Art Criticism - The State University of New York

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Between World War I and World War II, Max Nordau's Degeneration of 1892 became popular reading in Gennany. The work denigrated Tolstoy, Nietzche, Zola, the Pre-Raphaelites, and artists of a romantic nature as examples of social deterioration. In Nordau's eyes, nineteenth century realism was the culmination of tradition in the arts. The avant-garde came to be seen as on the same level with the insane, being labeled antisocial for their hyperindividualism and their attempts to explore emotions. They were the unhealthy in art, as opposed to the tradition of empirical realism, and so the terms of "degenerate" and "healthy" came-to be used to describe art. A group of art philosophers built on Nordau's theme of the deterioration in modern art. Hans Guenther, in his Race and Style, declared that the Hellenistic image of beauty is purely Nordic. His book connected the style of an artist with that artist's race, art becoming a representation of man and his race. The consequence was that nineteenth century naturalism, which would become Hitler's favorite genre, became associated with the Nordic, while styles like Impressionism were de-Nordic because they accept~d ugliness as reality.3 Guenther defined the task of the Nordic race, the epitome of pure health in his eyes, as protecting itself from the degeneration of society indicated by the work of the avant-garde. The illness indexed by the avant-garde was also associated with Jewishness, as nineteenth century German psychiatry believed the Jew to be more susceptible to insanity and inherently degenerate. 4 Similar things were written by Ferdinand Clauss, and these ideas were later picked up by Hitler, who, in 1935, would state that the artist should never depict dirt for dirt's sake, or depict "cretins as representatives of manly strengths."5 Instead, Hitler believed German artists should glorify the racial structures of their people. 6 In 1928, Paul Schultze-Naumburg published his book Art and Race, in which figures painted by Impressionists and Expressionists were juxtaposed to photos of the diseased and deformed. Here, Guenther's connection between race and style became hereditary determinism; every being tried to continue the lineage of its kind and it used art to this end. What the artist portrayed was his conquering ethnic specimen. The art of "inferior" races deviated from the naturalism of Nordic art, just as that inferior race has itself deviated from the healthy Nordic race, similar to Nordau's idea of degeneration. These thoughts culminated in Alfred Rosenberg's Myth of the Twentieth Century in which he characterized German Expressionism as infantile and claimed that it was Nordics who built German cathedrals, Greek sculptures, and Italian Renaissance masterpieces. One third of Rosenberg's text was devoted to art's importance in society, and his synthesis of Guenther, Clauss, and Schultze-Naumburg was popular, though he would later find out at the Nuremberg trials that even the high officials in the Reich had not read his texts very closely.7 Nonetheless, in 1933, soon after Hitler had been made chancellor, Rosenberg was made "Cus- 74 Art Criticism
todian of the Entire Intellectual and Spiritual Training and Education of the Party and All Coordinate Associations."g Hitler's support of Rosenberg stemmed from the importance he placed on art to create a new mythology. This new mythology was partially a means by which a totalitarian government could control the spirit of a people. But it was also sincerely believed that the decaying elements in culture were causing a cultural decline, and these elements had to be exorcised. Soon after Hitler became chancellor in 1933, he passed a law that legalized the removal of all government employees who did not obey the National Socialist ideas. 9 This meant that many museum and gallery employees were fired and replaced by those aligned with the party. The new organization Reichskulturkammer would regulate all non-government culture, with all artists being required to join and no Jews or Communists being allowed to join. Already, the famous persona in the Bauhaus had left and Wilhelm Frick, as Minister of the Interior and Education, had turned the institution into a German craft organization under Schultze-Naumburg's control. In addition, films by Eisenstein, Brecht, and Pabst were banned.1O Frick had also begun to clear works by Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Emil Nolde, Franz Marc and others from the Schloss Museum in Berlin under the reasoning that they were Judeo Bolshevik. Due to the conflict between the avant-garde and German nationalistic realism, the work of the avant-garde, with its complexity and inability to be readily understood, came to be seen as intellectual, elitist, and foreign by a nation demoralized by the effects of World War I. This was compounded by many artists' involvement in socialism during the Weimar era being communicated in their art so that more abstract works came to be identified with socialism and internationalism as opposed to nationalism. In the 1920s, following the influence of Nordau and others, the German Art Association was founded to combat "corruption in art" and "promote pure German art," which did not include the progressive elements of the avantgarde. 