Jürgen Wittdorf 

Jürgen Wittdorf "Freundschaftsphoto" (Friendship photo), 1964

Jürgen Wittdorf

Jürgen Wittdorf: "Construction brigade of sports students", linocut 1964.

Jürgen Wittdorf, East German, 1963

Linocut print, from a series titled Youth and Sport

Under the Shower (1964) by Jürgen Wittdorf: Berlin gallery revives men art of communist era

Seven men wash the sweat off their toned bodies in a communal shower. Unless you squint and mistake a tightly gripped bar of soap for something else, their limbs are suspended in tantalizing proximity but never quite touch.

The German artist Jürgen Wittdorf’s 1963 linocut print, from a series titled Youth and Sport, may look like something out of a top-shelf graphic novel or the virile drawings of the gay liberation icon Tom of Finland.

Yet the sensuous shower scene was never meant to scandalize, even while the men’s yearnings were hiding in plain sight: commissioned by the East German state, a framed print hung for years in the staircase of Leipzig’s sports academy and was later reproduced in a newspaper of the regime-run socialist youth movement.

Sixty years later, it is the visible tension between outward conformity and hidden desire that is driving a revival of Wittdorf, who fell into obscurity after the collapse of the German Democratic Republic and died in poverty in Berlin four years ago. In what would have been his 90th year, a first retrospective at the Biesdorf Palace gallery has been a surprise success, drawing 13,400 visitors to Berlin’s Marzahn district since its opening at the start of September of 2022.

Jürgen Wittdorf

Jürgen Wittdorf, a member of East Germany’s ruling party, was commissioned to decorate a gymnasium in Leipzig in 1964. His homoerotic prints were widely distributed in the Communist Youth Organization’s daily newspaper.

via KVOST, Berlin

“Multiple Realities: Experimental Art in the Eastern Bloc, 1960s — 1980s,”

The most substantial survey of art from the continent’s former Communist states ever to take place in an American museum. It includes nearly 100 artists, most of whom worked in treacherous conditions and outside of state institutions.

NYT

Jürgen Wittdorf.1964. Garçons sous la douche.

Jürgen Wittdorf (German 1932-2018) Baubrigade der Sportstudenten from the series Jugend und Sport [Sports Students’ Builders Brigade from the series Youth and Sport] 1964

Jürgen Wittdorf "Unter der Dusche" (Under the Shower), 1964

Woodcuts by Jürgen Wittdorf

Jürgen Wittdorf (1932-2018)

“Linocuts by German artist Jürgen Wittdorf and drawings by Poland’s Krzysztof Jung render the male body as the object of gay desire, a subject explored further in the exhibition’s third gallery, devoted to artist communities and underground movements. Several photographic series make visible the covert yet vibrant (and often persecuted) gay communities that existed behind the Iron Curtain. Among these are images by Poland’s Karol Radziszewski, who in 2015 founded the Queer Archives Institute, dedicated to the “artistic interpretation” of LGBTQIA+ history in Central and Eastern Europe. “

(via Susan Snodgrass on “Multiple Realities:Experimental Art in the Eastern Bloc,1960s–1980s”)

Jürgen Wittdorf, East German, 1963

Linocut print, from a series titled Youth and Sport