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Claudia Mesch is an American art historian and critic who writes on developments in 20th-century and contemporary art and film. She is author of Joseph Beuys: The Reader; Modern Art at the Berlin Wall: Demarcating Culture in the Cold War Germanys; Art and Politics: a Small History of Art for Social Change since 1945; and the artist biography Joseph Beuys. Some of these titles have appeared in Chinese, French, Spanish and Italian translation. She is a recognized authority on visual culture after 1945.
An expert on the work of West German artist Joseph Beuys, she has published a biography of the artist (2017) and co-edited the critical anthology Joseph Beuys: The Reader (2007). Mesch has furthermore explored Beuys' investigations of the material of lead (2021) as well as his development of the vitrine as sculptural practice (2013).
Mesch published one of the earliest post-reunification reappraisals of German-German art during the Cold War era in English language. Modern Art at the Berlin Wall: Demarcating Culture in the Cold War Germanys (2008) forwards the progressive notion that art in the former GDR merits art historical analysis. Mesch argues that despite the state policies that policed transnational exchange, the art histories of the two Germanys remained deeply entwined during the Cold War, since key cultural and artistic developments in the GDR continued to impact the artscene in the Federal Republic of Germany, and vice versa. Among the cultural developments Mesch discusses are the numerous emigrations or defections of GDR artist-exiles to the Federal Republic which marked the era, and which included Gerhard Richter, who would become the most renowned German painter of the late-20th century, as well as figures such as Georg Baselitz, Sigmar Polke and Eugen Schönebeck.
Another prominent Cold War development is the commitment to socialism and the institutional critique pursued by a contingent of students at the Düsseldorf Art Academy, most directly Chris Reinecke and Jörg Immendorff, and the latter’s secret transborder artistic exchanges with GDR artist A.R. Penck (Ralf Winkler). The book traces lesser-known GDR artists and the international roster of West-Berlin based artists who critiqued the state and the rise of corporate culture: Manfred Butzmann, Erhard Monden, the Clara Mosch group, Willi Sitte, and Wolfgang Mattheuer in the GDR; and in artworks beginning in the 1960s in West Berlin by artists Stanley Brouwn, Wolf Vostell, Beuys, K.P. Brehmer, Carolee Schneemann, Yvonne Rainer, Ed Kienholz, Allan Kaprow, and, emerging around 1980, the art group/artists’ space Büro Berlin featuring work by Katja Ka (Katja Hajek), Una H. Moehrke, Hermann Pitz, Res Ingold, Raimund Kummer and Fritz Rahmann, among others.
Her book Art and Politics: a Small History of Art for Social Change since 1945 (2013) foregrounds global modern and postmodern artists who have been marginalized in art history because of their distinct political positions—in terms of notions of postcolonial, feminist and queer equality, environmentalism and anti-globalization. She is also contributing editor of the college textbook Art History: A Thematic Approach, Renaissance to the Present (Cognella Inc., preliminary edition 2024).
Other essays have considered the figure of Ulrike Meinhof and postwar feminism as analyzed in Yvonne Rainer's film Journeys from Berlin/1971 (1979); and the Surrealists' historical exploration of games as a path to collectivity, and of the occult as an alternative historiography of visual art and culture.
As an art and film critic, her review of the 1998 Tom Tykwer film Lola Rennt (Run Lola Run) is among her most cited. Patricia Kelly, writing for the caa.reviews Centennial project, has distinguished Mesch's multi-book review “Rethinking Conceptual Art” (2002) as one of the most consulted in the history of that publication. A recent focus of her critical writing is Indigenous modern art's critical engagement with politics.
With art historians Amy Winter and Samantha Kavky, Mesch is a founding editor of the open access e-journal Journal of Surrealism and the Americas which began publication in 2007. The JSA has published English translations of primary and secondary texts relating to Surrealism in the Americas, and, new research in the field by Marie Mauzé, Graciela Speranza, Katharine Conley, David Craven, Ian Walker, Jonathan Eburne, W. Jackson Rushing III, Charlotte Townsend-Gault, Carlos Segoviano, Michele Greet, and Paulina Caro Troncoso, among others.
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