© Copyright 1996 VCCA Journal Electronic Edition
Table of Contents
Introduction
Expressionism gained significance between the years 1905 and 1918 during a turbulent, cultural climate, a "revelation of the profoundly problematic conditions of Europe at the turn-of-the century" (qtd. in Whitford 18). The Expressionists believed that art and society were interwoven. Through art, literature, cinema, and music they disclosed social injustices, rejected materialistic prosperity, and wanted to weaken the privileged leisure-class system. They felt this could only be achieved through "artistic awareness" and a proletarian revolution to dismantle laissez-faire capitalism. Many had visions of an apocalyptic catastrophe (neurosis of external surroundings) that would alter the face of traditional Europe as forewarned by Nietzsche. Sentimental humanism was quickly being absorbed by nationalistic ideology. The majority of the artists abhorred the enthusiasm of war and its aftermath. Through their media, realistic portraits of the horrors, spiritual annulment, and social upheaval they witnessed were communicated.
The need to express a modern voice against an outmoded way of life led the Expressionists to break with the Old Order. In 1892 Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (founder of the Brücke group) viewed the Munich Sezession Movement exhibition of Impressionist and Post Impressionist paintings. He felt that their content and execution were insignificant. It was then (1900) that he decided German art needed a different direction, modern visual communication. The artists in the Brücke group found their stimulus from life and experience. They strove for personal expression, an artistic oneness, and soul-searching that liberated content from its constrictive mode. They enforced a revolutionary idealism and sought "a new culture of man as the basis of true art" (Roethel 77). Many in the Brücke group used a primitive style influenced by Gauguin's South Sea Island paintings. Most painted in an abstract manner in reaction to traditional Realism, voicing their discontentment with the spiritlessness found in contemporary society.
The Verein Berliner Künstler (Berlin Artists Association), because of public reaction, withdrew an exhibition by Edvard Munch whose influence over the Brücke group was tremendous. Artists responded by establishing a foundation known as the Freie Künstler Vereinigung (The Union of Free Artists) to promote and endorse artistic creativity. Censorship over the artistic imagination would not be tolerated.
Between the years 1913 and 1929, Germany and Austria experienced economic, political, and social upheaval [1]. Societal discontentment encouraged and subscribed to radical political organizations like Hitler's Nationalist Social Party. Many Expressionist artists had to flee persecution because they refused to become a restrained, silent minority. Instead, with coy discretion through their art works, they exposed the dissention, poverty, and intellectual-cultural decay that transpired in Austrian-German society after World War I. German Expressionism defied the silencing oppression of Nazism by surviving the Thousand Year Reich. William Barrett, in his book Irrational Man explains: "Art is the collective dream of a period, a dream in which, if we have eyes, we can trace the physiognomy of the time most clearly" (41). German artists like Kathe Kollwitz [2], Max Beckmann, Otto Dix (b. 1891), and George Grosz (b. 1893) imparted the Zeitgeist of their time through their graphics and paintings. Although their art works were censored or banned by Joseph Goebbels' Reichministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda [RMVAP, Reich Ministry for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda], those that survived expressed a need for change against the Nazis' apolitical and anti-art (especially German Expressionism) movements. Goebbels as Reich Minister defined and imposed cultural standards on the public in accordance with "acceptable" German (Nazi) ideals. Hitler felt that "modern art" was destruction of form and content, relating decadent insensibility, everything that opposed the Völkisch spirit [3]." He thought there was an underlying conspiracy by cultural Bolshevist and Jewish sympathizers to destroy German identity.
The Nazis permitted only paintings to be exhibited that expressed a classical approach or portrayed national-Nordic spirit like those of Franz von Defregger's (one of Hitler's favorite artists) sentimental scenes from Tirolese peasant life. All other "modern" art works were considered entartete Kunst (degenerate art). The Brücke and Blauer Reiter groups were labeled un-German in character, disordered, and depicted cultural (racial) suicide.
This paper will concentrate on many of the artists who refused to be suppressed. Though many of their paintings were destroyed under the dictatorship of Adolf Hitler, they left visual, historical, eye-witness accounts--a testament for the world. Finally, this paper will relate how the Expressionists sought to reinforce the spirituality and moral fiber--once prominent in humankind--against flourishing hedonism.
