Questions of German- Bohemian Art and New Objectivity*

Questions of German- Bohemian Art and New Objectivity* Keith Holz This essay reviews historiographical issues that arise when To introduce the ground-breaking exhibition and catalogue one relates New Objectivity painting in Germany with on ethnic German artists groups in interwar Czechoslova- the visual arts of ethnic German visual artists in Bohemia, kia, Junge Löwen im Käfig [Young Lions in a Cage], Anna Moravia, and Silesia. It also discusses potential avenues Habánová referred to “The creations of the German-speak- of inquiry to examine this interrelationship more closely. ing visual artists from Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia in the Readers are reminded of the tortured complications arising Czechoslovakia of the interwar period.”1 Many will recognize in artists’ lives, careers, identities, and their wartime and the advantages this unwieldy phrase has over the histori- postwar dislocations that separated them from the role of cally limited, politically-freighted phrase Sudetendeutsche representing states in the postwar period. Apropos New Kunst that increased in both usage and political poignancy Objectivity, it asks who defined the art of ethnic Germans in over the course of the 1920s and 1930s. Yet, a dissonance Czechoslovakia and how did those definitions relate to the between those two phrases to characterize this field of re- discourse produced and disseminated by Gustav Hartlaub gional activity in the visual arts remains, and thus merits and Franz Roh’s trail-blazing positions in Germany. It also revisiting to better draw into historical focus the values asks that more specificity be placed upon defining the sense that attended emergent realist pictorial practices (includ- and scope new realist pictures by ethnic Germans were ing New Objectivity) during those decades. An evaluation “modernist,” or “avant-garde” in the Czechoslovak interwar of the then emerging practices of pictorial New Objectiv- context. Finally, the essay suggests an opening through ity in the context of these contested territories and their which new realist paintings, prints or drawings might be multiply redrawn borders benefits from understanding studied as artifacts involved in the address of audiences how any methodology might resemble the range of related whose expectations for art were engrained within local methodologies known as Kunstgeographie or “geography of notions and practices of craftsmanship in the highly art” as examined historiographically by Thomas daCosta respected design industries. Kaufmann.2 Whatever methodologies are developed will have the benefit of being able to build upon compilations of artists’ life and work, catalogues of artworks, and valuable Keywords: craftsmanship; design; modernism; reconstructions of artist groups, which thanks to the valu- New Objectivity; regionalism able, even monumental scholarship of Anna Habánová and Ivo Habán has largely been attained in this field. Prof. Keith Holz, Ph.D. Framing art historical questions in terms of a geog- Department of Art, Western Illinois University raphy of art, however, raises potential pitfalls that include e-mail: [email protected] nationalist and racialist thinking, assumptions of art’s tribal character (Stammescharakter), or the notion that style arises from a particular stem or tribe of a people (Volk) usually keyed to a specific place.3 Reanimating the geography of art to examine the nexus of German-Bohemian (and -Moravi- an, and -Silesian) painting in relation to the largely stylisti- cally defined German tendency known as New Objectivity, seems both necessary and advantageous as long as the racial essentialism that underpinned so many of its mid-twenti- eth century applications in this region can be avoided. Go- ing forward, scholarship on the art of the ethnic German artists of Czechoslovakia in isolation from the contempo- 14 OPUSCULA HISTORIAE ARTIUM / 67, 2018 rary developments of fellow Czech artists and artists from dresses four: 1) How has German-Bohemian art and par- minority ethnic groups in the First Republic will benefit im- ticularly its realisms been refracted and distorted through mensely as it is recast within new art historical accounts decades of interpretation and misinterpretation? 2) Who that accent the interactions between art and artists from all defined German-Bohemian art in Czechoslovakia and how major ethnic groups in the First Republic.4 did those definitions relate to the discourse unleashed by Considering this problem from another perspec- Gustav Hartlaub and Franz Roh’s trail-blazing positions? tive, it would be fair to say that art historians seeking to 3) In what sense were the new realist pictures “modernist,” study “the creations of the German-speaking visual artists and what did “modernist” mean for ethnic Germans in in- from Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia in the Czechoslovakia of terwar Czechoslovakia? 