Exhibition ‘Kunst für Keinen’ shows work that remained unseen in the Nazi era

You wouldn’t expect it so one-two-three. Painter and draftsman Otto Dix was one of the greatest critics of the First World War in Germany at the beginning of the last century. His criticism: that the German bourgeoisie had allowed themselves to be messed up in the war. That big business had financed that war. And that the consequences of this lost war for Germany were disastrous. Few artists could conjure such raw images from their brushes as Dix, who relentlessly portrayed the ugliness of his time.

But then. During the Nazi regime, some twenty years later, he registers for the Reichskulturkammer, the institute that the Nazis had set up to curb all cultural expressions, with the aim of the Aryanization of Germany. Suddenly Dix begins to paint pastoral landscapes and religious scenes with the Blessed Virgin Mary. And that while his earlier, rough work during the First World War was labeled as ‘entartet’ by the same regime and he was temporarily banned from exhibition.

It could be, you might say. But at the exhibition Art for Keinen in the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt, it turns out that Otto Dix was by no means the only artist to follow the Nazis. His paintings now fill the walls of the exhibition space with the work of thirteen others from the period 1933-1945, including Willi Baumeister, Hannah Höch, Ernst Wilhelm Nay, Franz Radziwill, Jeanne Mammen and the couple Hans and Lea Grundig.

Berufsverbot

While other artists had fled abroad from the Nazi terror and an imminent Berufsverbot – such as Max Beckmann, Max Ernst, George Grosz and Marc Chagall – Otto Dix and his followers continued to work eagerly in the Heimatland. It is understandable that these laggards, unlike the émigrés, have never been able to count on much appreciation. Because as an artist with a little moral sense, how could you sell it to yourself and others that you continued to work under the strict conditions of the Nazis? In a country that had become visibly Aryan and patriotic, all to glorify one Adolf Hitler.

Apparently nothing human is alien to an artist. The (mandatory) registration with the Reichskulturkammer was for many a way of survival. A pragmatic solution to keep working until things get better. Although you may wonder what that ‘just keep working’ meant. Dix was fired as a professor at the academy in Dresden and his early scenes from the First World War were banned. He moved to the far south of the country, near the border with Switzerland – as far away as possible from those who could keep an eye on him, painting a body of work that conformed to some extent to the dictates of the Nazis.

Those regulations were strict and unambiguous for the Nazis: whoever was not for them was against them. To give the German people an example of this ‘against’, propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels organized the exhibition on the first floor of the Hofgarten-Arkaden in Munich in 1937. Entartete Art† According to Goebbels, the seven rooms, furnished with 650 works of art by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Franz Marc, Max Beckmann, George Grosz, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Oskar Kokoschka and Wilhelm Lehmbruck, perfectly illustrated what did not correspond to the ideology of a purebred Germany. .

Degeneration

The exhibition was an important marker in National Socialist cultural policy. In one fell swoop it became clear what was no longer acceptable, too experimental, too avant-garde, Jewish or communist; expressions of moral and artistic ‘degeneration’, as Goebbels put it. For four years the exhibition would travel through Germany and Austria teaching the people what from then on no longer belonged to the official canon. With more than two million viewers, Entartete Art become the most visited exhibition in German history. Many paintings and sculptures were put up for auction afterwards (and were partly recovered in 2012 in the apartment of the Munich art dealer Cornelius Gurlitt). What was not sold would have been destroyed.

Simultaneous to the Entartete Art-expo was on display in 1937 a few blocks away in Munich, in the Haus der Deutschen Kunst, the counterpart: the Great Deutsche Kunstausstellungwith painted and sculpted German lyricism and racial purity that failed artist Hitler and his propaganda minister did appreciate.

The combination of the two exhibitions fitted in with the widely spread cultural reassessment that took place in the 1930s. About what was right and wrong art, and about what should be praised and persecuted. It also fit with the idea that art was a perfect means of propaganda in the country where culture and picture were highly regarded. The German people had to be educated not only with the bad but also with the art approved by the regime. Like the museums before the Entartete Artexhibition removed 20 thousand works of art from the wall because they did not fit the prescribed Nazi taste.

It was almost impossible for artists who remained in Germany to avoid intimidation and culture purification. Barring exceptions, such as Hitler’s favorite sculptor Arno Breker. For him, the Nazi years were a high point in his oeuvre. Breker, still called the ‘Michelangelo of the 20th century’ by his French colleague Aristide Maillol, knew better than anyone what the Führer loved: meters high effigies in marble, plaster or bronze of naked men throwing spears and healthy, fresh, equally naked women. .

For others, less inclined to portray Aryan bravado, the Nazi precepts meant above all: staying under the radar, even if you were a member of the Reichskulturkammer. In psychological jargon: ‘inner emigration’. You withdraw into your own thoughts, avoid contact with the outside world and try to survive in the shadows.

In this sense, the title of the exhibition in Frankfurt, Art for Keinen, art for no one, well chosen. Much of what hangs on the wall here, made in the 1930s and 1940s, was indeed not seen by anyone at the time. The production was largely clandestine, carried out behind closed doors, in the privacy of a studio, far from the political ordinances of Berlin. For fear of being discovered, social sensitivities and themes such as warfare and the persecution of the Jews were avoided.

For example, Willi Baumeister exhausted himself in experiments on color and material as if he were still a student at the academy, similar to how Marta Hoepffner conducted her photographic experiments, with naked ladies as subjects. Jeanne Mammen, Ernst Wilhelm Nay and Fritz Winter continued their lavish 1920s painting style through the Nazi years, but without becoming too offensive to the Goebbels judges. Artists who, like Dix, had often withdrawn to the periphery of the German Empire, to the countryside, to mountain villages or to a fishing village on the coast – a combination of inner and physical emigration.

Yet not everyone shared the pragmatism with which Baumeister, Nay and Dix survived in the lee. There was also resistance. Take the couple Hans and Lea Grundig. Both from Dresden, both members of the communist party and of the Association of Revolutionary Artists. In addition, Leah came from a Jewish merchant family. All in all, not very favorable circumstances to remain in Germany under the Hitler regime.

swastika

It is therefore remarkable that they were so critical about life ‘under the swastika’, as is the title of a series of etchings that Lea Grundig made in the 1930s. The common thread in their work: the persecution of Jews, house searches, infant mortality, general war misery. It is not surprising that the two were arrested several times by the Gestapo and sentenced to months in prison. Hans joined the Red Army towards the end of the war; Leah managed to escape to Palestine at the outset.

An important attribute in their work was the printing press. This gave them the opportunity to produce and distribute work in small format and in large numbers without having to submit an application for an official exhibition to the Reichskulturkammer. It was a strategy that others used as well. Think of Hannah Höch’s modest gouaches, which depicted death and resistance to war. Or the small spicy and critical photo collages that Willi Baumeister sent to his friends. Nevertheless, Baumeister, Höch and the Grundigs were exceptions to the rule that most wanted to continue their work without worrying about the violence of war.

Whether the work of those others was automatically ‘wrong’? It is too easy to call any stay-at-home during the Nazi regime an accomplice or collaborator. The exhibition in Frankfurt has too great a variety of shades of gray for that, between pronounced and neat work, between activism and obliging, between right and wrong. And especially between artists who wanted to be independent and those who obeyed the laws of the Reichskulturkammer.

The impulse to keep making art was simply too strong for many, even though they were being watched, their work as ‘entartet’ was banned and exhibiting was hardly possible – while the world was on fire.