Art History the Favorite Motifs of the German Artistic Group Die Brãƒâ¼cke Were the
Two art exhibitions currently on brandish in Berlin raise of import questions nigh the relationship of certain modern High german artists to the Nazi regime (1933-1945).
In Function 1, we discussed the Hamburger Bahnhof gimmicky art museum'due south exhibition of paintings by Emil Nolde (1876-1956), which treats the artist'south relationship to the Nazis and their ideology.
The Brücke Museum in Berlin has taken upwards the aforementioned theme in Escape into Fine art? Die Brücke Painters in the Nazi Period, concentrating on the artists Erich Heckel (1883-1970), Karl Schmidt-Rottluff (1884-1976), Max Pechstein (1881-1950) and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880-1938). In 1905, this group founded the creative collective known as Die Brücke (The Bridge).
Were "escape" and "internal migration" the artists' reactions to Nazism? After World State of war Ii, this was the broad interpretation of the behaviour of the group of painters associated with Die Brücke. It is time to take a closer look at this question, which is the theme of Escape into Art? Its curators are Aya Soika (Bard Higher Berlin), Meike Hoffmann (Free Academy Berlin's Degenerate Fine art Research Centre) and Lisa Marei Schmidt (Brücke Museum).
The next Kunsthaus Dahlem museum in Berlin complements the latter exhibition by examining the post state of war history of these Brücke artists. Similar Nolde, these representatives of Expressionism were associated in the minds of the wide public with what the Nazis termed "degenerate" fine art. The artists were invariably judged to exist victims of the Hitler regime.
The diverse means in which former Brücke members reacted to Nazism emerge in the current exhibition. All of them were able to continue working every bit artists until shortly before the end of the Second Earth State of war.
For the first time, the exhibition provides a comprehensive historical view of the activities of these artists under the Hitler regime, their artistic work and the extent to which they could effectively pursue their efforts. They wavered between hope, adaptation and resignation. In some cases, they sought to bring their fine art to the attention of the Nazi elite and when this failed they often simply withdrew into their private lives.
Like the Nolde exhibition, the Brücke exhibition provides visitors with a nuanced historical viewpoint, adopting neither a one-sided "victim" perspective nor a glorification of the role of the avant-garde during this period. Both exhibitions represent a welcome change in the current perception of art, eschewing a primarily sensualist, playful or quasi-religious approach in favour of art appreciation based on a critical examination of gimmicky history.
The exhibition explains that many German artists did non survive the Nazi era. One such was Charlotte Salomon, whose impressive piece of work was featured in the Kassel documenta 13 exhibition in 2018. The artists Otto Freundlich, Moissy Kogan and Felix Nussbaum were also murdered in concentration camps. Others, besides as many collectors and gallery owners, had to abscond Federal republic of germany and go into exile because equally Jews they were deprived of their livelihoods and, for the almost part, their property past the Nazis' notorious Nuremberg Race Laws.
The paintings of Brücke artists are shown along with detailed explanatory texts and numerous documents. The first part of the exhibition is devoted to the period 1933 to 1937. During this fourth dimension, museums and gallery owners sought to nowadays Expressionist artists as genuinely "German Modernists," producing artwork that corresponded to the nationalist outlook of the Nazis.
During the Weimar Republic period in Germany (1919-1933) advocates of a backward-looking, pseudo-realistic art had already denounced advanced art and particularly the Brücke artists as the abortive product of morbid brains. Every bit noted in the first part of this series, it was simply after the "Expressionism dispute" inside the Nazi party that the thing was settled in favour of the reactionary artistic nostrums of Adolf Hitler and his leading ideologue Alfred Rosenberg.
Die Brücke
The group of artists known as Die Brücke was founded by the Dresden compages students Fritz Bleyl, Heckel, Schmidt-Rottluff and Kirchner in 1905. Bleyl decided to pursue architecture while the others resolutely turned to painting. Some fourth dimension later, the group was joined past Pechstein, the merely member with academic preparation in art. Later the group moved to Berlin in 1908, Otto Mueller (1874-1930) became a member and, for a short time, the older Nolde. The immature artists also attempted, in vain, to win the venerated Norwegian painter Edvard Munch (1863-1944) to their ranks.