4) And finally, were the new realist the interwar period” face another obstacle before they even artworks produced imagining a public whose expectations begin. Namely, canons of art that are elevated in art his- for art were bound up with notions and practices of crafts- toriography, international museum circuits, as well as the manship? To put a finer point on this last question: to what global art market have almost solely been national canons. extent did expectations about the artistic products of paint- In other words, those canons have been attained and main- ers and graphic artists hew to those held for designers and tained due to their value in giving representation to a na- craftsmen in local industries and workshops? Asked differ- tion state. The artworks by the German-speaking artists of ently, how (if at all) did artists, as well as craftsmen and ar- these interlinked regions, however, have been untethered tisans in the handicrafts, differentiate themselves from the from their function of representing extant regions, territo- other? ries, or nation states since the close of the Second World This essay examines each of these four questions, War. Lacking legitimate claims to represent a nation state and elaborates additional related questions as well. In most – whether that nation state be their former homeland from cases, answers remain elusive and even inadequate, await- which they had been violently expelled in 1945 and 1946 ing further empirical research and textual or visual analysis. (and barred to them by the postwar Czechoslovak and Pol- 1. How was the actually existing German-Bohemian ish government), or the new country of their postwar resi- art and particularly discussion attending its realist produc- dence – after the Second World War these artists and their tions distorted at the time, and how was it distorted again artworks were severed from doing the job of representing later through decades of wartime and postwar interpreta- a nation state. Complicating the degrees of their separations tion and misinterpretation? This question derives directly from representing a nation or a national culture, in their from Christian Fuhrmeister’s recent essay on Nazi art in host countries they were seldom accepted as natives nor Germany: Die (mindestens) doppelte Zurichtung der ‚ge- were expellee attitudes toward assimilation homogenous. wordenen Kunst‘ / (At least ) a double distortion of the ‘art For these and other reasons, ethnic German artists of pre- produced’.5 Following Fuhrmeister’s formulation, this field War Czechoslovakia and their art have languished in public also needs to reckon with the broad conceptions still held and art historical consciousness. Put differently, whatever about German-Bohemian (-Moravian and -Silesian) art, efforts to promote their careers and art were undertaken and ask whether they are adequate. As with the postwar without the backing of the very states they formerly called reception of Nazi art that often remained blind to the ex- home (Czechoslovakia, and to a lesser extent Poland). tent moderately modernist work was “actually produced” Exclusion from the activities and discourses involved in for and under the Third Reich, it is essential to recognize building a national art in postwar Czechoslovakia was also how historiography and international diplomacy over- harsh toward the few modernist artists among them, for whelmed the reception of the art and careers of its ethnic their work or reputations remained tethered to the territo- German practitioners from Czechoslovakia. For Nazi art, rial particularities of the former Czechoslovakia instead of Fuhrmeister defines two phases of distortion, the first be- the internationalist upswing for modernism after the war. ing the difference between the “actually produced art” ver- And finally, many of these ethnic German practitioners of sus what was claimed about it during the Third Reich. The new realist art – whether rightly or wrongly – have been second (longer) phase has been defined by the difference (m)aligned with National Socialist Germany and its cultural between the “actually produced art” and its decades-long and racial policies and programs. This is especially the case postwar reception. In short, German-Bohemian art too when artistic projects had enlisted or contributed to Volks- will benefit from clarifying how it was distorted during the tümlichkeit (populist) or bodenständige (indigenous, more 1920s and 1930s, but also through the multiple distorting at: rooted-in-the soil) claims or visual rhetoric during the lenses of the postwar era. run up to the War and during the Protectorate. Thanks to the almost encyclopedic

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