“DEGENERATE ART”: THE FATE OF THE AVANT-GARDE IN NAZI GERMANY
It should come as no surprise then that a totalitarian regime would mount an attack on modern art. If the goal of such regimes is a populace that does not think for itself and is easy to control, any expression that reminds a person of his existence as a particular individual with particular traits, rather than as a member of the group, is a threat to the power and authority of the state.
One of my favorite painters in the show, Emil Nolde, was himself a Nazi–which proves that party membership didn’t protect one from persecution and that artistic talent doesn’t guarantee probity in other spheres. Yet Nolde’s art is as challenging and as individualistic as any in the exhibit. The artist cited his 1909 The Last Supper as a turning point in his career, a “milestone . . . in the change from optical, external stimuli to values of inner conviction,” and it is an amazing painting. Odd and striking yellows and greens are applied thickly and sensually, so that one’s eye is almost immersed in the paint. While the faces are distinguished from each other by differences of feature and expression, they are not nearly as individuated as characters would be in a Renaissance view of this scene. Instead each face harbors a swirl of color and line, an almost chaotic field of undifferentiated forms, which leads the viewer inward, toward some deep, ineffable experience of primal feeling and primal form. For Nolde, as for many 20th-century artists, the earlier ideal of art as an imitation of nature held little interest: “A wax figure confoundingly lifelike causes nothing but disgust. A work becomes a work of art when one reevaluates the values of nature and adds one’s spirituality.”
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In place of the three-dimensional perspectives, illusions of depth, and precise delineations of objects of earlier painting styles, Nolde gives us an aggressive, almost assaultive surface. His colors are both bright and deep; they simultaneously seem to shine out from the canvas and suggest unseen depths, a level of spirituality lying just behind the visible that cannot be rendered optically. In Flower Garden X, the deep purple at first seems luminous and radiant, but the more one stares at the picture, the more profoundly inward, mental, and not-of-this-world the colors become. In Hultoft Farmhouse the sky confronts the eye with a swirl of color that is a world in itself: deep, mysterious, almost infinite, and brimming with an ineffable spirituality–yet also sensuous, almost untouchable, a celebration of texture.
Confronted with such imagery, the careful viewer will find his own mind set in motion. Whether one identifies with the artist’s subjective vision, or is sent off on a flight of one’s own imagination, or begins to think about issues like the relationship of the inner mind to the natural world, one becomes more thoughtful, more inspired, and more individual by contemplating such works.
If unabashedly sensual art and music puts us in closer touch with our bodies and with our unconscious desires and drives, the official works may well have alienated viewers from their bodies and their souls by placing before them inhumanly perfect bodies, scenes, and sounds that bore no relation to the complexities and contradictions of a complete human being. But this is precisely the point: a populace subservient to an official vision that stresses one ideal for all is easy to control, ready to “follow orders.”
To give an image or a name to such forces is to bring them into the daylight; the Nazis wished to create a culture that was essentially antiintellectual, based on action rather than thought.