Chapter 1
Give Rise to the Visual Imagination
...the artist's work becomes the image of what endures eternally.--Friedrich Nietzsche, fr. Human, All Too Human
Every true intuition or representation is also expression.--Benedetto Croce, fr. Theory of Aesthetics
i
As the Hapsburg Empire started to vanish, a creeping fin de siecle emerged which placed culture and ideas lingering from the nineteenth century into transformation. Many of the major cities in the Prussian and Austro-Hungarian Empires were going through a metamorphosis. The Expressionists rejected Prussian Victorianism and its puritanical spirit. With the collapse of the bourgeoisie class, growing scientific ideology and philosophical concepts (man's place in the integral whole), many Expressionists applied Sigmund Freud's studies on the unconscious and his expression automatique to their works [4]. Artists like the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch, analyzed the inner turmoil, conflicts, and extreme states of awareness in his paintings. He wrote, "Disease and insanity were the black angels on guard at my cradle" (qtd. in Preble 109). Munch's Scandinavian melancholy was divulged through his work, as was Van Gogh's several decades earlier. By looking inward the Expressionists were able to scrutinize and express artistically their idiosyncrasies, cast- off antiquated perspectives, and obtain aesthetic fulfillment (life and beauty of spirit). They probed for the implications of "what is" or "might be."
By discarding nineteenth century German metaphysical complexity, the Expressionists tried to achieve spiritual cleansing. They sought liberation from conventional artistic trends through a psychological penetration into human consciousness. A majority used aesthetic expression as an outcry against the petrified formality of traditional styles. Others laid siege, confronted the inner unknown, and reacted against several deterrents; Ichschmerz (dissatisfaction with the self), Weltschmerz (dissatisfaction with the world), and Weltwehmut (world melancholy).
ii
The distinctive ethos of Northern characteristics-- moroseness, isolation, and restlessness--infused German Expressionism. Their Transalpine (German, Low Countries, and Scandinavian) dispositions reveled in fatalism, the dark side of the world-experience. The environment that existed was mordant, bedeviled, yet the Expressionists hoped to reevaluate the external in order to gain total spiritual fulfillment. Many of their art works were devoid of harmonious refinement. Through their work they exposed stark portraits of life--themes like death, madness, poverty, and oppression among the disadvantaged in society. Spectral figures of death dominated many of the lithographs of Kathe Kollwitz; they symbolized the fragmentation and lifelessness in the industrial working-class she encountered. These works divulged the cryptic expulsion of a dissolving age, distinctive of Northern artists. They enhanced the Grünewaldian torment and anxiety that existed in a cold, indifferent environment.
iii
Self-expression (Expressionistic ferment), pure abstraction, mystical-spiritual unity, man's autumnal awakening, and the struggle for social justice would be issues examined in their works. Kandinsky felt that absolute freedom for the artist produced spirituality and salvation.
The German (Austrian) Expressionists combined geometric shapes and colors anew to create a phenomenon of vitality and artistic force. The intensity of color was transferred to canvas by frayed nerves exhibiting an ugly reality. The symbolic value of colors (discussed in the next chapter) asserted independence, and explosion of sensation. As Kandinsky said: "A work of art consists of two elements, the inner and the outer. The inner is the emotion in the soul of the artist; this emotion has the capacity to evoke a similar emotion in the observer"(qtd. in Read 171).
Chapter 2
Influence, Symbolism, and Color Found in Expressionism
The painter of the future will be a colorist such as has never existed.--Vincent Van Gogh
. . . a beautiful work is a marriage of the inward and outer elements in terms of the law.--Wassily Kandinsky
i
By the beginning of the twentieth century, about 1906, Impressionist and Post-impressionist paintings started to appear in German cities like Berlin, Dresden, and Munich. Although Kirchner had reservations about the styles, two artists in the Brücke group were enthralled by Van Gogh's and Gauguin's work, Emil Nolde and Max Pechstein. Max Pechstein wrote, "Van Gogh is the father of us all." The German artist Paula Modersohn-Becker (considered a forerunner to Expressionism) after viewing some of Van Gogh's paintings remarked, "I should like to endow color with fullness, excitement" (qtd. in Dube 17). It would be the exaggerated use of color, animation, and spiritual form that would inspire the Expressionists. Van Gogh and Gauguin's use of subjective colors was physiological, irresistibly fleeting, and swiftly vanishing. As Van Gogh had stated about his work, "to exaggerate the essential and purposely leave the obvious things vague," and Gauguin expressed, "paint dreams and always remain on the search for the absolute." The influence of Van Gogh's emphatic, impasto brush strokes would be found in the later works of Kokoschka, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, and the early work of Franz Marc as seen in his painting Deer In the Twilight (1909). Van Gogh had taken his work beyond globs of paint applied to a canvas; he needed to reconcile his inner- self with deep devotion. Also his preoccupation with death drove him to put life and essence into his paintings through the use of color. Van Gogh wrote his brother Theo: "Instead of trying to render exactly what I have before my eyes, I use color more arbitrarily in order to express myself more powerfully" (qtd. in Whitford 28). Gauguin's work showed mankind existing undisturbed in his natural, primitive state.
