DEGENERATE ART
And yet when the Reich’s culture police come to Nolde’s studio during the play to take away still more of his work, and he cries out “Arresting art!” the equation’s simply there. We naturally flash on any number of more recent art arrests. On the Harold Washington portrait bust at the School of the Art Institute. The Robert Mapplethorpe photo bust in Cincinnati. The ongoing NEA artists bust in Washington, D.C. Comparisons don’t seem odious at all by that point. Only accurate.
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Donald D. Renaud is the perfect Emil for this approach. With his unremarkable looks and his slightly gawky manner, Renaud’s neither the picture of Aryan masculinity nor the ideal of the romantic sufferer. Just an excitable guy: alternately brilliant and stupid, loving and profoundly foolish. Paul Myers impresses in somewhat the same way, as a Nazi whose sweet manner and lively enthusiasm obscure his essential viciousness. By contrast, the women in the play tend heavily toward the archetypal: not so much characters as objectifications of Nolde’s conflicts. When the first words out of Nolde’s wife’s mouth are, “Emil, it was just a miscarriage; I’m fine,” we know we’re somewhere in the province of Mother Teresa and Donna Reed.
