Germany

The postwar reset

Few national art scenes have had to reinvent themselves as completely as Germany's. After 1945, with the academies discredited and much of the avant-garde exiled or destroyed, artists in Düsseldorf founded the ZERO group — Heinz Mack, Otto Piene and later Günther Uecker — proposing light, movement and industrial materials as a clean slate. At the same time, Joseph Beuys was turning the Düsseldorf Academy into the most influential art school in Europe, teaching that sculpture could be social, performative and made of anything from felt to fat.

In the early 1960s two of Beuys's near-contemporaries, Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke — both recently arrived from the East — coined 'Capitalist Realism', a wry German answer to Pop that treated advertising imagery and blurred family snapshots with equal suspicion. Their careers, which ran in parallel for five decades, still anchor the market for German painting.

Two schools every collector should know

The Düsseldorf School of photography grew from Bernd and Hilla Becher's deadpan typologies of water towers and blast furnaces. Their students — Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth, Thomas Ruff, Candida Höfer — scaled the approach up into wall-sized colour prints and made German photography a defining force in contemporary art. Meanwhile the Neo-Expressionists — Georg Baselitz, Anselm Kiefer, Markus Lüpertz, Jörg Immendorff — dragged German history, myth and guilt back onto canvas with heavy paint and heavier subject matter.

"Art is the highest form of hope."

Gerhard Richter, statement for Documenta 7, 1982

After the Wall

Reunification in 1990 redrew the map twice over. Berlin's cheap studios drew an international generation, while Leipzig — home to a rigorous East German painting academy — produced the New Leipzig School around Neo Rauch, whose figurative, dreamlike canvases found eager collectors worldwide in the early 2000s. Today artists such as Katharina Grosse, with her sprayed architectural-scale colour, and Wolfgang Tillmans, the first photographer to win the Turner Prize, show how broad the German tradition has become: rigorous, self-questioning, and unusually well supported by museums, Kunstvereine and public collections at every level.

A culture built for editions

Germany has one of the deepest print and multiple traditions in contemporary art, which makes it an accessible entry point for collectors. Beuys issued hundreds of multiples on the principle that ideas should circulate widely; Richter has produced editioned photographs, offset prints and facsimile objects throughout his career, each catalogued with its own edition number. This documentation culture matters: Richter's work is organised in a numbered catalogue raisonné, and serious German artists' estates and studios tend to keep meticulous records. Before buying, check that a print or multiple appears in the relevant catalogue raisonné or the publisher's records, and that the edition size, signature and numbering match what is documented.

Photography: sizes, mounting and care

Large-format German photography brings specific practical questions. Gursky, Ruff, Struth and Höfer typically work in small edition sizes — often six or fewer per format — and many prints are Diasec face-mounted, meaning the chromogenic print is bonded to acrylic. The finish is spectacular but unforgiving: scratches to the acrylic are difficult to polish out, delamination cannot be reversed, and colour prints are sensitive to prolonged bright light. Ask for a condition report that specifically covers the mount edges and surface, keep works out of direct sunlight, and never clean the acrylic with solvent-based products. A print in pristine condition can command a substantial premium over an otherwise identical example with surface wear.

Market notes and what to watch

The German market is unusually transparent by international standards. Sales within the EU may trigger the artist's resale right (in Germany administered through VG Bild-Kunst), a modest percentage due on secondary-market transactions above a threshold — factor this into resale calculations. Provenance deserves attention at both ends of the timeline: for prewar and immediate postwar material, restitution questions can arise, while for East German-era works, documentation is sometimes thin simply because the commercial infrastructure did not exist. Finally, be aware that the biggest names — Richter, Kiefer, Baselitz, Gursky — have attracted forgeries and unauthorised reproductions. Buying from reputable galleries, insisting on documented provenance, and cross-checking catalogue raisonné numbers remain the collector's best protections.