German prints and drawings from Friedrich to Baselitz and the Manilow gift of post-war German works on paper go on show in Chicago

Because of the two world wars, German art is very little known in the US, and there is still lingering anti-German feeling, says curator Jay Clarke, who has put on these two shows of works on paper to coincide with the Gerhard Richter retrospective moving to the Art Institute from MoMA in New York. The Art Institute has always been famous for its 19th-century French art, but it decided 10 years ago to build collections of German and British drawings. It already had good German Expressionists, but has added some 200 Romantics, early 20th-century artists such as Klinger and Lieberman, and contemporaries including Baselitz and Kiefer. The public needs to to get used to these works, says Dr Clarke: “ They have great power”. The accompanying publication, Negotiating history: German art and the past is precisely about the vexed issue of Germany’s history in the 20th century and how artists have dealt with it. The second show (19 June-11 August) is of the 30 works given by Chicago collectors, Susan and Lewis Manilow of recent German works on paper.