Red Posters

The huge poster in Dresden's Unity Square last week was bright red with a blaring message: WE WELCOME THE FIRST SOCIALIST ART EXHIBIT. Inside an immense gallery, East Germany's Communists had set up their biggest art show since the war: 599 paintings and sculptures by artists from both sides of the Red frontier. As art, the exhibit was hardly worth a second glance, but it did serve to give the West a rare and fascinating look at what happens to artists under Moscow tutelage.

What visiting West German critics saw were rank upon rank of slavish, posterlike pictures and sculpture dedicated to tested propaganda themes. They bore such titles as World Youth Festivals, To the Patriot Philipp Mueller,* The First Furrow for the Collective Farm, and the styles were all obedient, School-of-Moscow realism. There were glorified scenes of farmers and construction workers, kindly Red soldiers surrounded by admiring children, ball-fisted strikers and heroic rioters--all with clear brows, stern eyes and rippling muscles.

Some of East Germany's critics found a few things to complain about, e.g., in a picture of four Stakhanovites, it was not made clear which was the foreman. But most sang hosannas over the show, wrote that it had produced "an art which will not only be understood but loved for its realism." And just so there would be no mistake, Red Premier Otto Grotewohl spelled it out. "The government," he said, "demands that the artist make his works a mirror of the nation."

Possibly, observed one West German critic sarcastically, the artists had just that in mind when they chose the colors for their paintings: "Many artists showed a preference for dark, unclear, almost dirty colors, for brown, earthlike tints, for lackluster, washed-out blues, greys, and for black."

* A young Communist rioter killed last year in Essen.

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