In 1958 Josep Renau set foot in East Berlin, not fluent in German, but with the enthusiasm of a militant willing to discover and live in the true socialism he had fought for all his life. The Valencian artist came from Mexico, where he spent most of his exile after being forced to leave Spain in 1939. He came to East Germany ready to put at the service of the State everything he had learned over the years about art and propaganda.
During his early years in East Germany, Renau worked to make animated films and television posters, but soon began to focus on artistic expression, which he learned from Mexican master David Alfaro Siqueiros, whose purpose was to convey a new political message. socialist society: muralism.
In 1967 Renau was commissioned by the Socialist Unity Party of Germany to develop the “artistic concept” of a new residence by the Fine Arts and Architecture Advisory Council in Halle-Neusstad, a city “planned” for workers in the chemical industry. For students.
The initial plan proposed to erect two vertical murals, each 35 meters high and 7 meters wide, on the stair pediments of the residence, but Renau proposed extending the project to the entire building, a large five-area panoramic mural on the development. towards socialism and finally communism. According to initial drafts, the five murals would have been almost 1.5 km long. Neither Renau nor any other artist had encountered a work of this size in the GDR.
In 1968 Renau began working on the design of the project with four other German artists, but discussions within the group caused them to break up and Valencia was left alone. He went ahead, but was able to develop only three of the five planned murals: the two vertical walls that led to the project, and a third horizontal wall that covered the entire lower facade of the building’s canteen.
one million euros
This third mosaic, titled “Youth’s Walk into the Future”, was dismantled years later in the mid-1990s without any maintenance or repair. The murals on the stairs of the two 35-meter-high works by Renau remain. Together with Alfaro Siqueiros, he imbued everything he learned in Mexico with a personal style that embraced cubism, futurism and even surrealism.
One of these two large mosaics, entitled “The Forces of Nature and Human-Controlled Technology”, was restored in 2005 by the Halle City Council. The other, “Unity of the Working Class and the Founding of East Germany”, the same path as the large horizontal mural dismantled in the 1990s – that is, unstoppable degradation and inevitable disappearance – had not arisen for the Wüstenrot Foundation, dedicated to the preservation of ancient GDR art, willing to invest in local government one million euros to save an organization business.
This mural consists of 10,904 ceramic pieces, the material that best resists the high pollution of an industrial city like Halle-Neustead, and is designed in series but individually with majolica enamel paint.
Renau depicted a corncob, a microscope, and organ pipes as symbolic references to nature and agriculture, science and technology, and the fine arts. Below, a handshake marked the end of the division of the working class. And in the upper part, the portrait of Karl Marx shows the main political and ideological figure.
The content, symbols and scenes had to be perceptible to people on the go, something Renau learned from Siqueiros and his understanding of murals for the university city of Mexico City. Therefore, when designing these murals, Valencia studied the flow of movement of passers-by, possible lines of sight, and the effect of far and near vision on the images. Thus, through elaborate and ingenious use of color and composition, Renau was able to create a visually striking design that initially seemed largely abstract but reveals more content as the viewer approaches.
Plate number 10,904
Three murals in the Halle-Neustad education center were executed in 1974, six years before Renau’s death, in a room of the Regierungskrankenhaus, a nomenklatura hospital aimed at helping government circles in communist Berlin. The first signs of “Working Class Unity and the Establishment of East Germany” began to appear earlier this century when it was found that some ceramic plates were loosening, others falling off and cracks appeared. leaks.
In 2021 the Wüstenrot Foundation began planning restoration and conservation work, and its technicians examined 100 of the 232 rows of ceramic plates. When restoration work began in May 2022, more significant damage was found in the area above where Marx’s head was located.
To carry out the restoration, 10,904 ceramic tiles were numbered, their condition was mapped, and the endangered areas were temporarily consolidated. According to the restorers, about 6,000 tiles have lost their adherence, and after adequate treatment, a thousand need to be removed to reinsert them. In the upper part of the facade, about 500 tiles are damaged or completely destroyed, so it needs to be redone.
Studies should be completed by the end of the year. «This is more than just a mural, it is about the question of how to deal with the cultural heritage of the GDR – justifying Professor Philipp Kurz of the Wüstenrot Foundation – The works are not only part of the DDR, but part of our German identity» .
The IVAM exhibition Exiles of Renau showed its models and sketches for the new city of Halle-Neustadt (1964), designed to house a residential and educational complex for families working in the chemical industry. Fueled by the principles of the Bauhaus and the modern architectural movement, the DDR planned to rebuild cities devastated after the war by applying models that would reinvent and improve the living conditions of the population. But the experiment, a documentary of the time shown at the exhibition, did not go well.
Of the five proposed murals, two were rejected, and Renau made only three: Man’s domination of nature,
The march of the youth to the future and the unity of the working class and the establishment of the DDR.