“Berlinart 1961–1987,” at the Museum of Modern Art this past summer, was a show that wore its heart pinned ostentatiously on its sleeve.¹ The galleries were lined with paintings done in a thumpingly Expressionist vein. Most of the remainder of the one hundred and fifty works by fifty-five artists were neo-Dadaist gimcrackery—assemblages, found objects, and the like. Though the paintings weren’t especially large by contemporary standards, many of them were too big for the galleries. They loomed forward, overwhelming the glass-fronted cases full of artists’ booklets and collagelets. Nothing harmonized; the galleries had a helter-skelter look. Kynaston McShine, senior curator in MOMA’s department of painting and sculpture and the organizer of “Berlinart,” had transformed the Modern’s temporary exhibition spaces into a playground of the avant-garde. This playground—decorated with the sights of West Berlin in the wake of the Cold War—was melancholy, run down. There was barbed wire, darkness, dirt. “Berlinart” was all sloppy surfaces and portentous undercurrents. The art may not have been anything much, but the subtexts—of East-West relations, war and peace, the Nazi past—were being played for everything they were worth.

Since the Sixties a good deal of national and international money has been injected into the Western sector of Berlin in a largely successful effort to turn the city into West Germany’s art center. The plentifulness of such artists’ subsidies as the DAADFellowships (which brought Allan Kaprow and Edward Kienholz, among others, to the city), along with the city’s tradition of cultural