4C the Anti-Modernists

seum, were some six hundred and fifty the art world of the twenty thousand works that the Nazis eventually confiscated from Ger- man institutions and collections. Many The anti-MOdERNisTs were subsequently burned; others were sold abroad, for hard currency. Wall texts Why the Third Reich targeted artists. noted the prices that public museums had paid for the works with “the taxes of the BY PETER sCHjEldAHl German working people,” and derided the art as mentally and morally diseased or as a “revelation of the Jewish racial soul.” Only a handful of the artists were Jews, but that made scant difference to a regime that could detect Semitic conta- gion anywhere. Some months earlier, Jo- seph Goebbels, the propaganda minister, had announced a ban on art criticism, as “a legacy of the Jewish influence.” “Degenerate Art” was a blockbuster, far outdrawing a show that had opened the day before, a short walk away, in a new edifice, dear to Hitler, called the House of German Art. “The Great German Art Exhibition” had been planned to demonstrate a triumphant new spirit in the nation’s high culture, but the preponderance of academic hackery in the work produced for it came as a rankling disappointment to Hitler, whose taste was blinkered but not blind. By official count, more than two million visitors thronged “Degen- erate Art” during its four-month run in Munich. Little is recorded of what they thought, but the American critic A. I. Philpot remarked, in the Boston Globe, that “there are probably plenty of people—art lovers—in Boston who will side with Hitler in this particular purge.” Germany had no monopoly on ou might not expect much drama the works. One room features empty philistinism. from “Degenerate Art: The Attack frames that once held large paintings— “Degenerate Art” slandered every in- onY Modern Art in Germany 1937,” a probably destroyed—by the likes of Max novative style of the previous three de- succinct historical show at the Neue Gal- Beckmann, Paul Klee, Otto Dix, George cades—Hitler having dictated a starting erie. The subject—the propagandistic Grosz, and Oskar Kokoschka. The show date of 1910—but mainly, in an ironic “Degenerate Art” exhibition, which pre- decants an essence of Nazism’s malice emphasis, homegrown German Expres- sented modernist works for popular and the mass hysteria on which it fed. Is sionism. Some leading Nazis had been vilifi cation—is familiar, and it ranks as the target only art? Art was no incidental enthusiasts for the movement—Goeb- scarcely a footnote in the annals of Third matter for Adolf Hitler, whose designs bels considered it a fitly nationalist com- Reich infamy. But the nuanced treat- on the world, keyed to the rightful dom- plement to the New Order, with parallels ment of the event, by the German cura- inance of a purified master race, were aes- in German medieval, Renaissance, and tor Olaf Peters, shocks anew, even at a thetic at their twisted root. folk art. He had his apartment in Berlin distance of seventy-seven years. Peters The hate-fest of “Degenerate Art,” remodelled by the architect Albert Speer, has done a lot with a little: only about which travelled to eleven cities in Ger- who incorporated watercolors by the great twenty works that appeared in the show, many and Austria, commenced in Mu- Expressionist—and devoted Nazi— along with others by the same artists. Ap- nich on July 19, 1937. On display, in the Emil Nolde. But Hitler idealized pre- posite photographs and films accompany cramped quarters of an archeological mu- Christian Greek and Roman art and countenanced no kind of painting more Works on view include, at rear, triptychs by Adolf Ziegler and Max Beckmann. contemporary than nineteenth-century 96 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 24, 2014 PHOTOGRAPH BY RAYMOND MEIER TNY—2014_03_24—PAGE 96—133SC. —live art—r24763—please pull Virtual proof—extremelY CRITI- CAL PHOTOGRAPH TO BE WATCHED THROUGHOUT THE ENTIRE PRESS RUN 4C Bavarian genre scenes. The Führer paid before and after its devastation by Allied “The Four Elements” is disturbing. In a visit to the apartment and his rage, at bombs, in February, 1945, dramatize the presenting the work, and other, lesser but the sight of the paintings, snapped Goeb- toll of war in a city that was both the not entirely miserable examples of “great bels into line. (Political fealty cut no ice home of the pioneering Expressionist German art,” Peters plainly means to dis- with Hitler in matters of art.) Further cohort called Die Brücke (the Bridge) rupt complacent assumptions about a motivated by a determination to outflank and an early site of anti-modernist “exhi- moment when people, if untouched by anti-modernist radicals in the Nazi hier- bitions of shame,” staged by Rosenberg’s the terror, might still have condoned archy, such as the bumbling fanatic Al- Militant League for German Culture, some aspect of the