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Monday, April 29, 2019

Entartete Kunst - Degenerate Art


“Entartete Kunst” or “degenerate art” was the name given by the Nazis in Germany to modern art that wasn’t according to their norms of what art should be. The term was especially in use during the years 1933-1945, when the Nazis were in power. Degenerate art was removed from state-owned museums. Generally it was banned in Germany, as it didn’t fit the Nazi idea of Germanhood, meaning that it allegedly was un-German, Jewish, Communist, and the like. “Degenerate” artists, so artists that made such art, were boycotted, forbidden to exhibit or sell such art, or sometimes even forbidden to produce it. Their art was often abstract. Also music could be degenerate, like “negro music”, as the Nazis called it, so jazz.
In 1937 some 5,000 works of degenerate art was confiscated from museums and art collections, including work by Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall and many German painters. A selection of 639 works was exhibited in a special exhibition called “Degenerate Art”. The exhibition was shown in many towns in Germany. It’s intention was to horrify the visitors. Now that from then on artists who made degenerate art were seen as official national enemies, many fled abroad or went into “internal exile” by stopping to make the kind of art that had been forbidden.
It’s striking that one of the artists who was branded as degenerate was Emil Nolde. Nolde was an expressionist artist but he was also a committed member of the Nazi party. However, after a bitter ideological dispute, also expressionist art was seen as un-German, and in 1936 Nolde was ordered to stop his artistic activities. Among the 5,000 works confiscated in 1937 about 1,000 had been made by Nolde. The artist was upset for he didn’t understand what the problem was, but of course it was no help. After the Second World War Nolde became world-famous. He was known as an artist who had been classified as degenerate by the Nazis and whose work had been boycotted by them. That Nolde was a fanatical Nazi and an ardent anti-Semite even till 1945 had been more or less forgotten. After the war he did as if he had been persecuted by the Nazis. And so it happened that two of his paintings were on the wall of the office of the German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
A few weeks ago an exhibition dedicated to Emil Nolde has been opened in Berlin, titled Emil Nolde. A German legend. The artist during the Nazi regime. The makers of the exhibition had made a thorough inquiry into the life and political views of the artist and had disclosed the truth: That Nolde was rather a dedicated contributor to Nazism than a victim. The intention of the exhibition is to show this. It was a shock to many.
And Merkel? She decided to remove the two paintings by Nolde from her office and to replace them by two “innocent” works. I fully understand, and I certainly would have done the same. Nevertheless there is something problematical about doing so. The removed paintings are beautiful, at least in the eyes of the highest political authority of Germany – I assume – and of others. From an “objective” point of view they are outstanding works of art. That’s the artistic side. But politically? From that point of view the paintings were not allowed to be beautiful and outstanding in a sense, not by the Nazis and not by many people today, including Angela Merkel. However, there is a difference: The Nazis banned Nolde’s paintings because of their content; now they are banned because the artist himself is considered “degenerate”, so to speak. But whatever the reason may be, apparently art is always political, anyhow. Even “innocent” art fundamentally is, for society changes and what is “innocent” today may be “unacceptable” tomorrow, both because of what or how a work of art represents and because of the ideas the artist stands for. Does innocent art really exist? I am afraid it doesn’t.
Actually, the matter is more complicated than only the political aspect just discussed. A work of art represents something, namely what you see in it (or what you think to see). By doing so, it excludes what the work of art doesn’t present, incidentally or on purpose. Take by way of example my photos. Most of them don’t have an explicit political content. However, the image in the photo takes the place of everything that is not in the image, not only because it has been incidentally left out – for I can’t capture the whole world in one shot – but also because I intentionally didn’t want to photograph it. This can happen – and usually happens – because what’s outside the image didn’t fit my feelings but also because I didn’t want to include in the picture what’s not in the image because I consider it ethically and/or politically not acceptable. Everything has a meaning, also when it hasn’t. Nobody is innocent and nothing is innocent. Which does not need to mean that everybody is also responsible, though.
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You can find my photos on https://www.flickr.com/photos/photographybytheway

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