“Tell me what to do before I die of sorrow.” “Modern art on trial under the Nazis”
Degenerate Art Exhibition, Musée Picasso, Part III of III
While searching his apartment, a Gestapo officer saw a photograph of Guernica, Picasso's 1937 painting of the bombing of that city by German and Italian fascists at the direction of Franco. The Gestapo officer said to Picasso, “Did you do that?” The artist replied, “No, you did.”
Bienvenue and welcome back to Musée Musings, your idiosyncratic guide to Paris and art. We’re back at the Musée Picasso to see the Degenerate Art exhibition one last time. Next week, I’ll share what I’ve been reading, seeing, eating. To be followed alas by a review of the exhibition at MahJ, on the Dreyfus Affair. I don’t have the heart to see it yet.
I read lots of reviews for my first post on this subject. The only review I read about this exhibition was by Sebastian Smee in the Washington Post. My friend Bill sent me the link. I try my best to avoid Amazon and have no problem staying out of Whole Foods. Without subscribing, I can’t read articles in the Post. The paper that one of Trump’s favorite billionaires owns, the paper from which Ruth Marcus, after 40 years, resigned, explaining in the New Yorker, “I stayed until I no longer could - until the newspaper’s owner, Jeff Bezos issued an edict that the Post’s opinion offerings would henceforth concentrate on the twin pillars of “personal liberties and free markets,” and, even more worrisome, that “viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.”
Smee wants to keep his job. His review is one of those, “I’m writing about this but I’m writing about something else, too.” Many of the paintings and sculptures in this exhibition are first rate, but as Smee notes “the quality of the art is not the central subject. What the show is really about is culture wars, and where they can lead…Because while it’s true that the means by which wars are raged can fall along a spectrum from non-violence to violence, in dangerous times the gap between them dissolves.”
In 1928, the Nazis operated on the premise that German culture was under attack by Jews, Bolshevicks, foreigners, homosexuals, mentally ill and anyone who sympathizes with them. The justification for the 1937 Degenerate Art show was simply that: “Modern art was propaganda for Jewish and Bolshevik worldviews.”
We’re now in Room IV, Racial Purity. The text does not mince words on Nazi antisemitism and racism. Surely the curators want to establish that although the stain of France’s own antisemitism and Nazi complicity hasn’t been washed away, this exhibition is on the right side, the moral side, the decent side. The text under the paintings is not about art but about what happened to the art, to the artist. The approach taken by Team Trump is the Nazi approach. They want to control what students learn. By eliminating all mention of America’s history of racism from school books, the ‘thinking’ goes, white students won’t learn about it. As one commentator noted, if black students could live through it, white students could surely read about it. Not unrelated is the unbelievable sloppiness recently displayed by senior members of the Trump administration. As David Remnick the editor of the New Yorker noted, “Everyone from Cabinet members to the President’s press secretary, followed principles inherited by the President from the late Roy Cohn: Never apologize. And be certain to slander the messenger.”
The Nazis contended that foreigners were corrupting the purity of the Aryan race. They had to be eliminated so the country could once again be pure and produce art in its own image. Jewish artists, gallerists and collectors were denounced as agents of societal corruption. The Degenerate Art (DA) exhibitions coincided with the passing of laws persecuting Jews. There was a room set aside for works by Jewish artists at the DA exhibition in Munich. After the "DA" exhibition moved on, an exhibition of pure antisemitic propaganda Der Ewige Jude ("The Eternal Jew”) took its place. Heinrich Heine predicted that after books burned, humans would. It wasn’t only books. As the exhibition notes, “The symbolic elimination of "degenerate" artists (by destroying their art) paved the way for the physical extermination of all those people judged unfit, deviant or racially alien.”
Seventeen of Ludwig Meidner’s expressionist works were included in the DA exhibition of 1937. (Fig 1) Meidner considered leaving Germany in 1933. He put it off until 1939, when the antisemitic pogroms of Kristallnacht convinced him.
Figure 1. St. Paul, Ludwig Meidner (left Germany, 1939)
Polish born Jankel Adler was both Jewish and antifascist. He left Düsseldorf for Paris in 1933 and Paris for the UK in 1940. (Fig 2) At the end of the war he learned that his nine brothers and sisters had been murdered in the Holocaust. He never returned to Germany. He never permitted his work to be exhibited there.
Figure 2. Portrait d'Else Lasker-Schüler, Jankel Adler, 1924, (left Germany 1940)
Chagall’s painting, ‘A Pinch of Snuff,’ is based on a short story by the Yiddish writer Isaac Leib Peretz, (Fig 3) about a rabbi who sells his soul to Satan for a pinch of snuff. It was acquired in 1928 by a museum in Mannheim, five years later this painting, by a Jew, about a rabbi, was dragged through the city streets with this message attached, "Taxpayer, you should know how your money was spent". It survived and was exhibited at the "Images of Cultural Bolshevism" exhibition, 1933 and the DA exhibition, 1937. Chagall survived, too. Although as disorganized as he was, he got out of France at the very last minute with help from Varian Fry and the the International Rescue Committee.