Reich. Further com- fred Rosenberg, Goebbels became the which anticipated “Degenerate Art.” In plicating matters, not all the “degenerate” driving force behind “Degenerate Art.” a corridor hung with Nazi propaganda artists were first-rate, or even very good, He well understood the political utility of posters, a wall-spanning photograph of as witness a cartoonishly grotesque sculp- organized loathing; the Munich show in- crowds lined up to attend “Degenerate ture of a head, by Otto Freundlich, that cluded thirty-six pictures by Nolde, the Art” faces one of Jews arriving at Ausch- provided the chief image in publicity ma- most by any one artist. witz. (This might seem heavy-handed, terials for the Munich show. What might the culture of the Reich but its relevance is impossible to over- The art historian Ruth Heftig, one of have been if it had embraced Expres- state.) The show climaxes with a com- eleven essayists in the Neue Galerie’s sionism? That amounts to imagining parison of “Great German Art” works compulsively readable catalogue, states a Nazism without Hitler. The failure of and works that appeared, or might as crowning irony: that the “stigmatization his favored artists to fulfill his expecta- well have, among the “degenerates.” of modernism caused by the National tions might have taught him that great- Two triptychs are strikingly juxtaposed: Socialists is partly responsible for the ness in art cannot be willed, but, of a masterpiece by Beckmann, “The De- current boom in modern art,” having course, it didn’t. He just willed harder. parture” (1932-33), which escaped “created a canon, so to speak, that had The most celebrated German moderns confiscation and was given a place of not existed previously.” The glamour of either fled the country, like Beckmann honor in the Museum of Modern Art martyrdom came to halo modern artists and Klee, or retreated into internal during the war, and “The Four Ele- with political virtues that few of them ei- exile, like Dix, who painted anodyne ments” (1937), by Adolf Ziegler, who ther sought or merited. This set the landscapes in rural obscurity. Nolde was the least bad aesthetically of the Nazi stage, in Cold War America, for the spent the war years working in water- painters but one of the most vicious public acceptance of Abstract Expres- colors, so as not to risk a telltale odor spokesmen among them. sionism as, for all its esoteric aesthetics, of oils in his studio, because he was The central panel of the Beckmann a potent symbol of liberal democracy, officially forbidden to paint. In 1938, depicts a king in a boat at sea; in the side versus Communist dogmatism. In Ger- the most prominent originator of Ex- panels, enigmatic figures perform sadis- many, the reaction spurred a revival of pressionism, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, tic acts. In the Ziegler, which Hitler Expressionism and fuelled a spirit of committed suicide, in Switzerland. The owned, four nude Aryan beauties re- purgatorial atonement, which found Bauhaus, which is featured in one room pose on a long plinth and wield attri- focus in the career of the former Luft- of the Neue Galerie, had been forced to butes of fire, water, earth, and air. They waffe pilot Joseph Beuys and led to the disband, in 1933, despite a pledge of are kitschy enough, as confections of a global eminence of the painters Gerhard political neutrality from its director, trumped-up sensibility that Hitler had Richter, Sigmar Polke, and Anselm Mies van der Rohe. wishfully termed “Greco-Nordic,” but Kiefer. Divorcing our thinking about Photographs blown up to mural size well done, in simmering harmonies of modern culture from the residual conse- serve as backdrops for some works in the light-blue sky and delicately shadowed, quences of “Degenerate Art” probably new show. Two aerial views of Dresden, effulgent flesh. The pleasure imparted by can’t be done. THE NEW YORKER IS A REGISTERED TRADEMARK OF ADVANCE MAGAZINE PUBLISHERS INC. COPYRIGHT ©2014 CONDÉ NAST. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. PRINTED IN THE U.S.A. VOLUME XC, NO. 5, March 24, 2014. THE NEW YORKER (ISSN 0028 792X) is published weekly (except for five combined issues: February 17 & 24, June 9 & 16, July 7 & 14, August 11 & 18, and December 22 & 29) by Condé Nast, which is a division of Advance Magazine Publishers Inc. PRINCIPAL OFFICE: The Condé Nast Building, 4 Times Square, New York, NY 10036. Elizabeth Hughes, vice- president and publisher; Beth Lusko, associate publisher advertising; James Guilfoyle, director of finance and business operations; Lynn Oberlander, general counsel. Condé Nast: S. I. Newhouse, Jr., chairman; Charles H. Townsend, chief executive officer; Robert A. Sauerberg, Jr., president; John W. Bellando, chief operating officer & chief financial officer; Jill Bright, chief administra- tive officer.

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