German art exhibition at Albuquerque Museum explores life under fascism

Editor’s note: “Modern Art and Politics in Germany, 1910–1945” contains historical artworks that may include imagery that is disturbing to some readers.

How did German artists respond to the rise of fascism? That’s the question at the heart of “Modern Art and Politics in Germany, 1910–1945,” a traveling show that’s currently on view at the Albuquerque Museum.

Organized by the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, “Modern Art and Politics” is a magisterial presentation of rarely seen masterworks of the modern era. Of the 72 pieces in the show, only five have been seen in North America in the past 20 years. So, it’s unlikely they will all be brought together in Albuquerque again anytime soon. It’s a must-see show for that reason alone.

Not all of the works are “modern” in the stylistic sense. Rather, their stylistic diversity reflects the larger social, aesthetic and political divisions of that turbulent era.

As I walked through the show, I thought about my former literature professor, Justus Rosenberg, who died in 2021 at the age of 100. As a teenager, he had joined the French Resistance and personally rescued the writers Heinrich Mann (brother of Thomas Mann) and Franz Werfel from Nazi-occupied France. His comrades rescued the artists Marcel Duchamp, Marc Chagall and André Breton, among others. That generation of writers and artists is almost completely gone now. But as long as their books and artworks remain with us, they continue to teach from beyond the grave.

Fascism did not descend on Germany overnight like a scene change in a play. A timeline in the exhibition catalog details a series of gradual social and political changes as they affected the German art world, from a seemingly humorous polemic against modern art by a conservative art critic in 1921 to the firing of a slew of art professors and museum directors in 1933 to a series of decrees in 1935 which placed all museums under the supervision of government officials. And things just got worse from there.

Artists, meanwhile, kept making art.

George Grosz’s “Pillars of Society” (1926) is one of the most explicitly antifascist paintings in the show. Depicting a right-wing member of the German Parliament with a steaming pile of poop for brains, it still has the ability to shock and amuse a century later. Many of Grosz’s other works were destroyed by government agents who raided his studio the day after Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor. Grosz, meanwhile, had already fled to the United States.

Other artists, like Paul Klee, avoided political themes, focusing their attention instead on form and color. But the apolitical nature of Klee’s art didn’t stop the Nazis from ruthlessly mocking it as “insane childish scrawling” and confiscating over 130 of his works, some of which they destroyed. When you see Klee’s paintings in person, it’s clear that his technique is gentle. He slowly builds up color in layers. His edges are soft. His contrasts are muted. Nothing is “scrawled.”

Nazi anti-art propaganda only works if you don’t spend more than a few seconds looking at the art in question. And the critiques they leveled against artists like Klee were not logically consistent. One moment they’re attacking an artist for being childish and stupid, the next for being overly intellectual.

Some career-minded artists looked for ways to ingratiate themselves to the new regime, with mixed results. The left-wing artist Franz Radziwill tried to adapt his “new objectivity” style to Nazi-approved themes and even joined the Nazi party in 1933. His work was nevertheless denounced as “degenerate” in the infamous “Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art)” exhibition of 1937. But he remained in Germany and kept painting. A couple years later the Nazis bought some of his art. Then, they denounced him again.

Radziwill’s surrealistic war painting, “Flanders (Where to in this World?),” which he worked on for a full decade (1940–1950), is a wild mishmash of war planes, unicorns and christomorphic wraiths floating through a crack in the space-time continuum. Like “Slaughterhouse Five” — Kurt Vonnegut’s semi-autobiographical World War II novel involving time travel and space aliens — “Flanders” is the product of a war-haunted mind reaching beyond the terrestrial to explain the unfathomable. Would I have unfriended Radziwill for aligning himself with the Nazis if we had been contemporaries? Absolutely. But “Flanders” is a terrific painting, nonetheless.

One of the most groundbreaking artists in the show, I’m sorry to say, is Emil Nolde, a Nazi sympathizer and anti-Semite through and through. His highly physical brushwork and acid colors could easily be mistaken for the work of a young artist today. He’s proof that bad people sometimes make good art.

Should he be canceled for his despicable beliefs, his paintings confined to storage or deaccessioned from museums? I don’t think so. And while I can certainly understand why some viewers might feel uneasy about the inclusion of pro-fascist artists in “Modern Art and Politics,” I strongly endorse this risky curatorial move. First, it gives a much fuller picture of the art scene of the time, which was really several scenes in one. Only by experiencing the plethora of simultaneous, competing styles and ideologies can we begin to imagine the complexity and confusion of those fraught times over and against the fiction of a simple, linear art historical narrative.

Second, the inclusion of both fascist and anti-fascist art helps dispel the myth that politics and aesthetics go hand in hand. You really can’t tell who’s who, politically, just by looking at their art, unless you happen to already recognize every artist, and you know their biographies. Some left-wing artists, such as Franz Lenk, made sterile, academic-looking, frankly conservative still-life paintings, while right-wing artists such as Nolde were engaged in radical visual experimentation.

The fact is, the Nazis didn’t really know what to do with expressionism. Some pro-fascist curators and artists, including Nolde, tried to present the movement as uniquely and authentically “German,” a patriotic revival of folk art traditions and so on. But Hitler personally disliked their “unnatural” colors and distorted forms. Besides, it was hard for the regime to condemn left-leaning artists as “degenerate” on stylistic grounds without also condemning the work of right-wing artists who painted similarly.

And then there’s the strange case of Rudolf Belling. One of his sculptures was selected for the “Great German Art Exhibition” of 1937, a Nazi-organized museum exhibition meant to showcase what the regime considered the “healthiest” examples of patriotic German art. But the government’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, had chosen another of Belling’s sculptures for the “Degenerate Art” exhibition, whose purpose was to ridicule and denounce modernism. The two shows ended up happening at the same time in the same city — Munich — so audiences could walk from one to the other and literally see the same artist celebrated and condemned. Such was the fickleness of the Third Reich’s reactionary logic. Both sculptures are included in this show.

“Modern Art and Politics” shows how dozens of German artists responded to the impossible pressures of an increasingly restrictive and repressive government. Some spoke out, then fled the country. Some spoke out, stuck around and were sent to the camps. Some actively supported the regime but saw their work condemned anyway. Others tried to keep out of politics altogether or engaged in self-censorship so as to maintain their teaching posts and professional art careers — strategies that sometimes worked, but not always.

If the German art world had pulled together in solidarity to oppose fascism as a united front, would that have changed anything? Or would that simply have made it easier for government agents to round them up en masse? Impossible to know, I guess. And the point is moot anyway, because the German art world before and during the fascist era was deeply fractured, so any semblance of unity was unlikely.

What we are left with, then, is an archive of individual choices. Flawed, human choices by real people — cowardly or bold, impulsive or anxious, righteous or misguided — doing whatever they thought was right, or prudent, in the face of extreme circumstances.

Who made the best choices? And can I empathize with those who chose differently?

I know professor Rosenberg would have said it’s better to die while living an authentic, principled life than to live inauthentically, or in the service of a cruel regime. He often spoke about the importance of political commitment, a phrase that wasn’t particularly fashionable in the late 1990s, when I was in undergrad, but which I’ve been hearing artists and writers using more in recent times.

“Modern Art and Politics” doesn’t preach or take sides, but rather presents an archive of divergent perspectives, encouraging thoughtful self-reflection among viewers. What would I have done? What would you have done? What is the responsibility of the art and culture sector in times of extreme intolerance, anti-intellectualism and political repression?

German art exhibition at Albuquerque Museum explores life under fascism