What If the Nazis Had Embraced Modern Art?

Joseph Goebbels - Reichminister for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda -

pays a visit to the Exhibition of Degenerate Art in Munich (1937)

 

'We National Socialists are not unmodern; we are the carrier of a new modernity, 

not only in politics and in social matters, but also in art and intellectual matters.' [1]

 

 

I. 

 

As everybody knows, the Nazis were on a mission to cleanse Germany of bolshevism in all its forms, including so-called cultural bolshevism, a term widely used to denounce progressive and experimental trends in the world of contemporary art, music, and literature.

 

Thus, after coming to power in 1933, the Nazis prevented many artists from working or taking up teaching posts, replaced museum curators with loyal Party members, and, most notoriously, organised mass book burning events.

 

However, I'm pretty certain I once read that at least some leading Nazis were in favour of embracing modern art - providing of course it was produced by artists of pure Aryan blood who held the appropriate political views. 

 

If it was okay for Mussolini to couple Fascism with Futurism, then why shouldn't they celebrate certain works of German Expressionism - such as those by Emil Nolde or Erich Heckel, for example, which were said to exemplify the Nordic spirit and had parallels with German medieval and folk art. 

 

Even Joseph Goebbels, not wanting to be seen as a narrow-minded defender of bourgeois values, was open to the argument and, in texts written prior to 1933, spoke enthusiastically of the new, the radical, and the revolutionary [2] - or what we might simply call the modern. 

 

Indeed, the soon to be Reichsminister für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda had several works hanging on the walls of his Berlin apartment that would be branded in 1937 as Entartete Kunst (the Nazi mistranslation, as some wag said, of avant-garde).

 

Hitler, however, was having none of it - as made clear in a speech in the autumn of 1934, wherein he denounced modern artists as criminal lunatics and declared that under no circumstances would their incompetent rubbish play any role in the cultural rebirth of Germany. As far as he was concerned, any work that didn't conform to the aesthetic values of the Classical world was Un-German and corrupted by the Marxist-Jewish spirit. 

 

Goebbels, one of Hitler's closest and most devoted acolytes, thus quietly removed any offending pictures from his walls and, in 1937, he conceived the idea of an exhibition of works from the Weimar period - which he termed the era of decay - that would contrast with the forthcoming Great German Art Exhibition intended to showcase work approved by the Führer; statuesque blonde nudes, idealised landscapes, etc.

 

Hitler loved the idea and on 30 June signed an order authorising Die Ausstellung Entartete Kunst ...

 

Goebbels appointed Adolf Ziegler - one of Hitler's favourite painters and head of the Reich Chamber of Visual Art - in charge of a small team who toured state galleries and museums in numerous cities seizing thousands of works they deemed degenerate and showing signs of racial impurity [3].   

The exhibition opened in Munich on 19 July - one day after the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung - and included 650 modernist pieces, chaotically hung and accompanied by notices encouraging the viewer to ridicule the work and vilify the artist responsible.

 

Ironically, however, over a million people visited this exhibition in Munich; three times more than visited the one consisting of the very best that German art had to offer. This is perhaps not surprising when one considers that works by many leading international artists - such as Klee, Kokoschka, and Kandinsky - were on display. When the show toured other German and Austrian cities, it attracted a million more visitors [4]. 

 

II.

So, finally, we return to the question asked in the title of this post: What if the Nazis had embraced modern art? 

 

In other words, (i) what would that have meant for the development of German culture during (and after) the Third Reich? and (ii) what would that have meant for the development of modern art and its reception within the rest of the world?  

Unfortunately, whilst it's always amusing to ask such questions, this one doesn't really fly unless you remove Hitler from the scenario. For the Führer's thinking on what constitutes great art - and what constitutes degenerate rubbish - was clear, consistent, and not open to debate. 

 

Hitler despised every innovative and non-representational style of art that had emerged during his lifetime; Fauvism, Cubism, Surrealism ... you name it, he hated it - including, as we have seen, German Expressionism, even when produced by a devoted Nazi such as Emil Nolde.

 

So perhaps it's more productive to ask: What was the result of the Nazi rejection of modern art? 

