Degenerate art
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Degenerate art is the English term for the German entartete Kunst, a term adopted by the Nazi regime in Germany to describe virtually all modern art. Such art was banned on the grounds that it was "un-German" or "Jewish Bolshevist" in nature, and those identified as degenerate artists were subjected to sanctions. These included being dismissed from teaching positions, being forbidden to exhibit or to sell their art, and in some cases being forbidden to produce art entirely.
Degenerate Art was also the title of an exhibition, mounted by the Nazis in Munich in 1937, consisting of modernist artworks chaotically hung and accompanied by text labels deriding the art. Designed to inflame public opinion against modernism, the exhibition subsequently traveled to several other cities in Germany and Austria.
While modern styles of art were prohibited, the Nazis promoted paintings and sculptures that were narrowly traditional in manner and that exalted the "blood and soil" values of racial purity, militarism, and obedience. They called this style of Romantic realism Heroic art.[citation needed] Similarly, music was expected to be tonal and free of jazz influence; films and plays were censored.
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[edit] Reaction against modernism
The early twentieth century was a period of wrenching changes in the arts. In painting, such innovations as expressionism, Dada and surrealism, following hot on the heels of symbolism, cubism and Fauvism, were not universally appreciated. The majority of people in Germany, as elsewhere, did not care for the new art which many resented as elitist, morally suspect and too often incomprehensible.[1]
Germany had emerged as a leading center of the avant-garde not only in the visual arts but in music as well, giving to the world the atonal compositions of Arnold Schoenberg and the jazz-influenced work of Paul Hindemith and Kurt Weill. Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Fritz Lang's Metropolis brought expressionism to cinema.
The Nazis viewed the culture of the Weimar period with reactionary disgust. Their response stemmed partly from conservative aesthetic taste and partly from their determination to use culture as a propaganda tool.[2] On both counts, a painting such as Otto Dix's War Cripples (1920) was anathema to them. It unsparingly depicts four badly disfigured veterans of the First World War, then a familiar sight on Berlin's streets, rendered in caricatured style. Featured in the Degenerate Art exhibition, it hung near a label accusing Dix, himself a volunteer in World War I, of "an insult to the German heroes of the great war".
As dictator, Hitler gave his personal taste in art the force of law to a degree never before seen. Only in Stalin's Soviet Union, where Socialist Realism was the mandatory style, had a state shown such concern with regulation of the arts. [3] In the case of Germany, the model was to be classical Greek and Roman art, seen by Hitler as an art whose exterior form embodied an inner racial ideal[4].
The reason for this, as Henry Grosshans points out, is that Hitler "saw Greek and Roman art as uncontaminated by Jewish influences. Modern art was an act of aesthetic violence by the Jews against the German spirit. Such was true to Hitler even though only Liebermann, Meidner, Freundlich, and Marc Chagall, among those who made significant contributions to the German modernist movement, were Jewish. But Hitler [...] took upon himself the responsibility of deciding who, in matters of culture, thought and acted like a Jew."[5]
The supposedly "Jewish" nature of all art that was indecipherable, distorted, or that represented "depraved" subject matter was explained through the concept of degeneracy, which held that distorted and corrupted art was a symptom of an inferior race. By propagating the theory of degeneracy, the Nazis combined their anti-semitism with their drive to control the culture, thus consolidating public support for both campaigns.
[edit] Degeneracy
The term Entartung (or "degeneracy") had gained currency in Germany by the late 19th century when the critic and author Max Nordau devised the theory presented in his 1892 book, Entartung.[6] Nordau drew upon the writings of the criminologist Cesare Lombroso, whose The Criminal Man, published in 1876, attempted to prove that there were "born criminals" whose atavistic personality traits could be detected by scientifically measuring abnormal physical characteristics. Nordau developed from this premise a critique of modern art, explained as the work of those so corrupted and enfeebled by modern life that they have lost the self-control needed to produce coherent works. He attacked Aestheticism in English literature and described the mysticism of the Symbolist movement in French literature as a product of mental pathology. Explaining the painterliness of Impressionism as the sign of a diseased visual cortex, he decried modern degeneracy while praising traditional German culture. Despite the fact that Nordau was Jewish (as was Lombroso), his pseudoscientific theory of artistic degeneracy would be seized upon by German National Socialists during the Weimar Republic as a rallying point for their anti-semitic and racist demand for Aryan purity in art.