Van Gogh used yellow (his favorite hue) and blue as his primary colors; these colors would advance and vibrate from his canvas. Kandinsky and Marc used these primary colors to transcend everyday visual communication. Brightened by the influence of light, yellow became relaxed, hopeful, a guiding light while violet or gray dissipated into darkness (see chart below).
| Value Contrast | |
|---|---|
| Pure Yellow | Gray |
| LIGHT< turbid, trübe (sadness), opaque world >DARKNESS | |
Both Van Gogh and Gauguin felt that human emotions could be expressed through color; it gave their work symbolic meaning, the ideal state where man and nature were one. The Expressionists were motivated by the idea of colors and emotions being interrelated and the use of color to relate spiritual or mystical concepts.
The Brücke group felt that art sometimes relied on ideas and pictorial organization rather than sense impressions. Most felt that all of nature had an interrelation and interaction with irksome, often destructive elements, of which life, chaos, and death were born. These unavoidable elements implied an unseen grace.
Modern psychological studies have shown that colors do influence and affect our emotional states in response to size, distance, space, and temperature. The Expressionists would take color and light values beyond the established order, which showed mystical- modernity as a new era had begun.
ii
There was a growing despondency in artistic temperament under the Wihelmine regime; artists, poets, and musicians wanted to regain a rejuvenation of spirit and creativity. In the Blaue Reiter group, the power of color and other visual techniques were stressed to facilitate inner visions, whereas the Bruck school, under Kirchner, exuded colors glowing with "acid stridency," to express their art works.
Wassily Kandinsky, a Russian (b. 1866) from Moscow, discontinued his studies in law and economics at Moscow University to study at the Royal Academy in Munich; he received his diploma there in 1900. In 1909, along with several other artists, he founded a school known as the Neue Künstlervereinigung München (New Artists Alliance, Munich). Like their contemporaries, the Brücke group in Dresden, they wanted to attract new and revolutionary artists to further their cause for a "superabundance of the beautiful, the strange, the mysterious, the terrible, and the divine " (qtd. in Dube 21).
Kandinsky used primary colors (under the influence of Van Gogh) like blue and yellow, and secondary colors like orange and green, a "choir of colors," to project the tangible unity found in man. Certain colors held vivid meanings which strengthened a painting's individuality, a unique "language of color and content." His emotional sequence ran as follows.
emotion [in the artist] > the sensed > the art work > the sensed > emotion [in the observer](Whitford 183)
One sees a connection between the immaterial and material. Kandinsky felt that "a perfect drawing is the one where nothing can be changed without destroying the essential inner life quite irrespective of whether this drawing contradicts our conception of anatomy, botany, or other sciences" (Kandinsky 92). His art allowed the public to develop an instinctive response, a perceptual experience, and the ability to separate the aesthetic (moods, values, and beliefs) from established, ordinary form and content. Kandinsky felt that the inner elements of art were content which allowed vibrations from deep within to be symbolized. The Munich Expressionists were able to infuse a manipulation of the senses through their abstract works. Kandinsky stated: "The artist must train not only his eye but also his soul, so that it can weigh colors on its own scale and thus become a determinant in artistic creation" (qtd. in Birren 286). Kandinsky was an innovator who recognized and expressed the importance of color and abstraction's ability to evoke a multitude of reactions. Later in his career, color momentum and spiritual insight would become non-representational (in 1910, at forty-four years of age).
iii
Oswald Spengler in his magnum opus The Decline of the West, Volume One, Chapter Seven, "Music and Plastic the Arts of Form," explored the spiritual ambiance of colors on the "Faustian soul" (Catholic-Galilean dynamics). He considered yellow as light, red as sexual, and blue a perspective color related with darkness, coolness, and nothingness. This theory supported the symbolism found in Expressionist paintings. It was the colors blue-green that held the greatest mystical and spiritual omnipotence for Spengler, "Blue-green colors were monotheistic colors--those of loneliness, of care, of a present that is related to the past, and a future of destiny as the dispensation governing the universe from within" (246). Spengler also stated that the colors blue-green were the colors of the heavens, and that many interiors of cathedrals were painted with these "Catholic colors." He thus reinforced the intent of the Expressionists to bridge spiritual liberation with the necessity of art, a substance of life. Spengler associated the color brown with a historically-disposed soul, destitute of ideas, a shadow- color. The use of brown tones were minimized in the early paintings of Kandinsky, Karl Schmidt-Rottluf, and Franz Marc, who concentrated mostly on yellows, reds and blues--pure strident hues that related their ever growing spirituality. Their graphic works became expressive mindscapes, "a visual equivalent for the emotional experience itself" (Knobler 244). Marc used red and blue to create organic kaleidoscopes of color shapes, warm to cool. A lover of animals, his paintings showed repeating curves that implied motion, impulse, and energy. Marc's paintings showed diagonal and horizontal lines, representing movement and serenity. These paintings reflected a oneness with the universe as seen in his painting Landscape With Horses (1913).