 

Well, as one commentator rightly notes, being banned by the Nazis turned out to have a silver lining: 

 

"'This artwork became more attractive abroad, or certainly in anti-Nazi circles it gained value because the Nazis opposed it, and I think that over the longer run it was good for modern art to be viewed as something that the Nazis detested and hated.'" [5]

 

It's certainly the case that several of the artists featured in the exhibition are now considered among the greats not just of modern art, but within the long history and tradition of Western art. As another art historian writes, the "'stigmatization of modernism caused by the National Socialists is partly responsible for the current boom in modern art [... having] created a canon, so to speak, that had not existed previously.'" [6]  

Further - and crucially - as Peter Schjeldahl points out:

 

"The glamour of martyrdom came to halo modern artists with political virtues that few of them either sought or merited. This set the stage, in Cold War America, for the public acceptance of Abstract Expressionism as, for all its esoteric aesthetics, a potent symbol of liberal democracy [...]" [7]

I conclude, in agreement with Schjeldahl: "Divorcing our thinking about modern culture from the residual consequences of 'Degenerate Art' probably can't be done." [8]  

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Joseph Goebbels, quoted by Peter Adam in Art of the Third Reich, (Harry N. Abrams, Inc. 1992), p. 56.

 

[2] See the widely distributed pamphlet written by Joseph Goebbels entitled Die verfluchten Hakenkreuzler: Etwas zum Nachdenken (1932), in which he attempts to make clear what is meant by National Socialism and why it is, in fact, first and foremost an uncompromising spiritual revolution. 

 

[3] Over 5000 works were initially seized, including 1052 by Nolde, 759 by Heckel, 639 by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and 508 by Max Beckmann, as well as smaller numbers of works by such artists as Marc Chagall, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and Vincent van Gogh. It is interesting to note that only six of the 112 artists featured in the Degenerate Art Exhibition were Jewish. 

 

[4] Of course, whilst some came because they realised it would be their last chance to see great works of modern art in Germany, many also came to mock and be scandalised; for when it comes to modern art, public opinion isn't all that different from Hitler's - it's obscene, blasphemous, pretentious, infantile, etc.

 

[5] Jonathan Petropoulos, professor of European History and author of several books on art and politics in the Third Reich, quoted by Lucy Burns in 'Degenerate art: why Hitler hated modernism', on the BBC news website (6 November, 2013): click here.

[6] Ruth Heftig, quoted by Peter Schjeldahl in his essay 'The Anti-Modernists', The New Yorker, (March, 2014): click here to read online.  

[7] Peter Schjeldahl, op. cit. 

[8] Ibid.

On My Brief Life as a Painter

S. A. Von Hell: A New Day (c. 1985-87)

One of the few things I have in common with Adolf Hitler, is that I too failed to get into art school; though in my case, this was St. Martin's, London, not the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, and I don't remember being particularly shocked or devestated by the decision, unlike Herr Hitler, whose rejection would prove fateful.

For one thing, I had no training or background in the arts, and no discernible talent, skill, or competency as a painter. In fact, when I went for the interview at St. Martin's, I didn't even have a proper portfolio; I just had ideas and a kind of occult-pagan aesthetic that was heavily influenced at the time by D. H. Lawrence, Killing Joke, and Franz von Stuck.

My interviewers, unsurprisingly, were not impressed and weren't shy in telling me that they found my views to be disturbing and the handful of sketches for hand-painted t-shirts that I did bring along to be puerile. The punk insistence that all that mattered was attitude - who cares about composition and colour - failed to convince. 

Anyway, long story short - and as I've said - I didn't get a place on the course and the very small number of canvases I produced in the mid-1980s - including the fairly large phallic landscape above - have all been destroyed by damp or thrown away by my sister who was supposed to be looking after them for me in her loft.  

For better or for worse, I decided post-St. Martin's to reinvent myself as a poet rather than a painter - and then, later, as a philosopher-provocateur. But I miss playing around with paints and have promised myself to one day produce some new pictures, if only for the sheer pleasure of covering a surface with something other than words. 

Note: for a supplementary post to this one, please click here.

On Dalí's Queer Fascination with Hitler

Salvador Dalí: The Enigma of Hitler (1939)

Oil on canvas (95 x 141 cm)

Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia

I.

A lot of comedians find the figure of the Führer funny; from Charlie Chaplin to Mel Brooks there's a long tradition of laughing at Hitler and the Nazis. But some artists and aristocrats have a queer fascination with fascism and find the Führer rather sexy with his neat mustache and Aryan eye, bright blue.

This is certainly true of the great Spanish Surrealist Salvador Dalí. He had a thing for Hitler, whom he identified with the misanthropic, misotheistic figure of Maldoror and wasn't shy about admitting so in openly erotic terms: 

"I often dreamed of Hitler as a woman. His flesh, which I had imagined whiter than white, ravished me..."
  

