Learning Intentions
• To understand how art was influenced by historical
events in post-war and Nazi Germany.
• To understand how Hitler used and abused art to fit the
needs of his Nazi propaganda.
• To analyse some nasty looking paintings… also chairs
• To say Entarte Kunst and Otto Dix without offending
anyone.
Degenerate Art (entartete Kunst)
Degenerate:
An immoral or corrupt person.
Art:
The expression or application of human
creative skill and imagination
In Nazi Germany this term was used to describe
artwork that was un-German or Jewish.
An orgy of hate
The world of the 1920s was like a boiling cauldron. We did not see those who
fed the flames. However, we did feel the growing heat and watched the
violent seething. There were speakers and preachers on every street corner.
Sounds of hate could be heard everywhere. There was universal hatred:
hatred of Jews, Junkers (Prussian landowners), capitalists, Communists,
militarists, homeowners, workers, the Reichswehr, the Allied Control
Commission, corporations and politicians. A real orgy of hate was brewing,
and behind it all the weak Republic was scarcely discernible. An explosion
was imminent.
The world in Germany was unstable, virtually cracking, although it appeared
to be happy and gay. People were deceived and believed that the joyousness
had depth. Unfortunately, this was not the case. I am writing this because I
was a minute part of this chaos; I was the splinter that was miraculously
saved when the wood went up in the flames of the new barbarism.
- Grosz, A Little Yes and a Big No
Edvard Munch: The Scream (1893)
Kathe Kollwitz
Kathe Kollwitz's imagery is marked by poverty stricken, sickly women who
are barely able to care for or nourish their children. Kollwitz's art resounds
with compassion as she makes appeals on behalf of the working poor, the
suffering and the sick. Her work serves as an indictment of the social
conditions in Germany during the late 19th and early 20th century.
Kathe Kollwitz became the first woman elected to the Prussian Academy but
because of her beliefs, and her art, she was expelled from the academy in
1933. Harassed by the Nazi regime, Kollwitz's home was bombed in 1943.
She was forbidden to exhibit, and her art was classified as "degenerate."
Despite these events, Kollwitz remained in Berlin unlike artists such as Max
Beckman and George Grosz who fled the country.
http://www.mystudios.com/women/klmno/kollwitz.html
‘Self Portrait, 1924’
Modernism: Images of Despair
http://www.mystudios.com/women/klmno/kollwitz.html
Modernism: Images of Despair
1) What descriptive words come to mind when you view these artworks?
2) What themes are explored in these artworks?
3) What events and conditions of the 1910s and 1920s might have inspired
this type of art?
4) Why do you think Hitler would have found this artwork ‘degenerate’?
How did it clash with the type of Germany that he was trying to
promote?
Hitler: The Artist
"Of course it is possible that Hitler's rejection from the Vienna Academy of Art was
something that helped shape his character and turn him into the monster he became .” –
Richard Westbrook-Brookes
Some have speculated that Hitler's rejection from art college helped shape his character
in later years. He believed that it was a Jewish professor who had rejected his application
to study at the academy.
"They look quite typical of an aspiring student hoping to get into art school - tentative
and not very certain about his perspective when he's using pencil and pen, making basic
errors by getting the top and the bottom of a candlestick wrong in relation to each other
and so on … and he doesn't yet have much in the way of technical skill, but it's not so bad
that one can't imagine him learning - especially when he's bolder with the charcoal or
black chalk.” – Michael Liversidge
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/art-news/7511134/Hitler-sketches-that-failed-to-secure-his-place-at-artacademy-to-be-auctioned.html
Hitler: The Artist
Failure and resentment informed his aesthetic outlook and his loathing of
Modernism related also to his hatred of the Jews and of Communism, although
the pet phrase "culture-Bolshevism" to damn experimental art was ironical in
view of the startlingly brutal and retrogade cultural regime which Stalin was
imposing in Russia.
Not that there was anything new in an enthusiasm for "healthy" and "positive"
art, or the belief that "Art which merely portrays misery is a sin against the
German people" - Kaiser Wilhelm II's words, not Hitler's - but the Nazis took it
much further.
Much of the Reich's official art was mere kitsch, and its architecture was vulgarly
and oppressively grandiose, endless monuments to the fallen and, in Hitler's
morbid doodlings, still huger monuments to those who would one day die for the
fatherland.
Some artists went into exile, either involuntarily or because they would not serve
the regime, but far more did not. There were musicians who divorced Jewish
spouses to keep their jobs, while great names like Strauss, Pfitzner and
Furtwängler chose to endorse the regime.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2002/oct/19/politics.art
Pearl Jam: Do the Evolution
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDaOgu2CQtI&ob=av2e
Otto Dix hates life
http://www.mess.net/galleria/dix/
Otto Dix (1891-1969), the great German Expressionist, was famous for his
unique and grotesque style. Although Hitler's Nazi regime destroyed many
of Otto Dix's works, the majority of his paintings can still be seen in
museums throughout Germany.
