The simultaneous arrival of East and West Germany at Seattle art museums this spring is pregnant with meaning about the way art and culture are made to intersect with history and politics—or, if you prefer, "life," that lofty little word shared by the titles of these two exhibitions.

At the Frye Art Museum, Life After Death: New Leipzig Paintings from the Rubell Family Collection is 68 paintings and drawings of recognizable subjects, mostly by artists who have chosen to study in a postcommunist backwater and a historical academy separate—until their arrival—from the trends and markets of late 20th century. The much-hyped Leipzigers represent relief from the complaint that a century of art could have been made by toddlers; they represent the triumph of skill. They are also all men—it's as if the 19th century skipped into the 21st.

Make Your Own Life: Artists In & Out of Cologne at the Henry Art Gallery is a riotous display of video, sculpture, installation, music, ephemera, and bad painting, a messy séance for a scene that reacted against all things expressionistic, academic, and commercial. (Reviewed in the February 7 issue of The Stranger.)

All these artists lay competing claims to the same purity, to the naive ideal of modernism that is so easily appropriated by fascist regimes and capitalistic currents, and yet is so undying. The Cologne artists fight staleness and corruption using the traits of the West (excessive freedom, in all its forms), while the Leipzigers pull away from the canon and the art capitals like defiant monks. Naturally, the mouth of the market is wide enough to consume both. Almost all of these artists are top sellers, which you'd think would once and for all end any smoldering manifestos about some styles being more progressive and independent than others. All's fair in aesthetics and war.

The fun of these exhibitions—both suggestions, not statements, by thoughtful curators (Mark Coetzee and Laura Steward Heon for Life After Death and Bennett Simpson for Make Your Own Life)—is multiplied by their appearance at these two particular Seattle venues.

Until a few years ago, the Henry was Seattle's supplier of hot new art, and the Frye was a mausoleum for old German and Austrian realist painting. While the Henry, at the University of Washington, devoted itself to countercultural contemporary art in the late-20th-century legacy of the American university's shift to the left, the Frye missed the flowering of 20th-century art in part because of a longtime director's distaste for the early-communist associations of abstraction. (In a perfect irony, the galleries she once presided over now are full of artists influenced by a communist government that allowed only folksy social realism.) Make Your Own Life is a retrospective, while Life After Death is au courant. These shows reveal as much about the ways culture is packaged and channeled as about art.

All that said, a renewed classical approach to painting has been on the rise for years; the Leipzig School artists aren't actually groundbreakers or revolutionaries. They are romantics who, for the most part, went to Leipzig of their own accord while other people were leaving East Germany, to draw on its tragedy and flux offset by the reassuring, rigorous study of the history and practice of painting. It's an attractive premise.

For me, Matthias Weischer is the most heavenly thing about Life After Death. His four oils are scenes of sweepingly banal abandonment and lusciously colored loss. St. Ludgerus (2004) is a symphony of video-age assertions and erasures in constant tension, infused with a very German, absorbing sorrow.

David Schnell is a one-trick pony, but the trick is good. He rushes his scenery to a single vanishing point, an application of speed he offsets with the slow burn of slightly off-kilter bucolic landscapes. There's the strangeness here of a country flying forward with nobody in tow. I could look for days at Schnell's longing 2005 view from inside a rickety barn.

Neo Rauch, the most celebrated of the bunch, is a great painter I don't think I like. His colors are evocative and his mastery of various styles complete, but he loses me with his antiheroic, overdetermined surrealism. Christoph Ruckhäberle's stiff, neurotic ensemble scenes are cloying and superficial when they channel bad painting, but far better when they form an impotent response to the "Glitter and Doom" artists of the late Weimar Republic, making those early sickly figures look hale in comparison.

Tim Eitel and Martin Kobe start with photography and architecture. Kobe's groovy modernist interiors are intentionally vapid and disappointing; Eitel's scenes, created by setting subjects from one photograph seamlessly into a scene from another, are hauntingly incoherent.

Only one work is on display by Tilo Baumgärtel: a noir sci-fi fantasy of an Asian couple and their cuttlefishes, drawn in coal on paper, that's menacing and delicate enough to be gorgeous. It's a world in which everything old is new again. recommended