If you could be magically transported to a time and a place that were a Valhalla for art and artists, East Germany before the Wall fell probably would not be your first choice. Thought police discouraged non-Socialist Realist painting as too bourgeois and elitist. Modernist abstraction was considered decadent, to say nothing of the sorts of avant-garde styles prevailing in the capitalist West. Artists who veered from the party line put themselves at great risk.

There was a bohemian underground. Artists created nonapproved sorts of work in the privacy of their studios and produced exhibitions and theatrical events under the radar of official surveillance. But there is a reason that it is hard to think of an artist who thrived in the East while the stars of West Germany, like Joseph Beuys and Anselm Kiefer, rose to stratospheric heights. A little repression might be good for artists, giving them something to butt up against. But a lot is crushing. The most successful of all the East German artists, Georg Baselitz, Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke, moved to the West as young men in the ’60s.

What the authorities did encourage  or did less to discourage  were printmaking and other forms of graphic communication that, in theory at least, could be more broadly accessible to, and edifying for, the masses. Posters were accepted forms of expression, and artists who produced them in limited editions, not only as advertisements but also as works of art in their own rights, enjoyed relative freedom from censorship.