| THE EXPOSITION OF DEGENERATED ART MUNICH 1937 |
| Hitler's Motivations for the Exhibit Degenerate art was not acceptable to the Nazi government standards as many of the pieces were left deliberately unfinished, filled with unnatural, unrealistic colors, twisted shapes, and disproportionate sizes. Hitler personally selected eighty unfinished artworks that were formerly on display in public museums and placed them into the Degenerate Art (Entartete Kunst) Exhibition, for unfinished art might be subject to a myriad of interpretations. Any artwork that showed the misshapen or crippled distortions was to be eliminated for any work that did not celebrate conformity to the ideal was deemed worthless. While Klee asserted that art was not to be the window of reality and there were never inherent artistic rules and doctrines, his lectures from 1924 met the wrath of Hitler in the late 1930’s. His art, declared to be degenerate, was segregated along side his peers, this effectively censoring his artistic voice. Many Germans saw the Avant- Garde art, later distinguished as Degenerate art, as art far removed from the people; hence, it was not approved. No person, unless a student of modern art, could begin to understand its message. Professor Hans Adolph Buhler felt that in modern Germany, the role of art had shifted from a nurturing role as a healing goddess into a whore who served the art market as well as the art intellectual. Rather than meeting the needs of the common people, art had become the voice of the intellectual elite, the few who could understand its twisted logic and distorted vision . The art historian, Kurt Karl Eberlein, in 1933, recognized this turning away from the blood and soil of Germany and felt that modern art tended to silence the voice of everyman . Modern art had vision that was independent and was rooted in the insight of the individual artist. Each artist felt compelled to deliver his own inner message without needing to worry about how his message would be met. According to the official Nazi position, the artist and his creation were synonymous. If the creation was judged to be degenerate, it meant, in fact, that the creator himself was also degenerate. Conversely, a Jewish or Communist artist could not produce any acceptable artwork. Since the simple act of painting a work that could be seen as being “vicious or ugly or treasonable” showed the inherent support of the degeneracy, any twisting or non-realistic reflection away from truth would be seen as degenerate. Stylized and interpretative self portraits were particularly subject to criticism. Kirchner’s The Drinker revealed an intoxicated alcoholic in a confused setting and Meidner’s Self- Portrait had “bulging eyes, underdeveloped jaw, and deformed ears” to distort the artist’s face. This had to be the work of madmen or criminals according to the official art position, and such works as Hausmann’s head of Felixmuller suggested even further depravity with the vision of “disjointed features and the brain tissue showing”. There was an illness threatening the fabric of Germanic culture, and the source of the problem lay in the paintbrushes and tools of the non- racially pure artists. Schultze- Naumburg in his book, Art and Race, The Face of the German Art, condemned the works of Nolde, Barlech, Heckel, Hofer, and Kirchner by juxtaposing their artwork and photographs of victims of deformity and disease to show how their art celebrated defects rather than human triumphs and perfection. Both Goebbels and Hitler saw the acceptable artist’s primary responsibility as being a guardian of the German culture, and as such, the artist became a public figure, ready to capture a healthy vision of his society. According to the Nazi mindset, no Jew could ever aspire to be creative, which meant that the mission of educating and elevating the German culture would be in the realm the racially “advanced” pure Aryan. According to the official Nazi position, the artist and his creation were synonymous. If the creation was judged to be degenerate, it meant, in fact, that the creator himself was also degenerate. Conversely, a Jewish or Communist artist could not produce any acceptable artwork. Since the simple act of painting a work that could be seen as being “vicious or ugly or treasonable” showed the inherent support of the degeneracy, any twisting or non-realistic reflection away from truth would be seen as degenerate. Thus, art served the purpose of being a mirror for the society. All acceptable art would meet a standard of perfectly reflecting the finest heroic qualities of Germany. The highest elements were presented with pride and beauty and served as the central focus, rather than emphasizing the inner personal artistic struggle. The approved art was exhibited in Berlin in 1937 in the Haus der Kunst, and the grand opening of the exhibition was celebrated with the “Day of German Art.” A parade of more than seven thousand people and animals filled the streets of Berlin as various historical figures representing the diversity of German pride to include Renaissance artists and ancient kings marched by the crowds. Hitler used the occasion as a chance to deliver a speech on art history and contrast the preferred art with the unacceptable degenerate art. Calling for a war of purification, he demanded that the listeners exterminate the corrupt and only the pure and realistic be allowed to survive. While the Great German Exhibition, displaying eight hundred of eighty four paintings and pieces of sculpture of approved art, proved a flop and had unexpectedly low attendance, it served as a proper venue for displaying art glorifying German peasant life, nudes, and war scenes. Many were painted by Adolph Zeigler, who, as the president of the Reich Culture Chamber, served as the primary selector of art to be purged from the museums as degenerate art. Ziegler is probably one of the most mediocre painters of the XXth century. Across the street, three days later, opened the touring exhibit of degenerate art, Entartete Kunst, to display the one hundred thirteen artists who failed to heed the message. However it does not mean that all the artists accepted for the German Art Exhibit were bad or mediocre, some were excellent and still their works sell very well, others were just sycophants who painted to fit with the "Zeitgeist" and some were trying to make an inroad in the market and deserve no special comment but can not be qualified as Nazis. In the end the Nazis were not the pioneers of Entartete Kunst's destruction. Before them, the German Art Society of Bettina Feistel-Rohmeder launched 13 Entartete Kunst shows between 1933 and 1937, beating the Nazis on their own ground and adopting a more entrenched conception about modern art : she launched, as of 1920, a relentless campaign against modernism, bolstered by a regular publication called German Art Correspondence. A journal set up by Feistel- Rohmeder's German Art Society in 1927, German Pictorial Art, became a vehicle for the promotion of the art Feistel- Rohmeder preferred: conventional figurative art in the nineteenth-century style, showing landscapes, bucolic idylls, natural life and strongly delineated rustic characters. Exactly what Hitler and his henchmen appreciated most. But this is another story. It only shows once more that the Nazis were most of the time demagogue harvesters of other people creeds and actions. |
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| From Bettina Feistel-Rohmeder to Paul J. Goebbels, this was the kind of painting by Th. Baumgartner that conservative people in Germany wanted to see everywhere. Is it bad, is it good or just boring ? VOTE : |