Following a major exhibition in Cologne in 1912, the Brücke painters were displayed together with Fauvists, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, August Macke, Nolde, Munch, Ferdinand Hodler, Egon Schiele and others. The exhibition was conceived as a provocative respond to the widely publicized protestation in 1911 by High german artists, i.e., bourgeois artistic circles, confronting "infiltration" from foreign, predominantly French art.
In 1907, the Hamburg fine art historian Dr. Rosa Schapire (1874-1954) was accepted as a supporter. She went on to devote much of her work to the Brücke artists. She gave lectures, created catalogues of piece of work and was in constant correspondence via messages and postcards with the painters who did her portrait on several occasions. She held Schmidt-Rottluff in item high regard and he responded by painting her several times. One 1911 portrait of Schapire is included in the current Berlin exhibition.
Schapire was close to the Social Democrats and regarded herself as a champion of women's rights. In an essay in the Sozialistische Monatshefte (Socialist Monthly Bulletins), she attacked the bourgeois women's motility in 1897 and declared that 18-carat emancipation for women was only possible in a socialist society.
The Brücke grouping had already gone out in the expanse surrounding Dresden to paint from nature, although without whatever intent of reproducing it. The group's motto was: "Painting in nature, but non naturally." Rather than depict nature direct, they sought to use it as inspiration for their spontaneous perceptions. They were especially influenced by the fine art of the Heart Ages and the Renaissance. Heckel particularly admired Matthias Grünewald, the High german Renaissance painter.
In their manifesto, the Brücke artists distanced themselves from the prevailing school of Impressionism. "Anybody belongs with us who reflects what compels him to create in a direct and unadulterated manner." They were not interested in influencing social reality through their art, every bit Käthe Kollwitz was, only sought instead to capture their subjective view of the world using artistic ways.
The painters and their models ofttimes spent time at the Moritzburg Castle ponds near Dresden. They were drawn by the low-cal, life in the open and the movement of people, especially artists and dancers. They were entranced by casual nudity, which in turn aroused the hostility of conservative circles. Later, they primarily visited places on the Due north Sea and Baltic Sea coasts.
Similar other Expressionist painters and writers and many other artists of the time, the Brücke painters were strongly influenced by the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. They understood their fine art to be a grade of "spiritual self-liberation." Heckel produced a woodcut featuring a portrait of Nietzsche. The proper name of the group stems from a quote from Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-1885): "What is great in human being is that he is a span and non a goal: what is lovable in man is that he is an OVER-GOING and a DOWN-GOING."
In 1913, Kirchner wrote a relate nigh Die Brücke, in which he overstated his own role and history in the group. A biting dispute and then erupted with the other members, and Kirchner resigned. This led to the final dissolution of the group. The outbreak of war in 1914 led to the farther dispersion of the various artists.
Weimar
The Brücke Museum exhibition refers only briefly to a fact of some political and historical significance. The November Revolution of 1918 and the uprising of the German working class evoked a response from the Expressionists.
In December 1918, Pechstein was the initiator of the 122-member Nov Group, which included George Grosz, Wassily Kandinsky, John Heartfield, Otto Dix, Hannah Höch, Lyonel Feininger, El Lissitzky and Rudolf Schlichter, as well as a number of musicians (George Antheil, Hanns Eisler, Kurt Weill) and architects (Ludwig Mies van der Rohe). The artists from very varied artistic backgrounds, including a number of leading Expressionists, regarded themselves as prepare to support social revolution in Germany. Their articulation activities were express after 1921, although members of the Nov Group continued to regard themselves as progressive, committed artists.
The Nazis in turn used that commitment to demonise these artists every bit the "Carmine November Group." The latter's embrace of abstraction and full creative freedom was denounced as "Bolshevik" and in 1933, the group could no longer continue their work. In 1935, its fate was sealed when it was deleted from the annals of associations in Berlin.
In 1918 also, a number of artists and architects formed the related Fine art Soviet, or Workers Quango for Art (Arbeitsrat für Kunst), in solidarity with the workers 'and soldiers' councils, which had been formed across Germany. Its members included the erstwhile Brücke artists Pechstein, Schmidt-Rottluff, Heckel, Mueller and also Nolde. A leaflet by the grouping dated March ane, 1919, stated: "At the top is the motto: Art and the people must form a unity. Art should no longer exist mere enjoyment, but rather the fortune and life of the masses. The aim is to combine the various arts nether the wings of a big-scale body of arts." The activities of the Workers Council for Art provided important impulses for painting, modern compages, "new forms of building" and likewise the Bauhaus.