The Triumph of Death
(1934)
http://www.ottodix.org/
Degenerate Art Exhibition, Munich 1937
Hitler and the Nazi’s
removed all of the
Degenerate Art’ from
the galleries and
museums and
created a ‘Degenerate
Art’ exhibition to
ridicule modernist
artworks.
http://fcit.usf.edu/holocaust/arts/artdegen.htm
Leni Riefenstahl
LENI RIEFENSTAHL was born in Berlin in 1902. She studied
painting and started her artistic career as a dancer.
An injury of the knee put an end to her sensational career. After
that, she became famous as an actress, a film director, a film
producer and a film reporter. She became world-renowned as
an actress in the films.
Her greatest success she made with the documentary film
‘Triumph des Willens’ named after the Reich Party Congress
1934 in Nuremberg. However, at the end of the war this film
destroyed Leni Riefenstahl's career, for now it had no longer
been recognized as a piece of art but been condemned as a
National Socialist propaganda film.
She would later claim that she had no experience of politics. The
film she said ‘showed what was happening in front of our eyes…
It is history. A purely historical film’.
http://www.leni-riefenstahl.de/eng/bio.html
Triumph of the Will
1) What do the images in this film/documentary show?
2) What impression do they give of Adolf Hitler, the Nazi Party and German
life?
3) How is music used and what impact does it have on the audience?
4) Do you consider this to be art, propaganda or history? Why?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBfYncHshJc&feature=watch-now-button&wide=1
Albert Speer
Albert Speer was born in Mannheim, Germany. He was
educated in architectural studies at the Institute of Technology
in Karlsruhe, and later at the Universities of Munich and Berlin.
Inspired by Hitler's oratory prowess, he joined the National
Socialist party in January 1931, where he developed a close
friendship with Hitler. He believed Hitler and the Nazis could
answer the communist threat and restore the glory of the
German empire that he considered lacking under the Weimar
Republic.
Speer quickly proved his worth by his efficient and creative
staging of Nazi events. He designed monuments and
decorations, as well as the parade grounds at Nuremberg
where a party congress was held in 1934 and captured on film
by Leni Riefenstahl in Triumph of the Will. That Nuremberg
rally was the archetype of what became identifiable as a Nazistyle of public rallies as spectacles, characterized by huge
crowds of uniformed marchers, striking lighting effects, and
impressive flag displays directed by Speer.
He was a serious man
Albert Speer
In 1937, Hitler gave Speer the opportunity to fulfill his youthful architectural
ambitions by appointing him Inspector General of the Reich. Hitler selected
Speer, his "architect of genius," to construct the Reich Chancellery in Berlin
and the Party palace in Nuremberg. Hitler also commissioned him to
refurbish Berlin, a project for which Speer prepared grandiose designs that
were never completed.
Speer was found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity at the
Nuremberg International Military Tribunal in 1946. He had been charged
with employing forced laborers and concentration camp prisoners in the
German armaments industry. He was sentenced to twenty years'
imprisonment in Spandau prison, after which he published his best-selling
memoir, Inside the Third Reich (1970). Speer died in London in 1981.
http://www.thirdreichruins.com/
Albert Speer was a bit OTT
Grosse Hall - model
The Master Model
The Cathedral of Light
http://forum.skyscraperpage.com/showthread.php?t=141374
What do you think?
1) What descriptive words come to
mind when looking at Albert
Speer’s architecture?
2)
What shapes are most prominent
in Speer’s work?
The Mad Square Exhibition
http://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/exhibitions/mad-square/
Who gives a crap? It’s a chair.
The Bauhaus (1919–33) is widely considered as the most
important school of art and design of the 20th century. Founded
by the German architect Walter Gropius in the provincial town of
Weimar the Bauhaus quickly established its reputation as the
leading and most progressive centre of the international avantgarde. Gropius sought to do away with traditional distinctions
between the fine arts and craft, and to forge an entirely new kind
of creative designer, skilled in both the conceptual aesthetics of
art and the technical skills of handcrafts. Students were assigned
to a workshop – in metals, ceramics, textiles, wood, printmaking
or wall painting – where they progressed from apprentice, to
journeyman, to master craftsman.
From the outset, the school was considered to be both politically
and artistically radical. In 1925, authorities forced the school to
close in Weimar because of its perceived cultural bolshevism. The
Bauhaus relocated to the industrial city of Dessau and in 1928 the
architect Hannes Meyer took over as director. Growing political
pressure forced the Bauhaus to move again, this time to Berlin in
1932. The Nazis closed the Bauhaus permanently in 1933 after
police raided what had essentially become a school of
architecture under the direction of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.
The Bauhaus Chair