1I Similarly, in 1927, the Combat League for German Culture was founded to fight for creativity that was thought to have been tainted by foreign influence and was no longer able to attend to the demands of daily life. The seeds for the Munich exhibits were being set. The ideology of what would be acceptable had been arrived at through the writings of Nordau, Guenther, Clauss, Schultze-Naumburg, and Rosenberg. As Hitler became dictator in late 1933, it would be his taste combined with the developed ideology that would decide what was to be permitted. The false art was said to have been shaken off; from now on, there was to be no unfinished works, no pacifist works, no works depicting inferior races. the non-heroic, the Communist, or the Jew. 12 Art was to be used to give German culture a sense of strength, and, in particular, to help rebuild the notion of the German warrior. But to be clear, the attack on modem" ism was not just a device to gain the support of the German people who had vol. 17, no. 1 75
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Volume 17; Number I ART C.RIT1C1SM
Page 4 and 5:
Art Department State University of
Page 6 and 7:
4 Art Criticism
Page 8 and 9:
Breaking the Picture Plane: Reflect
Page 10 and 11:
whale saga (more recently Hesse or
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and many of whom were born in Europ
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printed a bullet track fired into a
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music that (like the Mona Lisa) has
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causing by neglect a bitterness amo
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preserved some of the exuberance th
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which inspiration was stabilized. 5
Page 24 and 25:
pain in the eyes of the cripple giv
Page 26 and 27: Bruckner did in his music) was not
Page 28 and 29: mortify into hard edges and mushy c
Page 30 and 31: with the sleep of reason. In the Am
Page 32 and 33: cent. Its fluidity of happy acciden
Page 34 and 35: And yet I can imagine these atrocit
Page 36 and 37: erature the not very evocative work
Page 38 and 39: maiden" of Marxism (unless things g
Page 40 and 41: ic he realize that artists suddenly
Page 42 and 43: The little nonsense that wise men r
Page 44 and 45: desensitized by the imitated means
Page 46 and 47: symbolism? If the arts only exist t
Page 48 and 49: The Femme Fatale as seen in the wor
Page 50 and 51: Huysmans parallels the life of De R
Page 52 and 53: ask for the unreasonable and receiv
Page 54 and 55: ennui or physical distress leads th
Page 56 and 57: ences cited herein, the femme fatal
Page 58 and 59: period."2 He traced the tradition b
Page 60 and 61: suggestion to the artist and the po
Page 62 and 63: of Moreau's works is vague and myst
Page 64 and 65: ing her as the femme fatale, or sub
Page 66 and 67: The subtitle Satanic Decameron evok
Page 68 and 69: completely mythical. Coupled with a
Page 70 and 71: Moreau was very much a man of his t
Page 72 and 73: themes and images are often decaden
Page 74 and 75: p. 7-8; cited in Pierre Louis Mathi
Page 78 and 79: shown distrust in the new styles. T
Page 80 and 81: These passages were meant to help g
Page 82 and 83: man public was voicing disapproval
Page 84 and 85: y old masters that were more suitab
Page 86 and 87: Notes 1 Alfred Barr, "Art in the Th
Page 88 and 89: From Diagnoses to Decadence: A Brie
Page 90 and 91: ate effort to reproduce fully an im
Page 92 and 93: patients. Charcot was often to be f
Page 94 and 95: Breuer attributed the presence of A
Page 96 and 97: still is traditionally associated w
Page 98 and 99: is not always recognized as such. H
Page 100 and 101: generation on which the multitude o
Page 102 and 103: 2 Elaine Showalter, The Female Mala
Page 104 and 105: 36 Freud and Breuer, 37. 37 Su'ch a
Page 106 and 107: Recasting the Art History Survey: E
Page 108 and 109: mode of self-consciousness that bes
Page 110 and 111: student-as-Other "calls" us to teac
Page 112 and 113: thesis of such descriptions into an
Page 114 and 115: In this final section of the essay,
Page 116 and 117: image-world, the picture opens up a
Page 118 and 119: history must itself be rethought in
Page 120 and 121: 15 Two of the most prominent propon
Page 122 and 123: power: from the premodern exercise
Page 124: ~fJed in the Unikd Smtc, .• 9 ~]~
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Art Criticism - The State University of New York

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