Germany has a strong, rich tradition in the visual arts. In the medieval era, the reign of Charlemagne introduced German artists to the three-dimensionality of Roman art. Paintings and sculptures, often in the Gothic style popularized in France and Germany, were generally made to decorate churches, and illuminated manuscripts and stained glass were also created. In the 15th century, the design of altarpieces, which combined the arts of painting, sculpture, and architecture, became a popular pursuit, and the rise of book printing led to the design of many fine woodcut illustrations. In the late 15th and the 16th centuries, a generation of German artists emerged that included Albrecht Dürer, Lucas Cranach, Matthias Grünewald, and Hans Holbein the Younger, all of whom worked in a style influenced by the Italian Renaissance; their work represented a golden age in German art. During this era, the Protestant Reformation of the 1520s brought about the destruction of some art that was deemed idolatrous and led to more secular subject matter, as seen in the numerous self-portraits by Dürer.

Subsequent generations of artists explored French and Italian variations on the Baroque and Rococo, but German art did not develop a definite national character again until the mid-18th century, when a staid Neoclassicism, advocated by theorist Johann Winckelmann and a series of new art academies, took hold. At the turn of the 19th century, Romanticism blossomed, perhaps best exemplified in the work of Caspar David Friedrich and Philipp Otto Runge, who in the first quarter of the century explored nature with a passionate, almost religious fervour. By the late 19th century, artists began to form groups that seceded from the conservative teachings and exhibition opportunities of the academies. Nevertheless, the staid Neoclassical style mostly dominated until the late 19th century, when secessionist groups formed in Munich (1892), Berlin (1898), and, under the leadership of Gustav Klimt, Vienna (1897).

German painters of the 20th century, especially groups such as Die Brücke (“The Bridge”) and Der Blaue Reiter (“The Blue Rider”), developed a new Expressionist current in European art. Beginning in 1916, Kurt Schwitters, George Grosz, Hannah Höch, John Heartfield, and others explored the more theoretical concerns of Dada, while in the 1920s artists such as Otto Dix and photographer August Sander worked in the realistic, socially critical style known as Neue Sachlichkeit (“New Objectivity”).

These and other developments came to a halt in 1933 with the rise of the National Socialists. Hitler and the Nazi regime condemned most modern art, holding the infamous Entartete Kunst (“Degenerate Art”) show in 1937 in an attempt to make a mockery of artists such as Wassily Kandinsky, Emil Nolde, and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. Conservative, “heroic” German landscape art was instead promoted as an ideal art form.

After World War II, German art struggled to regain a sense of direction, challenged by the emigration of many important German artists to France or the United States. In East Germany a form of Socialist Realism dominated artistic practice, a trend that would continue until reunification. In West Germany, however, many artists experimented with avant-garde movements such as Abstract Expressionism, Pop art, minimalism, and Op art. Beginning in the 1960s, Joseph Beuys created sculpture, performance art, and installation art that challenged the very definition of “high art.” Incorporating materials such as fat and felt, Beuys’s work represented an individual take on Pop art’s goal of bringing art into the realm of the everyday experience; his example influenced a new generation of artists. Perhaps the most notable German figure of the 1970s was Gerhard Richter, who became known for his paintings based on photographs. Blurring the lines between the media of photography and painting, his beautifully executed works anticipated the challenge to traditional forms that would characterize postmodern art. German art was again at the center of the international art world when Neo-Expressionism became the dominant international trend of the 1980s. Building upon German art’s long-standing interest in Expressionism, artists such as Georg Baselitz (who had been making important work since the 1960s), Anselm Kiefer, and Sigmar Polke combined a raw, expressive application of paint with challenging subject matter.

At the turn of the 21st century, photography became the international medium of choice. German artists who won international art prizes and had their work featured in the world’s most prominent museums included Wolfgang Tillmans, who gained attention for his portraits of youth culture; Bernd and Hilla Becher, who adopted a formalist approach and won a coveted lifetime achievement prize at the Infinity Awards in 2003; Thomas Struth, who became especially well known for his series of photographs set within major museum galleries; and Andreas Gursky, who became known for his large-scale photographs of public spaces. (For further discussion, see Western painting; history of photography.)