For Spengler, art and culture were correlated, a cyclic process which had characteristics unique to it alone. He compared cultural civilizations to biological forms that passed through many distinct phases. Culture was a process similar to childhood, youth, maturity, and old age. The Expressionists acknowledged that the world-experience had become self-centered, unable to expand beyond its familiar conservative boundaries. Spengler wrote in 1918, when the first volume of Decline of the West appeared, that the West had surpassed its productive period and was now in decline. Spenglerian pessimism engulfed Germany after the war, setting a precedence for impending doom.
iv
Undeterred by public indifference and harsh criticism, the Expressionists continued their need to communicate, through a variety of media, the disenchantment and skepticism in European society. Pseudo-scientific concepts entwined with social turmoil echoed discontentment among the German people. Social Darwinism and nationalism had gained precedence among the middle classes. In 1914 Europe erupted into Armageddon leaving the social conscience of humanity permanently disarranged.
Chapter 3
The Creators: The Brücke and Blaue Reiter Schools
i
The Brücke (Bridge) group was founded in 1905 in the city of Dresden by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, a former architectural student turned painter. Other members included Fritz Bleyl, Erich Heckel, Max Pechstein, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, and later Emil Nolde, a self-proclaimed nationalist. From the beginning they rejected traditional academic sterility and social injustice. Their art form was aggressive, spontaneous, often violent--which coincided with the times. They wanted their art to reflect an avant-garde interpretation, and to create a radically modern art form that disclosed the decline of an age. As Hegel expressed in his Philosophy of Right, "The pure inwardness of the German nation was the proper soil for the emancipation of spirit." The artists in the Brücke group felt that man must strive for a higher existence beyond convention, and secularism.
Kirchner's paintings were flat, two-dimensional color areas with vertical-diagonal lines (symbolizing the infinite), elongated figures that were round in the belly with narrow legs (Medieval influence), and furioso brush strokes that expelled "emotional impact" (Preble 415). Expressionist woodcuts carved in a primitive style reflected a South Sea (Gauguin) and African influence. Primitive Art and German Expressionism became major termini. Primitivism, with its uncorrupted simplification, held great appeal for the Expressionists. The relief (woodcut) became a favorite medium, plus it reached a mass market.
In his oil paintings, Kirchner blended red with purple, black with purple, and blues and greens with purple, associating purple with spirituality. In the Catholic Church violet or purple had always been identified with the Passion of Christ. Kirchner stated, "My goal was always to express emotion and experience with large and simple forms, and clear colors" (qtd. in Birren 274).
The Brücke group sustained their struggle within in order to inspire a pure identity and spontaneity of expression. Restless, uncompromising, Kirchner and Heckel were devoted to their art; they even refused instruction as did Van Gogh. Both were intent on preserving their improvisation and originality in form and color. Kirchner wrote in his diary in 1923: "Uncomprehended for the most part, and totally distorted; for with us [the will] shaped the form and gave it meaning" (qtd. in Dube 28).
The Brücke group were the first artists to probe the experience and decadence found in a metropolis, the evolution of suburbia; Berlin during post-World War I had become the center of turpitude in Germany. Artists like George Grosz and Otto Dix-- both fell under the Expressionists and DaDa schools--would follow suit combining the grotesque into satire, overall a more radical approach to Germany's increasing pathos, a Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity). In Vienna Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele were developing a similar "ugly body language" in their portraits (Comini 20).
Eventually the Brücke group grew apart; and after eight years of working together, in 1913 their dissolution was announced ending a remarkable legacy of artistic emotion.
ii
The Blaue Reiter (Blue Rider) School was formed in the city of Munich by Wassily Kandinsky, a Russian law student who had left Moscow to study art in Germany. Kandinsky and Franz Marc held the first Blaue Reiter Exhibition on December 18, 1911, at the Modern Thannhäuser Gallery. From the beginning, individualism, instead of co-working, was evident among the various artists. The name Blaue Reiter held a significant spiritual and romantic relationship. The color blue exuded a transcendent spirituality and was associated with the German Romantic poets who had influenced the Expressionists. Secondly, the iconography identified with The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse--famine, pestilence, war, and death--reflected the confusion of the times in their works. Kandinsky wanted to express something more sacred: he felt art was the life of the spirit and should communicate to the soul through subjective colors like blues and oranges.
Their works were void of objective reality and meant as a salvation for humanity, a response against industrial expansionism, nationalism, and disenchantment. They wanted the public to adopt an imaginative interpretation of their works. As artists, they felt civilization had become a technical, culture- devouring machine with its over sophistication a threat to modern life.