The suppression of the 1918 revolution enabled reactionary tendencies, anchored in the state apparatus and judiciary, to influence cultural policy and prevail in many areas. This development in turn led many artists to withdraw into the private sphere.
Although Pechstein, Kirchner and Nolde were among the almost popular modern artists in the Weimar Republic and were highly acclaimed in creative circles, they came under violent attacks from national-bourgeois circles.
I of their near virulent opponents was the builder and art critic Paul Schultze-Naumburg, whom the Brücke exhibition quotes in particular. He propagated "Nordic aesthetics" and a form of culturally based racism. His closest friends from the early 1920s included leading Nazis. In his book, Art and Race (1928), he denounced all modernistic art as "cretinism" and "degenerate" and juxtaposed works of art, particularly those of the Expressionists, with photographs of the physically and mentally handicapped.
Schultze-Naumburg was an important pioneer of the Militant League for German Civilization founded and headed by Nazi zealot Alfred Rosenberg. Founding members also included Gregor Strasser and Heinrich Himmler. Schultze-Naumburg joined in 1929 and gave a number of lectures on behalf of the system. He was one of the first to need the purging of mod art from "shameful exhibitions." Ferocious ideological struggles over art were fought inside and outside the NSDAP throughout the Weimar menstruation.
Under the National Socialist regime
The Brücke artists responded to the takeover of ability by Hitler in 1933 and the hostility of the Nazis with a diversity of strategies. All of them—with the exception of Kirchner who had been living in Switzerland since 1917—remained in Federal republic of germany and connected to paint more than or less undisturbed until the mid-1930s. They hoped their artwork would ultimately be recognised by the authorities.
The paintings on display in Berlin, together with various letters and documents, suggest that defining the artists' stance as one of "internal emigration" is too one-sided. At the same time, in that location is barely whatever testify of resistance to the Nazis. What prevailed amid all former Brücke artists was a vacillation between resignation and accommodation. Unlike Nolde, none of them was either a member of the party or a convinced National Socialist. Their style of painting during this period became somewhat more than conventional. Their shock was all the greater when in 1937 thousands of their works were removed from public collections.
On June xxx, 1937, Goebbels commissioned the president of the Reich Chamber for the Visual Arts, Adolf Ziegler, to scour every museum for "corrupt German fine art," draw upwardly an inventory of works and prepare an exhibition. Most half of the more than 600 works shown at the subsequent Degenerate Art exhibition consisted of paintings by Brücke painters.
Given that the grouping'southward paintings were in demand, many were sold abroad for foreign exchange. In 1938, Hermann Göring asserted: "We want to attempt to make some coin out of the crap." On this basis, Hitler's fine art dealers (Bernhard A. Böhmer, Karl Buchholz, Hildebrand Gurlitt and Ferdinand Möller) were besides able to divert quite a few into their own collections.
The Brücke Museum also includes a picture show excerpt of the Degenerate Art exhibition shot by the U.s.a. documentary filmmaker Julien Bryan—the simply film tape of the Munich show.
The Brücke Museum exhibition deals with the biographies of Kirchner, Pechstein, Schmidt-Rottluff and Heckel, their corresponding reactions to Nazism and the private stages of their proscription. Otto Mueller died of tuberculosis in 1930, but his work was as well censored and denounced by the Nazis posthumously.
Erich Heckel
Heckel, who in 1933 had been praised by advocates of his work as a contemporary alternative to traditional academic art, signed the "Telephone call of Cultural Artists" of August nineteen, 1934. The certificate was a pledge of allegiance to the Führer, drafted by Josef Goebbels. The 37 signatories included Wilhelm Furtwängler, Werner Krauss, Agnes Miegel, Hans Pfitzner, Richard Strauss, Mies van der Rohe, Barlach and Schultze-Naumburg.
