Düerer's Heirs

Streaming video - 1996

A 1961 painting by Harry Blume is at the center of this film: beside the painter himself, artists Werner Tübke, Bernhard Heisig, Heinrich Witz and Hans Mayer-Foreyt appear in the painting. All five members of the first postwar generation to study art at the Leipzig Academy for Graphic and Book Design when it reopened in 1947. Some of them went on to become professors at the academy. Director Lutz Dammbeck, himself an alumnus of the academy, presents the origins of the new German realism developed by the so-called Leipzig School, which took place in the context of socialist-realist dogma in the GDR before the Wall was built in 1961. After the Wall came down in 1989, what happened to the major Leipzig School painters Werner Tübke and Bernha...rd Heisig, who had been called “Dürer’s red heirs” by West German journalists in the 1970s? In the film, Tübke, Heisig and former GDR officials who were involved with culture in Leipzig at the time talk about modernism, conformism, political pressure, party discipline, personal claims and fading memory. The documentary paints an insightful, often critical picture of early East German art history. more