Belief in a Germanic spirit—defined as mystical, noble, rural, bearing ancient wisdom into a tragic destiny—existed long before the rise of the Nazis; Richard Wagner exemplified this school of thought.[7] Beginning before World War I, the well-known German architect and painter Paul Schultze-Naumburg's influential writings condemned modern art and architecture in racial terms and formed much of the basis for Adolf Hitler's belief that classical Greece and the Middle Ages were the true sources of Aryan art.[8] Schultze-Naumburg subsequently wrote such books as Die Kunst der Deutschen. Ihr Wesen und ihre Werke (The art of the Germans. Their nature and their factories) and Kunst und Rasse (Art and Race), the latter published in 1928, in which he argued that only "racially pure" artists could produce a healthy art which upheld timeless ideals of classical beauty, while racially "mixed" modern artists produced distorted artwork. By reproducing examples of modern art next to photographs of people with deformities and diseases, he graphically reinforced the idea of modernism as a sickness.[9] Alfred Rosenberg developed this theory in Der Mythos des 20. Jahrhunderts (Myth of the Twentieth Century)', published in 1933, which became a best-seller in Germany and made Rosenberg the Party's leading ideological spokesman.[10]
Hitler's rise to power on January 31, 1933 was quickly followed by actions intended to cleanse the culture of degeneracy: book burnings were organized, artists and musicians were dismissed from teaching positions, and curators who had shown a partiality to modern art were replaced by Party members.[11] In September 1933 the Reichskulturkammer (Reich Culture Chamber) was established, with Josef Goebbels, Hitler's Reichminister für Volksaufklärung und Propganda (Reich Minister for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda) in charge. Subchambers within the Culture Chamber, representing the individual arts (music, film, literature, architecture, and the visual arts) were created; these were membership groups consisting of racially pure artists supportive of the Party, or willing to be compliant. Goebbels made it clear: " In future only those who are members of a chamber are allowed to be productive in our cultural life. Membership is open only to those who fulfill the entrance condition. In this way all unwanted and damaging elements have been excluded." [12] By 1935 the Reich Culture Chamber had 100,000 members. [13]
Nonetheless there was, during the period 1933-1934, some confusion within the Party on the question of Expressionism. Goebbels and some others believed that the forceful works of such artists as Emil Nolde, Ernst Barlach and Erich Heckel represented the "Nordic spirit", and Goebbels even tried—unsuccessfully—to persuade the half-Jewish director Fritz Lang to head the Culture Chamber for Film.[14] Goebbels explained, "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."[15] However, a faction led by Rosenberg despised the Expressionists, leading to a bitter ideological dispute which was settled only in September 1934, when Hitler declared that there would be no place for modernist experimentation in the Reich.[16]
[edit] The Entartete Kunst exhibit
By 1937, this concept was firmly entrenched in Nazi policy, and on June 30 of that year Goebbels put Adolf Ziegler, the head of the Reichskammer dur Bildenden Künste (Reich Chamber of Visual Art), in charge of a six-man commission authorized to scour museums and art collections throughout the Reich, confiscating any remaining art deemed modern, degenerate, or subversive. These works were then to be presented to the public in an exhibit intended to incite further revulsion against the "perverse Jewish spirit" penetrating German culture.[17]
Over 5,000 works were seized, including 1,052 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 Alexander Archipenko, Marc Chagall, James Ensor, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso and Vincent van Gogh.[18] The entartete Kunst exhibit, featuring over 650 paintings, sculptures, prints, and books from the collections of thirty two German museums, premiered in Munich on July 19, 1937, and travelled to eleven other cities in Germany and Austria.
The exhibit was held on the second floor of a building formerly occupied by the Institute of Archaeology. Viewers had to reach the exhibit by means of a narrow staircase. The first sculpture was an oversized, theatrical portrait of Jesus, which purposely intimidated viewers as they literally bumped into it in order to enter. The rooms were made of temporary partitions and deliberately chaotic and overfilled. Pictures were crowded together, sometimes unframed, usually hung by cord.
The first three rooms were grouped thematically. The first room contained works allegedly demeaning of religion; the second featured works by Jewish artists in particular; the third contained works considered insulting to the women, soldiers and farmers of Germany. The rest of the exhibit had no particular theme.