The pledge, however, did niggling to amend Heckel's fortunes. Although he was able to showroom from 1933 to 1935, his art was denied recognition by the Nazis and, in 1937, was placed on the list of "degenerate art." After the seizure and removal of his work from museums in 1937, Heckel retired from public life. Until the stop of World War Ii, he preferred to paint in his summer retreat in the tiny village of Osterholz on the Flensburg Fjord. When his Berlin apartment was bombed in January 1944, he found a new refuge in Hemmenhofen on Lake Constance, where he remained later the state of war.
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
Following a nervous breakdown during World State of war I, Kirchner became heavily dependent on drugs. His self-portraits of these years—The Drinker and Self-portrait as Soldier(both 1915)—reflect his state of despair. He moved to Davos in Switzerland in 1917 and managed to wean himself in that location from morphine, staying until 1925. That year he returned to Frg for three months. He tried, in vain, to obtain a professorship then went back to Switzerland. Although he enjoyed quite a high degree of recognition, he believed his art was inadequately appreciated. His painting style changed, becoming more abstract and with more than emphasis on broad surfaces instead of lines.
He stayed in Switzerland and never returned to Germany. In a letter of the alphabet he describes a visit of his wife in Germany in 1935, which listed a number of positive aspects of life, although about of their acquaintances had left Germany. He expressed the hope that the new regime would ultimately triumph. He wrote that his sick wellness prevented him from returning.
Kirchner remained a member of the Prussian Academy of Arts until his expulsion in 1937. On June fifteen, 1938, he committed suicide in Davos, shooting himself in the heart. The motive for his suicide was probably non just a relapse into morphine addiction, simply also, as his wife wrote subsequently his death, the fact that 639 of his pictures had been removed from German museums and confiscated by the Nazis. Thirty-two of his paintings were displayed in the Degenerate Art exhibition, including his self-portrait as a soldier from 1915.
Max Pechstein
Max Pechstein came from a Social Democratic milieu and in 1933 was sacked from his teaching post. He protested fiercely when the Prussian Academy of Arts expelled left-fly artists such as Kollwitz and Heinrich Isle of mann. Nevertheless, he remained a member of the University, which testifies to his wait-and-meet attitude toward the regime. The Nazi sympathiser Nolde denounced him as a Jew, equally mentioned in Part 1, just due to his name, but he must surely take been enlightened of Pechstein's political views under the Weimar republic.
The Brücke Museum exhibits a number of letters that bear witness to Pechstein'south principled opposition to the Nazis. From the start of its reign of terror, Pechstein expressed his regrets at the difference of Jewish acquaintances and collectors. He clearly sided with Jewish friends and gallery owners, whom he appreciated, in contrast to the "purely Aryan art dealer Wolfgang Gurlitt," who had cheated him "from the proceeds of his piece of work." (ane)
Some of Pechstein's relations and acquaintances, notwithstanding, were fervent Nazi supporters. He maintained these relationships and tried to adapt to their gustatory modality both in his painting style and content. Thus, the Berlin exhibition features a rather naturalistic portrait of his son (Male child with S north owballs and 3 C arnations, 1937) with a short haircut and brusk pants, painted in the mode of New Objectivity. Pechstein took part in a competition for the National Socialist system Kraft durch Freude [Strength Through Joy] with a mural adorned by a swastika and was disappointed when information technology was rejected.
Prior to and during the 1930s, he spent months most the Baltic, at Lebasee (Łebsko Lake, at present Poland) and went repeatedly to the Curonian Spit. There he founded the artists' colony in Nidden (Nida). He painted landscapes, sunsets or fishing boats. When his economic situation became increasingly precarious, he decided to join the National Socialist People's Welfare association and the National Socialist Air Corps. (2)
In 1937, Pechstein was expelled from the Academy, but could still occasionally showroom upwardly until 1939. The Degenerate Art exhibition featured 16 of his pictures while more 326 were confiscated from the collections in German museums. In the same twelvemonth, he wrote a letter to his sister Gertrud expressing his unfounded promise: "Fortunately, the military does non want a war."
During the Second Earth State of war, Pechstein stayed mostly on the Baltic Sea in Pomerania. In 1943, his Berlin studio was destroyed, along with a large part of his work, in a bombing raid. Two years afterwards he painted the ruins of a devastated Berlin.
