Between Dream and Nightmare

London has been having symbolically enough in 2014 a sustained examination of not only art historically northern Europe in general with the National Gallery having looked at the northern renaissance but perhaps far more pertinently contemporary German art of the post war period, enhanced by an original examination of German history at the British Museum. The medium of painting is the prism, with significant showings of Anselm Kiefer, a West German b 1945, and Gerhard Richter b 1932, and Sigmar Polke, 1941-2010, both originally East Germans, who once showed together, and with others invented in the 1960s a brief anarchic movement called capitalist realism. They both studied too at the legendary Dusseldorf Kunstakademie. All of these three titans, their work now in the commercial stratosphere, have engaged profoundly with Germany's past, but Janus like in order to look forward also to a future. Marina Vaizey