There were slogans painted on the walls:
- Insolent mockery of the Divine under Centrist rule
- Revelation of the Jewish racial soul
- An insult to German womanhood
- The ideal - cretin and whore
- Even museum bigwigs called this the 'art of the German people'
Speeches of Nazi party leaders contrasted with artist manifestos from various art movements, such as Dada and Surrealism. Next to many paintings were labels indicating how much money a museum spent to acquire the artwork. In the case of paintings acquired during the post-war Weimar hyperinflation of the early 1920s, when a loaf of bread cost trillions[citation needed] of German marks, the prices of the paintings were of course greatly exaggerated. The entire exhibit was designed to promote the idea that modernism was a conspiracy by people who hated German decency, frequently identified as "Jewish-Bolshevist", although only six of the 112 artists included in the exhibition were in fact Jewish.[19]
It was considered the first blockbuster art exhibit of the twentieth century.[citation needed] In four months the exhibition attracted over two million visitors, nearly three and a half times the number that visited the nearby Grosse Deutsche Kunstausstellung (Great German art exhibition), featuring officially sponsored art.[20]
[edit] The fate of the artists and their work
Avant-garde German artists, mostly Expressionists, were now branded both enemies of the state and a threat to the German nation. Many went into exile and lost both their reputations and credibility. Max Beckmann fled to Amsterdam on the opening day of the entartete Kunst exhibit. Max Ernst emigrated to America with the assistance of Peggy Guggenheim. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner committed suicide in Switzerland in 1938. Paul Klee spent his years in exile in Switzerland, yet was unable to obtain Swiss citizenship because of his status as a degenerate artist. Otto Dix retreated to the countryside to paint unpeopled landscapes in a meticulous style that would not provoke the authorities.[21] The Reichskulturkammer forbade artists such as Edgar Ende and Emil Nolde from purchasing painting materials. Those who remained in Germany were forbidden to work at universities and were subject to surprise raids by the Gestapo in order to ensure that they were not violating the ban on producing artwork. Those of Jewish descent who did not escape from Germany in time were sent to concentration camps.
After the exhibit, paintings were sorted out for sale and sold in Switzerland at auction; some pieces were acquired by museums, others by private collectors. Nazi officials took many for their private use: for example, Herman Goering took fourteen valuable pieces, including a van Gogh and a Cezanne. In March, 1939, the Berlin Fire Brigade burned approximately 4000 works which had little value on the international market.[22]
After the collapse of Nazi Germany when the Russian army was the first to invade Berlin, some artwork from the exhibit was found buried underground. It is unclear how many of these then reappeared in the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg where they still remain. The story of how these paintings survived is not documented in public. They are simply listed at the Hermitage as: provenance unknown.
[edit] Listing of artists in the Entartete Kunst show at Munich, 1937
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[edit] Artistic movements condemned as degenerate
[edit] See Also
[edit] Footnotes
- ^ Adam, 1992, p. 29
- ^ Adam, 1992, p. 110
- ^ Barron, 1991, p.10
- ^ Grosshans, 1983, p. 87
- ^ Grosshans, 1983, p. 86
- ^ Barron, 1991, p.26
- ^ Adam, 1992, pp.23-24
- ^ Adam, 1992, p. 29-32
- ^ Grosshans, 1983, p. 9
- ^ Adam, 1992, p. 33
- ^ Adam, 1992, p.52
- ^ Adam, 1992, p.53
- ^ Adam, 1992, p. 53
- ^ Adam, 1992, p. 56
- ^ Adam, 1992, p.56
- ^ Grosshans, 1983, p. 73-74
- ^ Adam, 1992, p.123, quoting Goebbels, November 26, 1937, in Von der Grossmacht zur Weltmacht.
- ^ Adam, 1992, pp. 121-122
- ^ Barron, 1991, p.9.
- ^ Adam, 1992, pp.124-125
- ^ Karcher, 1988, p. 206
- ^ Grosshans, 1983, p. 113
[edit] References
- Adam, Peter. Art of the Third Reich (1992). New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc.. ISBN 0-8109-1912-5
- Barron, Stephanie, ed. 'Degenerate Art:' The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany (1991). New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc.. ISBN 0-8109-3653-4
- Grosshans, Henry. Hitler and the Artists (1983). New York: Holmes & Meyer. ISBN 0-8419-0746-3
- Grosshans, Henry. Hitler and the Artists (1993). New York: Holmes & Meyer. ISBN 0-8109-3653-4
- Karcher, Eva. Otto Dix 1891-1969: His Life and Works (1988). Cologne: Benedikt Taschen. ISBN 3-8228-0272-1
- Lehmann-Haupt, Hellmut. Art Under a Dictatorship (1973). New York: Oxford University Press.
- Minnion, John. Hitler's List: an Illustrated Guide to 'Degenerates' (2nd edition 2005). Liverpool: Checkmate Books. ISBN 0-9544499-2-4
- Nordau, Max. Degeneration, introduction by George L. Mosse (1998). New York: Howard Fertig. ISBN 0-8032-8367-9
- Rose, Carol Washton Long. (1995) Documents from the End of the Wilhemine Empire to the Rise of National Socialism. San Francisco: University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-20264-3
- Suslav, Vitaly. The State Hermitage: Masterpieces from the Museum's Collections vol. 2 Western European Art (1994). New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc. ISBN 1-873968-03-5
