Greening Up

SINCE WILLY BRANDT won the Nobel Prize for peace, and Heinrich Boll the one for literature, post-war Germany seems to have achieved a sort of new maturity. At the same time, a new generation of artists and writers is now coming of age, with results as mixed as they are varied--contrast the sad products shown at the Orson Welles's German film festival last spring with the literary success of Gunter Grass, Siegfried Lenz, or Boll.

Perhaps weakened more than other fields by emigration, the visual arts have been slower in returning to their pre-war stature which they typified by Expressionism and the Bauhaus. If the current graphic arts show at the Busch-Reisinger is any indication, recent developments have been more favorable, if hardly spectacular.

Both featured artists, Peter Ackermann and Hermann Waldenburg, were born in Hitler's time and both fill their current work with images of life and renewal amid ruined concrete. Waldenburg's aquatints reach back to the last, best representative of German painting, Paul Klee, with their draftsman-like environments and constant use of plant forms that seemingly grow out of pure geometry. Tilting up in exaggerated perspective, the box-like shapes from which Waldenburg's plants spring combine planes of rough shading to suggest concrete.

Like Klee's plant forms, Waldenburg's stay close to geometrical shape--and thus close to the ambiguous line between living and non-living--and are set in regular rows. The light which makes them grow is too diffuse and dull to be sunlight; the forms seem to be machined flat in a manner that is occasionally reminiscent of Purism and its lathed still-lives.

ACKERMANN SHARES WALDENBURG'S fascination with plant forms in concrete, but his series of etchings is more openly ideological: his backgrounds are the ruins of bourgeois society, with greenery just creeping from under stone slabs and out of dark, heavily hatched corners. Several titles are indicative: "Late Bourgeois Heroic," "Turning Into Gardens," "The Old and New Left." Ackermann has seized on the idea of "stripping away bourgeois facades" to show buildings with their fronts removed, their walls punctured or crumbling. Compared to his co-exhibitor, however, Ackermann lacks total control over the multiple, complicated line which builds up his compositions--a line working well enough in treating buildings, but marring the forms of plants or people with instances of just plain bad drawing. It is as if he couldn't draw the emerging new order because it hasn't shown itself yet.

Both artists stay close to the broad traditions of surrealism and Expressionist social commentary. Neither cuts any new stylistic paths, but both are competent enough to produce well-finished convincing prints.