A photograph from 1919 shows Edmund Kesting in his studio at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts. He looks self-assured, posing like a dandy, a young artist at the start of a brilliant career. It did not work out that way. Defamed as "degenerate" from 1933 and rejected again after 1945 in the Soviet zone and the later East Germany, Kesting dropped out of art history. Since 2 August, the Kunstmuseum Moritzburg in Halle has been showing the first retrospective of his work ever mounted.
"What we are showing now has never been seen in this form," says museum director Thomas Bauer-Friedrich. He curated the exhibition with the art historian Paul Kaiser, 56 years after the artist's death.
Kesting, born in 1892 and dead in 1970, was a painter, graphic artist, photographer and teacher. In Dresden he founded his own design school, "Der Weg". The Berlin gallerist Herwarth Walden brought him into "Der Sturm", one of the central addresses of the avant-garde. His biggest innovation in painting came in the 1920s. Kesting gave his pictures literal spatial depth by folding the canvas in front of and behind the stretcher and combining it with relief-like collage. He called these works "Bildbauwerke", or picture-constructions.
From photogram to chemical painting
Photography followed towards the end of the 1920s, and he treated it just as experimentally: multiple exposures, photograms, deliberate interventions in the developing process. Around 1950 he fused the two and called it "chemical painting". From the 1950s he arrived at a visual language that matched western European art informel. Almost nobody in East Germany got to see it.
After the war the pattern simply repeated. In the formalism debate, non-representational art was discredited in favour of socialist realism. Kesting's work was turned down by the major exhibitions, in Dresden among others, until the end of his life. From 1933 onwards his work was barely shown in public at all. He earned his living through commissioned photography. Of all things, a portrait photograph of Walter Ulbricht became his most widely circulated image.
The Halle exhibition runs until 25 October and then travels on. It will appear at further venues between 2026 and 2028, including the Kunstmuseum Ahrenshoop in spring 2027. It demonstrates what two dictatorships in succession prevented: that an artist who reinvented himself repeatedly across half a century might be seen in his own lifetime for what he was.