Degenerate Art 1993 the Nazis Vs Expressionism Summary
B efore inbound politics Adolf Hitler was a painter. Twice rejected for a place at Vienna'southward Akademie der bildenden Künste (Academy of Fine Arts), he had strident views on the nature of 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 art," the Führer proclaimed to the assembled crowd in September 1935, "to wallow in filth for filth's sake, to paint the man being but in a land of putrefaction, to draw cretins every bit symbols of motherhood, or to nowadays deformed idiots as representatives of manly strength."
This quotation appears on a wall of a Munich art gallery two years afterwards, when the Nazis displayed hundreds of seized artworks they declared entartet (degenerate). Jews and communists, abstruse pioneers, and particularly the Expressionists of the Dresden-centered movement known as Die Brücke (The Span) were condemned equally sick, poisonous artists in the Degenerate Art show of 1937. It was one of the well-nigh infamous exhibitions of the 20th century; it was too one of the best attended. And its effects are existence felt even today – witness the contested cache of paintings hoarded by Cornelius Gurlitt, whose father sold numerous paintings in that show.
Degenerate Art: The Attack on Mod Art in Nazi Germany, 1937, which opened this week at New York's Neue Galerie, reconstructs not simply the Munich exhibition that destroyed so many creative careers, only the rhetoric that made the exhibition possible. It's the first evidence since this museum of High german and Austrian art opened in 2001 to reckon exclusively with the Nazi period, and it's a welcome step forward.
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 normally those exhibitions trailed off at the finish of the Weimar period with a brief, dutiful reminder of the horrors to come up.
This evidence pushes into the 1930s, and it features non just art accounted 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 little thin in parts – the fifty paintings exclude several major figures, such as Max Ernst and László Moholy-Nagy – the history of the works that are here makes up the difference.
Attacks on art began almost immediately later Hitler's accession in 1933, oft in spontaneous, private Schandausstellungen ("shame exhibitions").
Dix, who earned the Iron Cantankerous as a soldier during the kickoff earth war, was a favourite target of these proto-Degenerate Art shows; his glorious grotesques such as War Cripples (1920), they claimed, were insufficiently patriotic. State of war Cripples was included in the later Munich exhibition and was after destroyed. The Neue Galerie has a contemporary postcard of the lost work, as well as the painting's frame, hanging empty.
Past 1937 a committee led by Adolf Ziegler, Hitler's favorite painter, was charged with purging High german museums of unacceptable fine art. Virtually 600 of those seized works were included in the Degenerate Art exhibition, which opened on 19 July 1937 – the day after Hitler's Smashing German Art show 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 fine art in the Great German 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 show wisely refuses to recreate that 1937 hang. The art here has ample room to exhale; Nazi slogans are kept off the walls. Instead the curator, German art historian Olaf Peters, has included a brusk film taken at the two Munich shows. These show the galleries of the Degenerate Art exhibition crowded with visitors, but nobody looks shocked or disgusted. Many might take been seeing modernistic art for the very first 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 wide swath of artists, and their fates varied as much equally their paintings. Paul Klee, represented hither by three exquisite watercolors that all hung in Munich, made information technology to Switzerland, but he couldn't obtain citizenship cheers to Nazi condemnation. Dix fled to the German countryside, Beckmann to the Netherlands and and so America. Kokoschka, in U.k., proudly painted his "self-portrait as a degenerate artist". Kirchner killed himself.
However central aesthetics were to Nazism, Peters takes pains to clarify that the party'due south views of art did non come out of nowhere. The concept of degeneracy – the idea that artists could have pathological disorders, that their art could be non but bad just sick, even contagious – was widely debated during the era of Bismarck, most prominently past the Austro-Hungarian physician and critic Max Nordau, whose 1892-93 book Entartung ("Degeneration") warned that whatsoever society could exist corrupted past decayed ideas of beauty and virtue. "Degenerates are not ever criminals, prostitutes, anarchists and pronounced lunatics; they are often authors and artists," Nordau argued. His theories on art and disease ripple through the writings of Nazi race ideology, including Mein Kampf – even though, in ane of the most fell ironies of modern fine art history, Nordau was non simply Jewish but a committed Zionist, and he'due south buried in Tel Aviv.
For the Nazis, modernism was not only an junior or distasteful style. It wasn't even just not-Aryan. Modernism was a swindle – a dangerous prevarication perpetuated by Jews, communists, and even the insane to contaminate the body of German club (they were fond of medical and corporeal metaphors, the Nazis). The stakes are clear in the largest gallery of this bear witness, which features two triptychs next. On the right is Beckmann's Departure, a thousand and enigmatic allegory of hope in the confront of persecution. On the left is Ziegler's The Four Elements, a kitsch, insensate, classicised-to-death depiction of iv nude, racially idealised women, their breasts circular as grapefruits.
"German Volk, come up and judge for yourselves!" Ziegler proclaimed at the opening of the Degenerate Art exhibition. The Germans of 1937, of course, had no such liberty of judgment. Difference, similar all of Beckmann's work, was purged from the land and ended up in the Museum of Modern Art in New York by 1942. The Four Elements stayed in Munich – and hung in Adolf Hitler's house, 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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