Karl Schmidt-Rottluff
Even during the menstruation of the Weimar Commonwealth, Schmidt-Rottluff's portraits were vilified past folkish-nationalist circles, while others saw him every bit a welcome representative of Nazi cultural ideology because of his depictions of peasant life. As a result, he initially held out sure hopes for the new regime—hopes that were apace dashed. He withdrew to Pomerania and kept out of politics. Schmidt-Rottluff, however, continued to represent with the critic Rosa Schapire, who had emigrated to London.
In 1933, he was expelled from the Academy, having joined two years before. In 1936, two of his landscape paintings were exhibited in Hamburg. However, more than 600 of his works were confiscated from museums with many on show at the Degenerate Art exhibition the following year. In 1939, several of his artworks were burned in the courtyard of Berlin'southward primary burn down station.
Like many other artists, Schmidt-Rottluff received a "professional ban" in 1941 and could not sell his piece of work. He had no access to art supplies and only survived with the help of friends. To keep working somehow he used chalk and pastels to sketch uncomplicated motifs like vegetables or feathers. He also painted some watercolours.
In September 1942, he was given the opportunity to stay and paint with Helmut James Graf von Moltke and his wife Freya at Schloss Kreisau in Lower Silesia. He shared his hosts' rejection of the Nazis, but was unaware of the Christian-oriented resistance circumvolve led by Moltke and his friends. (iii) In 1943, Schmidt-Rottluff'due south apartment in Berlin was destroyed by a bombing raid and he fled to the countryside.
In 1934, he painted the image Uprooted Copse, which was interpreted by art historians as a metaphor for his ain "uprooting." Other landscape paintings, such as Span with Icebreakers (1934), were interpreted as symbols of his subliminal resistance.
Conclusion
The primary merit of the Brücke Museum exhibition lies in the fact that it refrains from categorical judgements and instead objectively charts the behaviour and role played past the individual artists. The art of the Brücke painters and their attitude adopted in the Nazi period should neither be glorified nor merely condemned.
The surviving Brücke artists were appointed to academic posts later 1945 and their postwar paintings could and were used to rehabilitate German civilisation because they represented a significant modern art movement. Post-obit the downfall of Nazis, broad layers of the population who had been culturally starved embraced modern fine art and were open up to rediscovering its claim.
This occurred despite the fact that these painters and their fine art failed to express any sort of political resistance to the Nazis. What Leon Trotsky wrote in 1938 is specially truthful of the Expressionists and their dilemma during Nazi rule:
"The decline of bourgeois guild means an intolerable exacerbation of social contradictions, which are transformed inevitably into personal contradictions, calling forth an e'er more called-for need for a liberating art. Furthermore, a declining commercialism already finds itself completely incapable of offering the minimum atmospheric condition for the evolution of tendencies in art which represent, nonetheless little, to our epoch. Information technology fears superstitiously every new word, for it is no longer a matter of corrections and reforms for commercialism but of life and decease. … Art, which is the virtually complex office of civilisation, the most sensitive and at the aforementioned fourth dimension the least protected, suffers most from the decline and decay of conservative club."(4)
Notes
Catalog: Escape into Art? Die Brücke Painters in the Nazi Period, Brücke Museum, Berlin, edited by Aya Soika, Meike Hoffmann and Lisa Marei Schmidt
(ane) Pechstein filed a lawsuit against Wolfgang Gurlitt, a cousin of Hitler'southward later art dealer Hildebrand Gurlitt, when in 1922 he refused to release work stored by the artist. Although Pechstein received almost of his paintings under a court agreement, Gurlitt was immune to continue eleven. For the x paintings Pechstein sold that year, he received 180,000 Reichsmark from Gurlitt—a nigh worthless sum in Germany's year of mass inflation.
(2) Bernhard Fulda, Aya Soika: Max Pechstein: The Ascension and Fall of Expressionism, De Gruyter, Berlin / Boston 2012, p. 313.
(iii) Kreisau Circle: a resistance grouping that rejected assassinations and designed plans for a order afterward the collapse of the Third Reich. Moltke was sentenced to expiry by the People'due south Court in 1945 and executed.
(4) Leon Trotsky, "Art and Politics in Our Epoch" (June 1938), https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1938/06/artpol.htm
Source: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/07/26/mode-j26.html
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