Such statements, along with his 1939 work, The Enigma of Hitler, were the final straw for André Breton and his fellow Surrealists: it was one thing Dalí airing his dirty laundry in public - including a pair of shit-stained underpants - but to confess an attraction for the German leader on the eve of war, that was beyond the pale.

Thus, Dalí was (finally) expelled from the group with whom he had been affiliated for a decade. His argument that Hitler was merely a manifestation of his own decadent aestheticism didn't really wash. Nor did his insistence that Hitler might himself be regarded as a kind of Surrealist, prepared to launch a war solely for the pleasure of losing and seeing the world in ruins - the ultimate act of gratuitous violence.


II.

Dalí would in later years paint two more pictures of Hitler: Metamorphosis of Hitler's Face into a Moonlit Landscape with Accompaniment (1958) and the charming watercolour entitled Hitler Masturbating (1973). But it's the Engima work, reproduced above, that shows Dalí at his best and most recognisable; many of his favourite themes, symbols and motifs are on display here.   

Critics who like to approach art from a psychoanalytic perspective suggest the picture is all about Dalí's fear of domineering authority figures, or his anxious concerns to do with impotence. And, who knows, maybe they're on to something. However, such readings don't exhaust the work and, intriguing as the psychosexual elements are, I think it's the political nature of the painting that most interests.

For whilst Breton and company insist it glorifies the German dictator, it seems to me far more ambiguous (as all art should be). Thus, one could just as reasonably argue that the painting seems humorously critical of the fact that Hitler threatens to land us all in the soup ...       

Note: readers interested in other recent posts on Dalí can click here and here.

Portrait of the Führer as a Young Artist (Or How Hitler Helps Us Counter Aesthetic Idealism)

 Adolf Hitler, Self-Portrait (detail), 1910

Hitler had a long and passionate relationship with painting; one that swung from the love and devotion of his early years as a would-be art student in Vienna where he produced hundreds of sketches and water colours, to his notorious rejection as Führer of almost all modern work as degenerate.

In Mein Kampf (1925), he confesses how his youthful ambition was not to become a great statesman, but, rather, a great artist. Indeed, even in the dark days of 1939, just before the outbreak of World War II, Hitler told a somewhat bemused UK Ambassador: 'I'm an artist, not a politician. Once the Polish question is settled, I want to end my days as a painter.'      

Unfortunately, however, most of Hitler's pictures - whilst technically competent and not lacking in a certain charm - displayed only a mediocre and all-too-conventional talent; one that failed to convince the examiners of the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, who twice rejected his application to enrol as a student (first in 1907 and again a year later).     
  
But some - particularly the faceless self-portrait above in which a 21-year-old Adolf sits on a stone bridge and dangles his feet over a colourful stream (possibly contemplating his own failure and growing sense of alienation and anonymity) - really have something intriguing and challenging about them.     

At any rate - and as Peter Beech, a freelance journalist and subeditor on the Culture and Review section of The Guardian (a paper not known for its Nazi sympathies) concedes - Hitler's work, whether we like it or not, isn't that bad. It's certainly superior to most of the outsider art produced by the criminal and/or criminally insane. Beech writes:

"I'm no expert, but I sense that the putdowns of the art world are overstated. Hitler's paintings are amateurish, but they certainly aren't an abomination - that came later. In fact, they're quite sweet. The man who dreamed up the death of the Jews proves to be a surprisingly dab hand at sunlight on stone walls. They show him nearly getting it right, or at least not getting it very wrong. This is much, much worse. Looking at these pictures, it's not enough to say they are something Hitler tossed off during his brief, early masquerade as a human being. The artist quite clearly has a grasp of a very nuanced and very human proposition: what is beautiful."
   
This, as Beech points out, is problematic - not least of all for those beautiful souls who think art has something important to teach us; that it's morally instructive and uplifting:

"What is the link now - if any - between aesthetics and morality? We all accept that our creatives needn't lead impeccable lives, but it's something else to admit that true monsters are capable of taste. ... Hitler's paintings, if we look at them, hard, should help us dismiss any lingering belief that we can learn in a moral sense from something that demonstrates technical accomplishment. They confirm, if we needed confirmation, that there has never been any relation between form and content, between what is pretty and what is right. ... If Hitler can do loveliness, then it has nothing to teach us. Beauty is simply beauty - and that's the truth."

Many have come to accept the banality of evil. But it's only a few as yet who admit also the superficiality of art. 


See: Peter Beech, 'Face it, Hitler's art isn't that bad', The Guardian, 29 April, 2009.