In May 1912 Kandinsky and Marc published the Almanach der Blaue Reiter which was devoted to artists, musicians, poets, and writers. Kandinsky wanted to bind various art forms that were similar; he wrote: "Two great movements in painting were born practically on the same day (1911-1912): Cubism and Abstract (=Absolute) Painting. Simultaneously Futurism, Dadaism, and Expressionism soon to prove the conqueror" (qtd. in Dube 104). Elsewhere the artistic imagination flourished with modernity. In Italy, Futurism promoted technology, speed, and machines. Dadaism (Slavic for "yes, yes") encouraged anti-art which ridiculed Western culture and was enacted in protest against the savagery of World War I. Marcel Duchamp, in his pre-Dadaist painting Nude Descending A Staircase (1912) found inspiration in geometrical chronophotography. His abstract painting created a feeling of motion through space. Arnold Schonberg (1874-1951), a Viennese composer, contributed articles on painting and modern music. Schonberg was the innovator of the atonal (1908) and twelve-tone (1923-1925) musical systems. Kandinsky and Marc contributed essays, drawings, and commentaries on current social issues and the arts. They felt artists, not critics, should write articles on art, music, and literature; this was revolutionary for its time. The subject matter was as diverse as the contributors. Commentaries were written on folk art, experimental music, medieval woodcuts, and Bavarian glass painting. The almanac even displayed children's drawings, which they felt represented unspoiled innocence. This publication closed the gap between the various "isms" that divided one art group from another. Its aim was "that the publication will unite in one place the efforts which are making themselves noticed so forcibly in every sphere of the arts, and whose fundamental purpose is to push back the existing limits of artistic expression" (qtd. in Dube 105). Although the publication sold nearly 1,500 copies, a second edition never appeared--one factor being that Franz Marc was killed at Verdun in 1916.
iii
Kathe Kollwitz (1867-1945), a leftist artist, wrote, "The joyous side simply did not appeal to me " (qtd. in Gill 36). Her lithographs and pen-ink drawings (strong light values) related "In the face of war, death and human cruelty; encouraged empathy, charity, and conscience" (Preble 120). The intensity of life gave her the inspiration to depict the suffering of mankind and its emotional misery. Her artistic penetration enabled her to expose the hopelessness among the downtrodden.
The Great War evoked confusion and sadness, "her whole being revolted at the thought of nations engaged in mutual slaughter" (Nagel 36-37). When her son Peter was killed at the front in World War I, she wrote in her diary, "Death is the great leveller, down with youth! It's enough to drive one to despair" (qtd. in Nagel 37). Thereafter her graphics were void of unnecessary detail, and the theme of death was prominent.
Egon Schiele (1890-1918), a Viennese painter, had studied at Vienna's prestigious Academy of Arts from 1906 to 1909 under the tutelage of Gustav Klimt, the reining innovator of Austria's Jugendstil. The dates are significant because the classification list issued by the Academy for the years 1907-1908 stated that Adolf Hitler's submitted drawings were insufficient to gain admission. Hitler's boyhood desire to gain recognition as an artist had been denied. Hitler would later vent his rage against the academics who accepted a pervert, pornographer, and criminal like Schiele, instead of him [5]. This incited Hitler's rage and contempt for those decadent, "swine-artists". Schiele sought a probing, inner investigation into his subconscious and dark side. He wrote, "art can not be modern: art is eternal" (qtd. in Venturini 18). His paintings displayed a fragile balance, the Sturm and Drang (storm and stress), and a whirlwind of frenzied energy. His self-portraits showed angular, jagged features that were contorted or exaggerated, a flat decorative style. Many felt Schiele exhibited a narcissism unequaled with so many self-portraits. One of Schiele's more controversial paintings, Self-portrait with Pants Down (ca. 1909) showed him guilt-ridden after indulging in the act of masturbation--the sin outweighing the pleasure, eros in conflict with shame. Eventually, he devised a protective shield as defense against a hostile and apathetic public. Schiele died in the influenza epidemic of 1918.
Oskar Kokoschka (1886-1980) was a self-taught Austrian painter. His influences were Austrian Baroque decorative painting and Gustav Klimt's Jugendstil. Many of Kokoschka's dramatic works were inspired by the psychoanalytical literature of the French Symbolists Arthur Rimbaud and Charles Baudelaire. But it seemed that his greatest literary influence came from the dream plays of Strindberg, once again reinforcing identification with "Northern characteristics."
His early paintings exposed the dejection found in Austrian society, self-hatred and escapism. From the outset his intention was to shock and outrage the public. His paintings were a reflection of the fin de siecle and modern de-cultured conscience. Kokoschka's abstract portraits and landscapes were distorted, organic shapes. He used "cool colors," often in monochromatic color contours. He would continuously scrape and add layers of dense paint to his canvas, relating an "interior biography of the twentieth century" (Faerna 6); this technique, called impasto, created actual texture. He co-mingled literary-visual fantasy, creating flat, two-dimensional space.
