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Elegy for the Oppressed
| Article
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20085 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
2 / 1992 |
1,664 Words |
| Author
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Eric Gibson
Eric Gibson, art critic for the Washington Times, last wrote
on Henry Ossewa Tanner in the September 1991 issue of The
World & I. |
It is no slight against the authors of the ten essays that form the bulk of the catalog to the exhibition "Degenerate Art": The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany to say that it is the "Chronology" at the end of the book that makes for the most compelling reading.
It does more than simply provide a historical context for the exhibition. It lays out, in an inexorable rhythm, the steady destruction of cultural life in Germany under the Nazis. And it is here that the contradictions, ironies, and sheer monumental tragedy of the first forty years of the century in Germany are made to stand out in starkest relief.
It was a period of the highest cultural achievement and at the same time the basest incidents of human degradation. Moreover, all too often those inhuman attacks were directed at the very examples of cultural achievement that formed the reputation of Germany as a bastion of Modernist exploration.
Thus we are reminded in the Chronology, for example, that only a year before Hitler's abortive Munich Putsch in 1923, two pillars of modern literature were published, T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land and James Joyce's Ulysses. Hitler dictates Mein Kampf the same year that Andre Breton issues the first Surrealist Manifesto, 1924. A year later the Neue Sachlichkeit exhibition, which marked a turning point in modern German art, opens.
With the accession of Hitler to the post of chancellor in 1933, the dark clouds begin to gather. Over the next decade the separate paths of culture and politics converge as the Nazis begin their campaign against both the Jews and modern culture.
Goebbels becomes minister for "National Enlightenment and Propagandas," and he begins to oversee the making of art. Museum directors are fired, to be replaced by Nazi apparatchiks. Modern art museums are closed and their contents systematically confiscated, to be sold or destroyed. Artists begin to flee.
It is the campaign that is so dramatically recreated in "Degenerate Art": The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany. This exhibition, organized by Stephanie Barron, curator of twentieth-century art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, premiered there last year, and went on to Chicago and then Washington, a city not on the original itinerary but that was added after officers of the Smithsonian Institution who had seen it felt strongly that it should be seen there.
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