In historical analyses of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), the role of writers such as Christ Wolf and Heiner Müller occupies a prominent spot. The visual arts in the GDR have received much less attention, with Cold War scholarship in the West usually dismissing the East's socialist realist style as mere political propaganda of low artistic quality, aesthetically and ideologically inferior to the modernist abstraction that came to define art in the “free West.” The art historian April A. Eisman's book sets out to correct the assumption that modernist art was only produced by dissidents who rejected the GDR's “real existing socialism.” In the process, her study of the painter Bernhard Heisig (1925–2011) offers an interesting glimpse into the East German art world and into debates about art and society in Germany before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Beautifully illustrated with the works of Heisig and other GDR artists, Eisman's book is based on rich archival material, close visual analysis, and interviews with the late artist himself. The book focuses on Heisig's role in the transformation of the Leipzig art scene from a conservative provincial art school to a center of East German artistic experimentation. Formerly a teenage World War II soldier and Soviet prisoner of war, Heisig rose to prominence by both representing and challenging the GDR's dominant socialist realist style, which had shaped communist cultural policy since the anti-Western Formalism Debates of the late 1940s. As Eisman argues, Heisig did not treat realism and modernism as binary opposites; rather, he aimed to connect artist and audience by “creating art that was dialogic rather than didactic” (16).

Heisig's artistic evolution occurred against the backdrop of the 1960s in the GDR, a period of uneasy consolidation between the construction of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Walter Ulbricht era in 1971. Eisman's accomplishment is to show that despite the lingering influence of Stalinist ideology, “the East German art world was not a top-down system of uniform repression but rather a ‘field of friction’ (as Heisig called it) in which artists actively engaged in debate with cultural functionaries and politicians” (3). The book centers on the analysis of four such debates that involved Heisig in this decade. For a Western observer (and non–art historian), the controversies that Eisman discusses can seem trivial rather than explosive—too much abstraction in a city-commissioned mural, not enough optimism in a historical painting of the Paris Commune—but Eisman skillfully analyzes how seemingly banal choices of brushstrokes or colorization had the effect of artistic and political statements.

Eisman's focus on the Leipzig art scene reveals the limitations of the term totalitarianism to describe cultural policy in the GDR. As Eisman argues, “Artistic policy in East Germany changed in large part because of artistic interventions by actively engaged artists like Heisig, albeit often after significant and vehement debate” (18–19). Even though the SED party leadership's meddling in district exhibitions and discussions of painting styles were petty and micromanaging, they “illustrate the complexity of cultural politics in the GDR where cultural policy varied significantly at the local level, and the many organizations responsible for art were often in competition with one another” (82).

A second strength of Eisman's book is her exposure of the shortcomings and distortions of the reception of GDR culture in West Germany, not only during the Cold War but also after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. While Heisig had already represented the GDR in the West during the 1970s and 1980s, the end of the Cold War led to his breakthrough as a major German artist and to important exhibitions and retrospectives of his work in the reunified country. Yet, as Eisman demonstrates in her conclusion, the West German reactions to Heisig's works were influenced as much by ideology as discussions in the East had been. Heisig's status as Staatskünstler (official state artist), who had represented the SED dictatorship led to a Bilderstreit (“image battle”) in the 1990s, often waged by former GDR dissidents and their supporters in the West. Even more telling of Western stereotypes and reductionist assumptions is the fact that Heisig's positive reception in the West has rested on his later paintings, which visualized war traumas and were based on biographical experiences. In the early 2000s, this qualified Heisig to fulfill the one-dimensional categories of the “quintessential German artist,” whose art is seen as predominantly shaped by and praised for its preoccupation with Germany's role in World War II and its Nazi past. Heisig's accomplishments and contributions as a GDR artist—like his innovative works of the 1960s—were downplayed or ignored in the Federal Republic (171).

Eisman's study is a welcome corrective to many of the Cold War stereotypes and oversimplifications surrounding art in East Germany. The author demonstrates that Heisig's work under the confines of GDR cultural policy deserves recognition that ideologically motivated scholarship has often ignored. Yet her book also shows that historical investigations of art in the GDR cannot avoid touching on wider issues of East German politics and society. Eisman credits Erich Honecker, who took over the SED leadership from Ulbricht in 1971, for the “relaxation” (177) of GDR cultural policy, allowing Heisig to develop his neo-expressionist style that harkened back to painters such as Otto Dix and Max Beckmann. But according to John C. Schmeidel, the number of official Stasi employees rose by 60% in the 1970s, and there were more than 93,000 unofficial informers (IMs) by the end of the GDR. As a leading functionary in the Leipzig Academy and the Union of Visual Artists, it would have been impossible for Heisig to be unaffected by the GDR surveillance state and the compromises it involved, especially for someone with the permission to exhibit his art in the West.

Against the common view in Western scholarship that all modernist artists in the GDR were victims of the SED regime, Eisman emphasizes Heisig's “commitment to Socialism and his desire to improve it from within” (3). These “utopian views” (8) were shared by many GDR intellectuals, but Heisig's career also “reveals a politically savvy artist who was able to give cultural functionaries what they wanted to hear while at the same time remaining true to the original speech” (79). That Heisig ultimately chose accommodation over confrontation does not diminish the artistic quality of his works, but the questioning of his status by artists whose careers were destroyed or who suffered imprisonment or expatriation for their more wide-ranging critiques of the SED state cannot all be dismissed as Cold War dogmatism.

For better or worse, it is these moral ambiguities and complexities of his role as a GDR artist that make Heisig indeed a “quintessential German artist”—and it is the achievement of Eisman's illuminating book to bring this twentieth-century painter and his role in the development of modernist art in the GDR to the attention of a wider audience. Her book deserves to be read not only by people who are interested in East German art but also by anybody interested in German history in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.