In the painting Count Verona (1910), Kokoschka used analogous colors to invoke human compassion. By painting the subject's tie in red against soft brown hues, the viewer was drawn to the suffering and hopelessness of his existence. As Spengler had noted in Decline of the West, the color brown was associated with a disposed soul. This painting showed a flat space with dark values that created a foreboding atmosphere. Count Verona was a tubercular patient slowly perishing from his debilitating illness; his bulging eyes and sunken cheeks related that his time of death was near.
Oskar Kokoschka was another victim of World War I. After volunteering for the Imperial and Royal 15th Dragoons, he was transferred to the front where he was seriously wounded and discharged in 1916. After speaking out against the Nazi regime in 1938, his work was automatically suppressed, confiscated, and labeled "degenerate" art. Although Kokoschka had to flee from Prague to England, he maintained a lucrative artistic career, living to the age of 94 years.
iv
The storm force and devastation from World War I had disastrous consequences on the modern art movement. Franz Marc, co-founder of he Blaue Reiter group, was killed at Verdun in 1916; August Macke was killed in France in 1914; and the Futurist artist Umberto Boccioni was killed in 1916. Ironically, Boccioni and the Futurists (Aeropittura) had promoted speed and the effectiveness of machinery which in the end betrayed them. Egon Schiele perished in the Spanish influenza epidemic of 1918. Finally as National Socialism rose and censorship laws were passed against Modernism, artists fled to safer countries. These included Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Max Beckmann, and Oskar Kokoschka. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner founder of the Brücke group was so despondent over Nazi aggression and political ostracism that he committed suicide in 1938.
Many artists were relieved of their academic positions, like Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and Paul Klee whom the Nazi's accused of continued mongrelization and infantilism in their art works, defying the idealism of German Classicism. Changing political ideology and indifference from a conservative public created an unsafe climate for those who were unwilling to conform. The danger signs were escalating, especially after the National Socialists came to power in Germany during the 1930's.
Chapter 4
The Aspiring Artist
As a young boy, Adolf Hitler wanted to be an artist. He had little concern for anything other than art, history, and his mother. He was influenced by nineteenth century landscapes, Neoclassicism (its rigid formality), pastoral scenes--and, privately, by pornography and the erotic nudes by the Bavarian artist Franz von Struck (1863-1928) [6]. Struck did a series of paintings entitled Das böse Gewissen (The Evil Conscience) which appealed to Hitler's erotic, masochistic nature. These demonic-sadistic paintings depicted women as the personification of evil and sin. The art works had titles like Das Laster (Depravity), Die Sünde (Sin), and Die Sirene (The Siren). The paintings showed snakes slithering, embracing women's thighs and breasts. Hitler found the erotic-sadistic themes stirred his masochistic yearnings. There was one Struck painting that held emotional attachment for Hitler, his painting of Medusa's head (Greek myth related that the eyes reduced men to stone). Hitler felt the eyes in this painting were the eyes of his beloved mother, Klara; their power had a mesomeric effect on him. Hitler acquired a vast collection of Franz von Struck's paintings for his Linz collection.
During adolescence, Hitler spent a great amount of time daydreaming and fantasizing. He held delusions of grandeur, envisioning himself as Germany's most renowned and celebrated artist. He visualized masses thronging to museums to admire and praise his artistic achievements. Unfortunately for humankind, two factors stifled his dream: a domineering, tyrannical father who wanted him to become a civil servant; and his rejection by Vienna's Academy of Fine Arts in October 1907.
Alois Hitler maintained a relationship built on fear and indifference with his son Adolf. He would come home drunk from the tavern, beat his wife, children, and the dog. Hitler would later confirm that his father's authoritarian demeanor and brutality resulted in irreparable damage. Alois repeatedly tried to suppress Adolf's aesthetic creativity by ridiculing his developing talent, claiming that as an artist he could never support a family. His father's over control and harsh criticism led to an inevitable clash of wills with Hitler threatening his father, proclaiming that he would stop studying in school completely. An unsteady compromise was reached, but Hitler's father still espoused "Artist, no, never as long as I live" (Hitler 9). The confusion between love and pain left a state of massive contradictions. Later this led Hitler to lay blame for the injustices impinged upon him on others. Alois Hitler died of a pleural hemorrhage when Hitler was in his mid teens. At last there were no more obstacles to hinder him, and he could pursue his dream of attending Vienna's Academy of Fine Arts.
The Academy of Fine Arts was the most prestigious art school in Austria. Among its academics were Otto Wagner, Professor of Architecture, and Franz von Struck. Many of the Expressionists studied there: Kokoschka, Klee, Marc, and Kandinsky. Adolf Hitler sat for his entrance examination in October 1907; he was eighteen years old. The exam was given only once a year in October. Hitler was confident that the instructors would recognize his genius and that acceptance was guarantied. When Hitler received his test results by mail, the Classification List read:
The following took the test with insufficient results, or were not admitted. . .Adolf Hitler Braunau a. Inn, April 20, 1889, German Catholic. Father Civil Servant upper rank 4 grades of Realschule. Few heads. Test drawing unsatisfactory (qtd. in Shirer 16).
