Picasso's Guernica at the Center of Formalism Debate in Postwar Germany

In the late 1940s, Pablo Picasso became a cultural battleground mascot for the West as the Soviet formalism debate spread from the USSR to the Soviet Occupation Zone (SBZ) and then to Western Europe. The debate notably targeted Picasso's painting "Guernica." In a 1946 programmatic speech, Soviet cultural officer Alexander Dymschitz promised that the occupation power in East Germany would allow artists who had not compromised during the Nazi era to "work freely." This seemed fulfilled by the rapid reopening of theaters, cinemas, concert halls, and other cultural institutions. The resulting work opportunities initially attracted not only socialist-minded but also bourgeois remigrants to settle in the SBZ. On November 24, 1948, the Red Army's Tägliche Rundschau published a text by Dymschitz titled "Über die formalistisch" (On the Formalist). The article continues in the current issue of Freitag.