Degenerate Art of Nazi Germany in the Twentieth Century
B efore entering politics Adolf Hitler was a painter. Twice rejected for a place at Vienna's Akademie der bildenden Künste (University of Fine Arts), he had strident views on the nature of fine art and its role in society – ones he did not abandon even in the midst of the Nuremberg rallies.
"It is not the mission of fine art," the Führer proclaimed to the assembled crowd in September 1935, "to wallow in filth for filth's sake, to paint the homo but in a land of putrefaction, to draw cretins equally symbols of maternity, or to present plain-featured idiots equally representatives of manly strength."
This quotation appears on a wall of a Munich fine art gallery two years later, when the Nazis displayed hundreds of seized artworks they alleged entartet (degenerate). Jews and communists, abstruse pioneers, and especially the Expressionists of the Dresden-centered motility known every bit Die Brücke (The Bridge) were condemned as sick, poisonous artists in the Degenerate Art show of 1937. It was 1 of the most infamous exhibitions of the 20th century; it was as well one of the best attended. And its effects are existence felt fifty-fifty today – witness the contested cache of paintings hoarded past Cornelius Gurlitt, whose father sold numerous paintings in that show.
Degenerate Art: The Attack on Modernistic Fine art in Nazi Frg, 1937, which opened this calendar week at New York's Neue Galerie, reconstructs not just the Munich exhibition that destroyed so many artistic careers, but the rhetoric that made the exhibition possible. It's the first show since this museum of High german and Austrian fine art opened in 2001 to reckon exclusively with the Nazi period, and it's a welcome step frontwards.
The Neue Galerie has devoted solo shows to many of the artists here, from Kandinsky and Kokoschka to Otto Dix and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, and usually those exhibitions trailed off at the end of the Weimar period with a brief, dutiful reminder of the horrors to come up.
This testify pushes into the 1930s, and it features not simply art deemed degenerate but also Nazi-approved painting and sculpture, political party propaganda, and films such as the hideously anti-Semitic treatise Der ewige Jude (The Wandering Jew). The outcome is bracing, and if the exhibition is a lilliputian thin in parts – the 50 paintings exclude several major figures, such as Max Ernst and László Moholy-Nagy – the history of the works that are hither makes up the difference.
Attacks on art began about immediately afterwards Hitler's accession in 1933, often in spontaneous, individual Schandausstellungen ("shame exhibitions").
Dix, who earned the Iron Cross as a soldier during the first earth state of war, was a favourite target of these proto-Degenerate Fine art shows; his glorious grotesques such as War Cripples (1920), they claimed, were insufficiently patriotic. State of war Cripples was included in the later on Munich exhibition and was subsequently destroyed. The Neue Galerie has a contemporary postcard of the lost work, as well equally the painting'southward frame, hanging empty.
By 1937 a commission led past Adolf Ziegler, Hitler's favorite painter, was charged with purging German museums of unacceptable art. About 600 of those seized works were included in the Degenerate Fine art exhibition, which opened on 19 July 1937 – the day after Hitler's Bang-up German language Art evidence at the purpose-built, gruesomely fascistic Haus der Deutsche Kunst (renamed the Haus der Kunst, this gallery is now directed by the remarkable Nigerian curator Okwui Enwezor and presented an admirable exhibition in 2012 on its Nazi history). Where the art in the Great German Fine art show hung in neoclassical style, the Degenerate Art show displayed paintings cheek-by-jowl on the walls, ringed with angry or derisive texts such as "madness becomes method" or "revelation of the Jewish racial soul."
The Neue Galerie bear witness wisely refuses to recreate that 1937 hang. The fine art hither has aplenty room to breathe; Nazi slogans are kept off the walls. Instead the curator, German art historian Olaf Peters, has included a short motion picture taken at the 2 Munich shows. These evidence the galleries of the Degenerate Fine art exhibition crowded with visitors, but nobody looks shocked or disgusted. Many might take been seeing mod art for the very kickoff time.
Only a small number of the artists in the degenerate art shows were Jewish. Felix Nussbaum, a surrealist who was murdered at Auschwitz, was not included; Emil Nolde, a Nazi party member whose autobiography is laced with anti-Semitism, was. Degeneracy was a fluid concept, applied to a broad swath of artists, and their fates varied as much as their paintings. Paul Klee, represented here past three exquisite watercolors that all hung in Munich, made it to Switzerland, only he couldn't obtain citizenship thanks to Nazi condemnation. Dix fled to the German countryside, Beckmann to holland and then America. Kokoschka, in Britain, proudly painted his "self-portrait as a degenerate artist". Kirchner killed himself.
However central aesthetics were to Nazism, Peters takes pains to analyze that the party'south views of fine art did non come out of nowhere. The concept of degeneracy – the idea that artists could accept pathological disorders, that their fine art could exist not only bad but sick, fifty-fifty contagious – was widely debated during the era of Bismarck, most prominently past the Austro-Hungarian dr. and critic Max Nordau, whose 1892-93 volume Entartung ("Degeneration") warned that whatever order could be corrupted past decayed ideas of dazzler and virtue. "Degenerates are non always criminals, prostitutes, anarchists and pronounced lunatics; they are ofttimes authors and artists," Nordau argued. His theories on art and affliction ripple through the writings of Nazi race credo, including Mein Kampf – even though, in i of the most brutal ironies of modern art history, Nordau was not just Jewish but a committed Zionist, and he's cached in Tel Aviv.
For the Nazis, modernism was not merely an inferior or distasteful manner. It wasn't even but non-Aryan. Modernism was a swindle – a dangerous lie perpetuated by Jews, communists, and even the insane to contaminate the body of German language society (they were fond of medical and corporeal metaphors, the Nazis). The stakes are clear in the largest gallery of this show, which features two triptychs side by side. On the correct is Beckmann's Departure, a grand and enigmatic allegory of hope in the face of persecution. On the left is Ziegler'southward The Four Elements, a kitsch, insensate, classicised-to-expiry depiction of four nude, racially idealised women, their breasts circular as grapefruits.
"German Volk, come and judge for yourselves!" Ziegler proclaimed at the opening of the Degenerate Art exhibition. The Germans of 1937, of class, had no such liberty of judgment. Divergence, like all of Beckmann's work, was purged from the land and ended up in the Museum of Modernistic Art in New York by 1942. The Four Elements stayed in Munich – and hung in Adolf Hitler's business firm, over the fireplace.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/mar/13/degenerate-art-attack-modern-art-nazi-germany-review-neue-galerie
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