His human figures were lifeless, devoid of emotion or anatomical knowledge. His cityscapes or architectural drawings showed a technical draftsmanship. Hitler recorded his reaction in Mein Kampf, "It was a bolt from the blue" (Hitler 20). He approached the Rector wanting to know why he was not accepted; he was advised to apply for entrance in the School of Architecture as an alternative because his anatomical drawings were so poor.
Hitler tried a second time in October 1908, but this time he was not allowed to sit the architectural exam because of his incomplete secondary education (he lacked the number of credits needed for qualification). Even the portfolio of drawings he submitted for approval was considered inferior.
On his third try for entrance into the Academy of Fine Arts (1910), Hitler was determined to excel as an architect. He states in Mein Kampf: "While the Goddess of Suffering took me her arms, often threatening to crush me, my will to resistance grew, and in the end this will was victorious" (Hitler 21). But once again Hitler was rejected--the final time. He was reduced to selling watercolor postcards on the street and living in flophouses [7].
Hitler was always awkward in his social interaction: being a loner, he developed a sense of normlessness; yet he could always manipulate others to administer to his needs through a false display of charm and manners. It was around this time that he started to read anti-Semitic literature and discovered the cause of his failures--the Jews who were destroying German Romanticism with materialistic self-gain. It was the Jewish academics who did not realize his talent, and the Jews were blamed for Germany's humiliating defeat by the terms enforced in the Treaty of Versailles.
Hitler would find an accepting audience with the oppressed, the middle class, and industrialists for his fanatical views on the Jews. Hitler's subverted ideology gained him the recognition and popular endorsement of the German people. In January 1933, Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany.
Chapter 5
The Artistic Imagination Suppressed
Dadaism, Futurism, Cubism, and other ISMS are the poisonous flower of a Jewish parasitical plant, grown on German soul--Dr. Reinhold Krause, Nazi educator, 1937
i
The Third Reich was a totalitarian government that imposed censorship on modern aesthetics for the purpose of exerting control and power. Art, music, literature, and films--"personal expressions," that did not conform to Nazi ideology--were contained. Modernization and urbanization were equated with one another, communicating moral corruption. Hitler felt that modern art was devoid of inventiveness and that it antagonized the sensibilities of the German Volk. Under Hitler's dictatorial power, Expressionism was targeted by a bureaucracy determined to harness and banish individual interpretation. Hitler harangued that "the government of the Third Reich will undertake a thorough moral purging. The entire educational system, the theater, the cinema, literature, press, and broadcasting will be used as a means to an end" (qtd. in Adams 10).
In March 1933, one of Hitler's first declarations was the Enabling Act which stated the following.
Art will always be the expression and reflection of the yearning and reality of an age, blood [Hitler felt "pure blood" to be the cement of a chosen civilization] and race will again become the source of artistic intuition. It is the government's task to ensure that especially in a period of limited political power, the nation's intrinsic worth and will to exist should find even mightier cultural expression. (qtd. in Bleuel 181)
The Jews were blamed as the "anathema of German idealism," their subhuman corruption "culturally. . .contaminates art. . overthrows all concepts of beauty and sublimity" (Hitler 326). The Enabling Act gave the Nazis total power and legislative authority.
Once in power, the National Socialists proceeded to purge universities and museums of "modern garbage" that encouraged foreign encroachment. Many museums thought they were immune from government interference. Tragically directors or curators that indorsed modern art were fired. Instructors that did not comply with Nazi ethics were dismissed from their academic positions. Expressionist artists like Otto Dix (Dresden Academy), Paul Klee, and Oscar Moll (Düsseldorf Academy) were dismissed from their professorships. Under the Nazi regime, culture and expression retrogressed leaving a sense of neurosis and hopelessness. Artists that did not flee into exile maintained a low profile--while still working in seclusion to sustain their artistic creativity.
ii
By 1937 the Nazis had initiated a multitude of restrictions on modern culture, Any form of expression that did not adhere to "pure nordic character" was banned. Acceptable styles included Neo-Baroque German Romanticism and Classical architecture (Hellenism) designed with vertical patterns and perfect proportions (Golden Section= 6:1.) reflecting German punctilious orderliness. To appease and compensate Hitler's megalomania, he had the House of German Art built by the architect Paul Ludwig Troost in Munich. The museum held three thousand works of art. As Hermann Goring stated: "May this house be devoted only to serious art, art that is our blood, art that people can comprehend. Only that is true art that the ordinary man can understand" (qtd. in Adam 96). The works displayed were selected by Hitler, and many of the submitted works that did not meet his approval were destroyed. The block letter words engraved on bronze over the entrance read: "Die Kunst ist eine erhabene und zum Fanatismus Verpflichtende Mission" (Art is an Ennobling Mission Demanding Fanaticism).
