Barbara Hepworth, and Bernhard Heiliger. Like no other competition after 1945, it…

The sculptor and writer Wieland Förster is born in Dresden on February 12, 1930. As a young man, he experiences the war and the bombing of his native city. At the age of sixteen, he is imprisoned in Bautzen for three years, allegedly for possessing a weapon. After his release, he begins studying sculpture, initially…

In August 1945, Galerie Gerd Rosen opened at Kurfürstendamm 215 as the first exhibition space for modern and contemporary art in post-war Berlin. Its founders were the bookseller Gerd Rosen, the businessman and art collector Max Leon Flemming, and the painter Heinz Trökes. The writer Ilse-Margret Vogel was also involved in building it. Trökes acted…

The exhibition »Escape into Art?« is the first critical and detailed examination of the artistic practice, scope and everyday life of the former Brücke artists during the Nazi period.

The exhibition »Escape into Art?« centres around works by Schmidt-Rottluff, Heckel, Pechstein and Kirchner in the Brücke-Museum collection. The presentation seeks to take a multifaceted view and approaches the complexity of the Brücke history – between recognition and ›defamation‹ – by means of artworks and extensive documentation.

In 1950 the exhibition »Werke europäischer Plastik« (Works of European Sculpture) opened at the Haus der Kunst in Munich. It represented the first attempt after 1945 of German sculptors to compare themselves directly to Western European modernism. The organizers—the four sculptors and professors of the Munich academy Toni Stadler, Georg Brenninger, Josef Wackerle, and Theodor…