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Their eyes closed, the couple are lying in a loving embrace on a blanket – and may even dropped off to sleep momentarily. With their seemingly rough and coarse bodies, the sense of tenderness between them only appears more pronounced. In his stylised and monumental depiction of figures, artist Rudolf Bergander was very much in tune with the zeitgeist of his day – or was he already adopting the formal language favoured by the Nazis?

As a student of Otto Dix, Bergander had learnt how to elaborate his figures’ characteristic qualities and then intensify them – or almost exaggerate them. In 1931, he painted a young woman suffering from tuberculosis, wearing a blue dress. The reclining couple in this work could well be read as working class, locating the painting in the canon of proletarian revolutionary art. At that time, Bergander was still a member of the German Communist Party. In 1933, he returned to his hometown of Meißen – the phase when he painted this couple. So does this style tell of his adoption of those heroic monumental figures so favoured by the Nazi regime? You certainly look at this work differently knowing Bergander joined the Nazi Party in 1939 and painted explicit propaganda pictures of Hitler Youth groups with waving flags and drummers.

After the war, though, Richard Bergander became a member of the SED, the ruling party in the GDR. He went on to become the Rector of the Dresden Art Academy. In 1952, he painted an icon of Socialist Realism – the House Peace Committee, a work also in the Albertinum collection.