In 1937 Hitler and Goebbels collaborated an exhibition of entartete Kunst in Munich where 650 art works were viewed by an estimated two million Germans. The purpose of this show was to expose the frivolity of wasted public funds and exploit the Jewish influence over cultural institutions. Some of the artists shown included Kandinsky, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Franz Marc, Kirchner (639 pieces), and Emil Nolde (1,052 pieces) [8]. Goebbels stated that removing these works from public places had nothing to do with artistic restrictions on pure-German expression. The Führer wanted to protect Germans from corrupting influences. Young people were not allowed to view the exhibit which helped to escalate the public's hostility. One slogan printed on a placard expressed the opinion shared by the majority of Germans: "All the artistic and cultural blather of Cubists, Futurists, Dadaists, and the like is neither sound in racial terms nor tolerable in national terms" (qtd. in Baker 86). Others simply stated that the art was "nature as seen by sick minds" (Baker 86). The show was sabotaged by inferior lighting, some paintings were hung over doorways while others were hung side by side. The viewing space was small and cramped making it difficult to maneuver. Everything had been done to make this show unsuccessful. Still there was a small minority who were not influenced by Goebbels' persuasion tactics. Many appreciated the spirituality and modern expression the art works related.
Conclusion
Throughout their reign, the Nazi's would continue to destroy and eliminate all forms of personal and artistic expression that threatened their authority. Fortunately for humankind, the Thousand Year Reich could not withstand the onslaught of democracy and started to unravel. At 3:30 p.m., Monday, April 30, 1945, Adolf Hitler, in his underground bunker, put a revolver in his mouth and pulled the trigger; he died instantly. The Reich would endure only a week after his suicide until May 7, 1945, at 2:41 a.m., when General Alfred Jodl surrendered unconditionally to Allied forces. In the end, the artistic imagination survived the darkness and evil of Hitler's Third Reich. Presently Expressionism continues to provide spiritual fulfillment to thousands while Nazi Germany is studied in an historical context, a reminder of darker times.
Notes
1. Article 231, War Guilt clause in the Treaty of Versailles, stated that Germany and Austria had provoked the war; therefore, both countries had to pay reparations to the Allied Governments. This act destroyed the German economy and devastated the middle class. By 1921 the German mark had plummeted to 75 to the dollar. In 1922 it fell to 400, and by 1923 it was 7,000 to the dollar. When the Ruhr Valley was occupied by the French in 1923, the German mark was four billion to the dollar. The Ruhr Valley was Germany's nucleus for industry and precious metals. French occupation united the German people in a growing Francophobia.
2. Kathe Kollwitz's (1867-1945) husband was a physician in the Schonhaus and Prenzlau districts, an impoverished part of Berlin's North-end. She would assist her husband in his practice where she came into contact with the working-class poor of Berlin. Kollwitz's socialistic leanings for equality exposed her to the joys and sorrows among the poor whose plight can be seen in many of her lithographs.
3. In the beginning, after World War I, the Geusen Youth Group regarded Expressionism as an experience that "penetrated to the depths of the soul" (Mosse 187).
4. Sigmund Freud had a layman's appreciation for art. He states in his book The Moses Of Michelangelo, "May I say at once that I am no connoisseur in art, but simply a layman" (qtd. in Kofman 8). At times he tended to overanalyze, perhaps harboring feelings of resentment and envy for those with an artistic imagination: "there is a general enmity between artists and those engaged in the details of scientific work" (qtd. in Gay 317). Freud was aware of the large gap between the aesthetic and scientific mind. He had trouble relating to art where form and content were abstract or non-representational.
5. Schiele served a prison term for twenty-four days for drawing young female models, naked and under the age of consent.
6. Franz von Struck was an instructor at Vienna's Academy of Fine Arts. Among his pupils were Franz Marc and Wassily Kandinsky, who held him in high esteem.
7. Around 1910 when he failed entrance into Vienna's Academy of Fine Arts, Hitler was destitute because he refused to do any type of manual labor. He lived in men's homes and maintained a demeanor of superiority over his co-inhabitants. Hitler still continued to paint and would peddle his watercolors to art and secondhand dealers. Many of the shop owners were Jewish and generally paid Hitler fair prices for his work.
8. Joseph Goebbels had decorated the walls of his office and home with watercolors by Emil Nolde. Nolde considered himself a nationalist artist and was one of the earliest members of the Nazi Party in Schleswig-Holstein. Goebbels hoped that Nolde's "Nordic Expressionism" would pass as nationalist art (Adam 57). But when Hitler saw the paintings, he expressed his disapproval; Goebbels had them removed immediately.
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George Norris is an honors student at Blue Ridge Community College in Weyers Cave, Virginia.