From Economic Equality to “Mommy Politics”. Women Artists and the Challenges of Gender in East German Painting

Abstract

This article looks at the impact that East Germany 's gender policies had on the visual arts and especially women painters across four decades. The first two sections focus on women 's participation in the national art exhibitions in Dresden during the Ulbricht and Honecker years, looking at how their artwork responded to official gender policies, and at the emergence of three women – Heidrun Hegewald, Gudrun Brüne, and Doris Ziegler – as nationally prominent painters. The third section focuses on the paintings and agitations of Angela Hampel in the 1980s as an example of a new phase in the pursuit of gender equality in East Germany, one abruptly cut short by the unification process. Ultimately this article argues that East Germany 's gender policies, despite not having achieved the stated goal of true equality, had a positive impact on women artists, and especially painters, in East Germany, increasing the number of women included in major exhibitions, encouraging greater complexity in their work, and ultimately fostering a socialist-feminist critique of lingering patriarchal biases.