Art is a little simpler, a little simpler
Only after realizing that the film was actually three hours long. The film covers a wide range, the background theme is grand, and the emotional expression is more subtle. During this period, I often felt that there was an output of my thoughts, but it was difficult to summarize my thoughts and feelings at the first time after reading it. That's how I felt after watching the movie.
This is a film with a long time span. The story begins with the male protagonist Kurt's childhood. In 1937, under the rule of Nazi Germany, all avant-garde, innovative and bold modern art was characterized as decadent art, decaying and meaningless. When he was a child, Kurt and his aunt watched the exhibition together and listened to the narrator's denigration of modern art.
After world war II, Kurt's hometown was divided into the camp of the GDR. Kurt also successfully entered the local art academy to study painting. Professors in the School of Art tell students that art should be realistic and should serve the people. Kurt, with his extraordinary talent, was chosen to paint large murals of socialist society. Kurt, however, disliked the job and the creative atmosphere in the socialist environment at the time. He believed that socialism imprisoned his free-creative ideas, and that all his works had to serve the government of the time. Dissatisfied with the general environment at that time, he chose to leave. Before the Berlin Wall was built, he easily arrived in West Germany and began a new creative career.
Upon arriving in West Germany, he was introduced to the various and trendy modern art forms of the time and enrolled in the local art academy. In the relatively liberal West Germany, there was no strong ideological constraint on artistic creation. Three different periods represent and also represent the development of modern art in Germany. Kurt's teacher at the West German Academy of Arts told the students not to choose any political party, to choose art, and only in art is freedom not a fantasy. Art has always existed in different political ideologies, and the shackles of ideas are like a solid cage, and artists can fly freely, but they can never really avoid and escape. It is difficult for artists to completely avoid the influence of social ideology, but their artistic creation should be rooted in art for art's sake.
As a child, Kurt's pursuit of art was considered mentally unstable and forcibly taken away by the Nazis. Watching his aunt scream in pain, in the face of such a separate scene, he subconsciously took out his hand to cover his eyes and chose to escape. But the aunt firmly told him not to look away, the real things are beautiful. Although Kurt did not fully understand the meaning, nor did he look directly at the "real" every time, the tragic experience of the aunt's tragic death in the "racial purification" due to emotional instability, the ruthless bombing of innocent people by planes in the war, the suicide of his father after the war when he could not find a job and could not stand his own gap, and the encounter with his wife Ellie in the East German Academy of Arts, etc. The traces of these years, the truth of this life, has long accompanied Kurt all the way.
After arriving in West Germany, he began to carry out a series of bold and avant-garde format art creations based on gourd painting scoops. By chance, the teacher decided to visit his artwork out of praise for what he said in class that art was like buying a lottery ticket, and that a random combination of six numbers won the lottery and answered meaningfully. The teacher observed his artwork for a long time and told him sheepishly that the artworks had no trace of himself, not him. Faced with the teacher's doubts, Kurt abandoned other art forms and returned to his most primitive means of creation, painting. But helplessly, Kurt's creative inspiration seems to have dried up, sitting in front of the canvas all day but unable to write. What exactly was himself, he could not answer, and life fell into a backwater.
But one day, on a whim, he copied the head of the doctor who had been arrested in the newspaper and ordered to carry out "racial purification" in the newspaper. After turning over his past photos, he suddenly saw the picture of his aunt holding him when he was a child, so he also drew this photo. Suddenly he remembered the photo of his father-in-law asking him to hand in the information, so he drew a headshot of his father-in-law. After painting, he suddenly drew these three photos together. But he did not know that it was his casual and unconscious creation, which resembled buying lottery tickets, that revealed the truth about his aunt's year: after the order was given that year, it was his father-in-law who diagnosed his aunt and sent her to the gas chamber. Of course, Kurt certainly had no way of knowing the truth about his sister-in-law. Later, inspiration came to him like the wind, and he began to copy one picture after another of him, the "truth" of what had happened in his life, about himself.
His paintings became famous for his imitations, and he became one of the best artists of his generation. His beautiful "reality" eventually became beautiful art.
At Kurt's exhibition, the reporter asked him if the characters in the paintings had masters, such as himself or his family and friends. Kurt quickly denied it, calling the paintings masterless and had no corresponding figures in his life. This is not a biographical record of creation, but a return to the purest artistic creation of the beginning, without any ideology, without any thought or emotion.
Back to the film itself, it is actually a biographical film based on the first half of the life of the German visual artist Gerhard Dricht, in which Kurt's art teacher in West Germany is also based on the famous German artist Josef Beuys. But just like the name of the movie, the film itself is also a "masterpiece". It is like the ups and downs and bland life story of every German youth in the background of that chaotic era, depicting the real life conditions of people at that time. These most authentic bits of life symbolize the essence of the pursuit of art — authenticity and purity.