TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/030491/0304400.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 8.6 KB | 189 lines

                                                                                ART, Page 86

Culture On the Nazi Pillory


The Third Reich's mocking exhibit of "degenerate" works is
re-created for the first time

By ROBERT HUGHES


    Among all the efforts to clamp state censorship on art in
the 20th century, one symbolic event stands out. It is
"Entartete Kunst," the Nazis' show of "degenerate art," the
purpose of which was to ridicule Modernism. Even when Stalin
launched his terror against the Russian avant-garde in the
1930s, it never occurred to his apparatchiks to hold a big show
of the art he loathed. But this was precisely what Hitler did
in the summer of 1937 in Munich, contrasting it with another
exhibition -- reverently installed in the neoclassical halls of
the new House of German Art -- of the art he approved.

    The second show was called the "Grosse Deutsche
Kunstausstellung" (Great German Art Exhibition), and much of
it was handpicked by the Fuhrer himself. In his opening speech,
he promised that "cliques of chatterers, dilettantes, and art
forgers will be picked up and liquidated."

    Over there, across the park, one saw the works of Max
Beckmann, Max Ernst, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Oskar Kokoschka and
others. The viewer could imagine what demons stood behind them:
the creeping Jew, the scheming Bolshevik, the Negro with his
thick lips and saxophone, the slavering pervert. In here it was
all David and the Apollo Belvedere, noble simplicity and calm
grandeur as interpreted by such heirs of Michelangelo and
Polyclitus as Hitler's favorite sculptor Arno Breker and his
court painter Adolf Ziegler. What kind of Germany, the two
shows asked, do you want?

    "Entartete Kunst" was the first traveling blockbuster show
of the 20th century. It went to several venues in Germany and
Austria and was seen by the staggering total of nearly 3
million people, a larger box office than any art exhibition
before or since. (By comparison, the Museum of Modern Art's
Picasso retrospective drew 1.1 million four decades later.) It
contained some 650 paintings, sculptures and prints by just
about every Modernist artist of consequence in Germany and
Austria; it was a huge, random anthology of the achievements of
German Expressionism. Everything came from German museums, since
the idea was to show how the official public culture of
Germany had been infiltrated by Modernism. At the end of the
show, whatever seemed salable was auctioned by the Fischer
Gallery in Switzerland. Minor or unsalable works were
destroyed. The whole affair was an elaborate purification rite,
art's equivalent to book burning.

    Yet although "Entartete Kunst" is still an archsymbol of
cultural repression, it remains vague in detail. The catalog
was a mere brochure, and only a few photos of the actual
installation seem to have survived. What, exactly, was in the
show? Below the obvious surface of anti-Semitic and
anti-Modernist stereotypes, what did it actually represent? How
did it fit into the larger programs of Nazism, and why was it
so popular?

    These questions, and others, are now raised and answered by
an altogether fascinating reconstruction of "Entartete Kunst,"
which opened last week at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
"Degenerate Art: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany"
is the result of five years of patient detective work led by
art historian Stephanie Barron, whose specialty is the art and
cultural politics of Germany in the '20s and '30s. With the
help of photographs that had lain unconsulted since the end of
World War II in the archives of the National Gallery in Berlin,
Barron was able to reconstruct not only the contents of the
show, work by work, but also their hanging on the walls of the
Archaeological Institute that far-off summer.

    Although some of the 650 works have disappeared and others
remain unidentifiable, Barron was able to borrow some 180 items
that were in the original show. Among them are numerous
masterpieces of the period, such as Kirchner's piercing image
of castration anxiety, Self-Portrait as Soldier, 1915, and
Beckmann's Still Life with Musical Instruments, 1926, perhaps
the greatest of his still-life paintings, now seen for the
first time in the U.S.

    This pictorial core is preceded by a scale model of the
original installation in Munich (an astonishing piece of
detective work in itself), complete with the Nazis' derogatory
slogans ("Revelation of the Jewish racial soul," "The ideal --
cretin and whore," and so forth) written around them. The
museum has also produced voluminous samplings of other aspects
of the Nazi program of culture as total propaganda. There are
vitrines of banned books and Nazi catalogs, and tape loops of
old newsreels of cultural parades in Munich: triumphal
processions of kitsch, with huge papier-mache Greek heads borne
by people dressed as Rhine Maidens and warriors of the
Teutoburg Forest. There are screenings of films whose display
is still illegal in Germany, such as Hitlerjunge Quex, 1933,
and Jud Suss, 1940. One can listen to a duet from Act I of
Lohengrin, conducted by the young Nazi virtuoso Herbert von
Karajan, or to SS marches.

    Short of summoning the Mormon Tabernacle Choir to belt out
the Horst Wessel Song in the Hollywood Bowl, the museum has
spared no efforts to sample the culture of the time as vividly
as possible for an audience to whom the Third Reich is, at
most, a remote and unwelcome memory. And the catalog, with its
essays by Barron and other hands, German scholars as well as
American ones, is certain to remain the definitive study of
Nazi cultural repression for many years to come.

    This is a neatly timed show. Issues of censorship and
political art resound in the American air as they have not
since the 1930s. "Degenerate Art" may remind a few people (at
least those who have not been utterly blinkered by their own
sanctimony) how toxic a sense of political "correctness" can
be once it is injected into the social arteries and corrupts
the language that flows in them. In America today the free
speech of culture has at least as much to fear from the academic
lefties as from the religious Fundamentalists or the loony
right, which was certainly not the case in Germany in 1937. For
American artists today, censorship or repression usually means
not getting a National Endowment for the Arts grant. Jesse
Helms may be a bigot, but he is not Dr. Goebbels, and one can
only imagine what the ghosts of George Grosz or Beckmann,
exiled to America, might say to those who think he is.

    The difference between the attitudes behind "Entartete
Kunst" and those of America's cultural puritanisms is vast and
crucial. No American has ever got away with the suggestion that
art, along with literature, music, drama and film, should
conform to a state-enforced ideology. The popularity of
"Entartete Kunst" sprang from a common ground of bewilderment,
the feeling that advanced art, in the 1930s as in the 1980s,
had lost contact with the man in the street. It was seen as an
index and even, in some obscure way, a cause of the sense of
social "decay" on which Nazism harped.

    America has never been short of paranoids who fantasized
some "essential," ideal American society, undermined by
"outsiders." But they had no totalitarian frame through which
this romantic pessimism could be magnified, whereas Hitler
invented one. Anti-Semitism was only part of the demonology of
the "Entartete Kunst" show. In fact, only half a dozen Jewish
artists, the best-known of whom was Marc Chagall, were included
in it.

    What seems to have been of far greater appeal to the German
audience was the diffused threat of general pathology, of an
incurable strangeness that was Modernism itself. Entartet, as
Barron stresses, was at root "a biological term, defining a
plant or animal that has so changed that it no longer belongs
to its species." But today the work shown in "Entartete Kunst"
strikes us as classic. It has become part of the legend, the
official culture of the 20th century. No doubt some folks will
get more thrills from the show's documents of Nazi kitsch than
from the once "shocking" works of Kokoschka and Kirchner. Still,



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HITLER'S HIT LIST


    In what the Nazis called an "exorcism of evil," the
"Entartete Kunst" show ridiculed paintings by many notable names
in modern art. Among the artists:


    Max Beckmann     Marc Chagall     Lovis Corinth     Otto Dix
   Wassily Kandinsky     Ernst Ludwig Kirchner     Paul Klee
  Oskar Kokoschka     Emil Nolde     Karl Schmidt-Rottluff