The Rape of Europa(2)

In the midst of all these passions, the quiet Belgian group did the best of all, acquiring a top Ensor, Gauguin’s Tahiti, Picasso’s Acrobat and Young Harlequin from Wuppertal, Chagall’s Maison bleue from Mannheim, and works by Grosz, Hofer, Kokoschka, Laurencin, and Nolde. In his wildest dreams, the Brussels banker who bought the Picasso could not have imagined that it would sell for over $38 million forty-nine years later.

When the auction was over, twenty-eight lots remained unsold. The sale did not bring in nearly as much as had been hoped. The proceeds, about SFr 500,000, were converted to, of all things, pounds sterling, and deposited in German-controlled accounts in London. The museums, as all had suspected, did not receive a penny.

These pictures had been banished from Germany as “degenerate art,” but the Nazi authorities were well aware of their usefulness as a convenient means of raising urgently needed foreign currency for the Reich. To Alfred Hentzen, a curator at Berlin’s Nationalgalerie who had been furloughed from his job for nine months in 1935 for showing excessive interest in modern art, it seemed that, with this auction of its national patrimony, the German government had reached a degree of shamelessness and cultural decay unparalleled in the history of art.8

With hindsight, the gradual progress toward this “shameless” event is clear to see. In the world of art, as elsewhere, the Nazis simply took existing prejudices and attitudes to incredible extremes. Few could believe or wanted to acknowledge what was taking place before their very eyes.

In 1933 Alfred Barr, while on a sabbatical year in Europe, wrote three articles on the National Socialist art phenomenon, which were universally rejected by major American periodicals as being too controversial.9 Only his young associate Lincoln Kirstein was bold enough to print one in his new magazine, Hound and Horn. The others were belatedly published in October 1945 by the Magazine of Art. Jacques Barzun noted in that issue that “Mr. Barr’s three pieces are an embarrassing reminder of the public apathy that very nearly cost us our civilization.”

Barr, who attended the first public meeting of the Stuttgart chapter of the Nazi-affiliated Combat League for German Culture (Kampfbund für Deutsche Kultur) only nine weeks after Hitler had become Chancellor, was one of the first outsiders to hear the new regime’s cultural theories. To a theater crowded with the cultural elite of the city, the director of the Combat League set forth the new ideas:

It is a mistake to think that the national revolution is only political and economic. It is above all cultural. We stand in the first stormy phase of revolution. But already it has uncovered long hidden sources of German folkways, has opened paths to that new consciousness which up till now had been borne half unawares by the brown battalions: namely the awareness that all the expressions of life spring from a specific blood … a specific race! … Art is not international. … If anyone should ask: What is left of freedom? he will be answered: there is no freedom for those who would weaken and destroy German art… there must be no remorse and no sentimentality in uprooting and crushing what was destroying our vitals.

Applause, hesitant at first, by the end was stormy.10

Action had, in fact, gone before words in Stuttgart. A major retrospective of the painter Oskar Schlemmer which had opened on March I was closed twelve days later, following an exceedingly nasty review in the local Nazi press: “Who wants to take these pictures seriously? Who respects them? Who wants to defend them as works of art? They are unfinished in every respect… they might as well be left on the junk heap where they could rot away unhindered.”11 Intimidated, the museum locked up the whole show in a remote gallery. The Nazis had won their first parliamentary majority only six days before.

Alfred Barr, who was admitted to the show only because he was a foreigner, was so furious that he asked architect Philip Johnson to buy several of the best pictures “just to spite the sons-of-bitches.” Johnson complied and one, Bauhaus Steps, has been at the Museum of Modern Art in New York ever since.12

Acceptance of these warnings was not made easier by the very mixed reception all modern art had endured for many years. As late as 1939 a Boston art critic, reviewing a show of contemporary German works, many of which had come from the Lucerne auction, sadly declared: “There are probably many people—art lovers—in Boston, who will side with Hitler in this particular purge.”13 In Germany itself there was a long antimodern tradition, reaching back to Kaiser Wilhelm’s 1909 firing of Hugo von Tschudi, director of the Nationalgalerie, for buying Impressionist paintings. Max Nordau, a Jew who fortunately did not live to see the use made of his theories, had declared all modern art to be “pathological” in his 1893 book, Entartung (Degeneracy). He included Wagner, Mallarmé, Baudelaire, and the Impressionists.14 Newspapers covering New York’s famous Armory Show in 1913 picked up this catchy phrase, referring to the “degeneration of art” exhibited there. In the same year an exhibition of Kandinsky’s works was described in a Hamburg newspaper as a “shoddy tangle of lines” and the artist himself as “this insane painter, who can no longer be held responsible for his actions.”15 Before 1914 protests and counterprotests flew back and forth between conservative and modern painters. The fight became political enough to be discussed in the Reichstag, and the Prussian parliament even passed a resolution against the “degeneration” of art. But as was the case in other countries, the controversy remained in the realms of opinion and taste.