Shiny after being restored, the glazed majolica tiles shine again on the huge and colorful vertical mural whose title leaves no doubt: Unity of the working class and foundation of the GDR. At the foot of the street, a group of people celebrates the rehabilitation of this imposing mosaic designed between 1968 and 1974 by the Valencian artist Josep Renau for the city of Halle, then a territory of communist Germany.

The mural, crowned by an effigy of Karl Marx, is 36 meters high by 7.25 meters wide, and runs from top to bottom across the facade of a rectangular building that served as a residence for apprentices. At the other end of the facade stands another Renau mural of the same size, The forces of nature and technology dominated by human beings, restored in 2005.

“We are happy and proud that the impressive work of Josep Renau has been restored and preserved for the future, because even the uncomfortable cultural heritage of the GDR must not simply disappear, but be preserved for reflection and debate,” said Philip Kurz, director general of the Wüstenrot foundation, which has financed the works in cooperation with Halle City Council, on Tuesday.

The restoration of the murals by Renau, a painter with deep communist convictions who in 1958 left exile in Mexico to settle in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), is part of a revaluation of the works of art created for the public space in that country of the Soviet sphere. After German reunification in 1990, many were forgotten and neglected, suffered deterioration and lack of appreciation, and some were mutilated or demolished. Its artistic value was dismissed because of its ideological charge and a past of division due to the cold war that wanted to be left behind. The Wüstenrot foundation, which is dedicated to rehabilitating these pieces, claims that they belong to Germany’s cultural heritage, a vision that is increasingly shared.

In that context, the mosaics of Josep Renau Berenguer (Valencia, 1907 – East Berlin, 1982) shine with excellence, since he introduced unusual elements, or until then underestimated, in the mural work panorama of Germany from the East: futuristic, cubist, dadaist and surrealist traits.

Renau designed and completed several murals, but only three have survived: the two in Halle and a third in the city of Erfurt, Man’s Relationship with Nature and Technology, which lined the facade of a cultural center and which was rehabilitated in 2019.

When Renau arrived in the GDR in 1958, he was also accompanied by the halo of his political career. Affiliated to the Communist Party of Spain (PCE) since 1931, the artist focused on posters and photomontage. He was 29 years old when in September 1936, in the midst of the Civil War, the Republic appointed him director general of Fine Arts. As such, he organized the Spanish pavilion at the 1937 Paris International Exhibition and asked Picasso to participate. Gernika was born from that order.

The victory of the rebels and the Franco dictatorship forced Renau to go into exile with his family, first to France and then to Mexico, where he worked with muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros. In his new life in the GDR – where he moved at the invitation of the government – ​​he embodied all that experience.

“Renau was an exceptional teacher for us, and of course he was also a personality with history, because of the Spanish civil war, anti-fascism and exile”, explains one of his disciples, Ulrich Reimkasten, 69 years old, painter in Halle. In the 1970s, the then young Ulrich was part of the group of budding artists who went to Renau’s classes on Saturdays in a living room in his house on Kastanienallee, in the Mahlsdorf neighborhood of East Berlin. It was a detached house and there he had his library, his slide collection, his study and his workshops.

“Sometimes we were up to ten students drawing and painting in the living room, sitting here and there. Renau spoke a bit rough German, very personal, and I sometimes acted as his translator”, explains the 76-year-old painter Marta Hofmann in Berlin, a regular at those sessions. “Renau taught how to geometrize, to place the drawing in space and to measure with the eyes; that’s what he used to say,” continues Hofmann, originally from Argentina, who arrived on a scholarship from the GDR to study art and stayed there forever. “He was a grumpy grandfather, with a bad temper, who soon got angry, but he gave you everything he had; he was very generous in the transmission of his knowledge”.

Another issue is that the communist officials were satisfied with their stubbornness in defending their artistic and ideological postulates. “I don’t paint for the central committee, I don’t paint for the party, I don’t paint for art critics; I paint for people who are not interested in painting. (…) Today, for people to see art, they have to go to a museum, a gallery or an exhibition, but in my opinion this is wrong, because art has to reach people, in every house, without asking!” said Josep Renau in a talk in Erfurt in 1980 when he was 73 years old.

“She was a passionate polemicist and found that things in the GDR were too petty; that’s why he had almost no friends and argued a lot with people in the party”, remembers Ulrich Reimkasten. The Valencian artist designed five murals for Halle, his first major project in the GDR, since since his arrival he had mainly devoted himself to graphic propaganda films for television.

Of the five sketches, two were rejected for being too abstract for the taste of the local communist elite. The other three were made by a collective of artists according to the socialist vision of the designer. But one of these, The march of youth towards the future, which decorated the facade of the canteen, did not withstand the onslaughts of reunification. It was demolished at the end of the nineties.

“Renau’s plan for Halle was abstract. I saw sketches, but the principals were narrow-minded, they wanted obvious images. He took it and said: ‘These idiots will get what they want,'” recalls Reimkasten. But Renau managed to get away with it. Seen up close, the motifs represented (Marx, the spike, the microscope, the lace) are clearly distinguishable, but from a distance the design looks abstract, cropped, futuristic.

Josep Renau stated that the murals had to be conceived to be contemplated by passers-by in motion. “He was talking about how he looks at people walking down the street – remembers Marta Hofmann-. In Erfurt he managed to make a curved corner of the building”. That mural, which Renau started working on in 1980, was finished in 1984, two years after his death, thanks to the involvement of his circle of artists.

From 1976, Renau traveled periodically to Spain, where he started projects. He died in 1982 in East Berlin, and by family decision he was buried in the Friedrichsfelde cemetery, known as the cemetery of the socialists. His artistic legacy in Germany lives on.