The German term Bilderstreit — literally “image-struggle” or “painting-dispute” — names the postwar debate over whether figurative painting could be morally and politically legitimate after Nazism. Under the Third Reich, representational art had been instrumentalized by the state; the Nazi exhibitions of “degenerate art” and the promotion of heroic realism made figuration suspect. After 1945, the default critical position in West Germany favored abstraction — particularly Tachisme, Informel, and American Abstract Expressionism — as a cleaner break with the fascist aesthetic.
Neo-Expressionism reopened the question by returning to the figure at scale and with vehemence. Baselitz’s Die große Nacht im Eimer was seized not only for obscenity but because its figurative rawness violated the postwar consensus. Kiefer’s Heroische Sinnbilder restaged the Nazi salute, forcing the Bilderstreit into the gallery itself. The movement’s entire existence is a wager that figuration could be purified not by avoiding history but by inhabiting it.
See also
- Georg Baselitz — the painter who forced the question
- Anselm Kiefer — the painter who restaged the taboo
- critical-disputes — for the reception fight
- lineage — for the generational context