Figure 3. The Rabbi’s Take (A Pinch of Snuff), Marc Chagall, 1926 (left 1940)
Otto Freundlich (Fig 4) was born in Germany to a Jewish family that had converted to Christianity. In 1908 he moved to Paris and rented a studio at the Bateau-Lavoir, where he met Picasso. For several years he shuttled between France and Germany. In the museum’s archive, there are 13 letters from Freundlich and 22 from his partner, the artist Jeanne Kosnick-Kloss, dating from 1925 to 1943. (Fig 5) The letters from the war years are heartbreaking. Freundlich was initially interned by the French authorities as a German national. He and Kosnick-Kloss fled to the eastern Pyrenees. Denounced by a neighbor, he was arrested again, in 1943. This time not for being a German but for being a Jew. He was sent to the Drancy internment camp outside of Paris. On March 2, 1943, Kosnick-Kloss, still in the Pyrenees, sent Picasso a letter which concludes, "It's all too late. I have just been told that Otto has been sent to the north. Please do something for him. I beg you. Tell me what to do before I die of sorrow.” Two days later Freundlich was sent from Drancy to the Sobibor death camp where he was murdered. (Fig 6) Just before the train left Drancy, he wrote this final missive to Jeanne: ’ Dearest heart, I can still send you a goodbye before the train leaves. I embrace you with all my love, may heaven protect you and give you strength. I love you and will always be with you, your Otto.”
Figure 4. Hommage to People of Color, Otto Freundlich, 1935 (murdered in death camp, 1943)
Figure 5. Letters between Freundlich & Jeanne Kosnick-Kloss & Picasso (1925-1943), Musée Picasso
Figure 6. Otto Freundlich, portrait (1878-1943)
Room V and Room VI discuss the purging of modern art from German museums and the sale of some of the art that was confiscated. It’s obscene, condemning then profiteering. But how far is it, really, from first harassing and then demanding payment from the Ukrainian president for U.S. money and military aid.
Room V explains why there were so many works of art in German museums that Nazis labeled degenerate, an estimated 20,000 works by 1,400 artists from around 100 museums. Because during the Weimar Republic, “German public collections had developed a strongly modernist-leaning acquisition policy, and were viewed as pioneers in this regard on the international scene.” So, like Trump and his minions who are undoing everything any Democrat and certainly anything that Joe Biden did, Hitler and his Nazi thugs tried to undo everything that the Weimar Republic stood for. Art wasn’t the first thing on their agenda, democracy was. The Nazis opposed the idea of democracy, it was inefficient. Multiple political parties led to ineffective government.
We haven’t had a degenerate art exhibition yet, but how far off is it if Trump has just signed an order, according to the AP, putting Vance “in charge of overseeing efforts to ‘remove improper ideology’ from all areas of the institution, including its museums, education and research centers, and the National Zoo….It marks the Republican president’s latest salvo against cultural pillars of society, such as universities and art, that he considers out of step with conservative sensibilities.” Denying freedom of expression to art museums, cultural institutions and universities is of a piece with deporting immigrants and dismantling USAid. They all have the same goal - to dismiss and discount what came before and return to the halcyon days of white male supremacy.
Eliminating the program to keep electric car charging stations in good repair reminded me of Ronald Reagan’s petty loathsomeness. He not only manipulated the timing of the release of the Iranian hostages so that it would coincide with the first few minutes of his presidency, he had the solar panels that Jimmy Carter installed in the White House removed as soon as he moved in.
The art displayed at the Degenerate Art exhibition that opened in August, 1937 wasn’t thoughtfully assembled. Actually it wasn’t even assembled until after the first wave of confiscation happened. And those didn’t happen until June 1937, led by Joseph Goebbels and the Nazi painter Adolphe Ziegler, whose Four Elements (Fig 7) was one of Hitler’s favorites. The second wave of confiscations in August 1937, was to find anything the first wave of confiscations missed.
Figure 7. The Four Elements, Adolf Ziegler, 1937
In this room, we see paintings by Kokoschka, El Lissitzky and Kandinsky. Alter Mann (Old Man) (Fig 8) is one of 16 works by Oskar Kokoschka in the DA exhibition in Munich. Kokoschka, a central figure in the Expressionist movement, was accused by reactionary critics, of being the archetypal "degenerate" artist and of being mentally ill. He lost his teaching position at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts in 1933 and fled to Prague and then to England in 1939 when the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia.
Figure 8. Alter Mann (Old Man) Oskar Kokoshka, 1906 (Germany to Prague to England, 1939)
Proun 2 by El Lissitzky (Fig 9) was part of a series he created from 1919 to 1923 to express the idea that society can be revolutionized by the transformation of perception. It was confiscated in 1937 and taken to the USA by an art dealer, where it was bought by a collector who donated it to the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1952.
Figure 9. Proun 2, El Lissitzky, 1920 (ptg confiscated 1937, bought by American, donated it to Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1952
This early landscape by Wassily Kandinsky (Fig 10) entered the collections of the Weimar Schlossmuseum in 1923. In 1937 it was confiscated by the Nazis, along with over 260 works by Kandinsky and given to the dealer Hildebrand Gurlitt, who we discussed two weeks ago, who was one of four dealers the Nazis had mandated to sell the "products of degenerate art" outside Germany. In 1939 Swiss art dealers bought it for 200 Swiss Francs. That same year it was bought at auction in Bern by American collector Solomon R. Guggenheim, for his newly opened modern art museum in New York.
Figure 10. Wassily Kandinsky (one of 260 paintings confiscated, from Swiss dealers to Guggenheim Museum)
Room VI, “Trade in Degenerate Art” is mostly a summary of what we have learned. This exhibition follows the format I followed when I taught at university. Which can be summarized this way: Tell Them, Tell Them what you told them, Tell Them again. There’s a lot of repetition, but we need to follow the sequence to understand how it all happened.
Joseph Goebbels used the confiscated works to generate funds. A commission was formed to select works that were "internationally usable". The Nazis held an auction in June 1939, "Paintings and sculptures by modern masters from German museums", was the largest initiative of this kind, with works by Vincent Van Gogh, Henri Matisse, Paul Gauguin, Max Beckmann, Wassily Kandinsky and Pablo Picasso. (Figs 11, 12)
Figure 11. The Departure, Max Beckman, 1935
Figure 12. The Bather, Pablo Picasso (dealer Paul Rosenberg’s collection, confiscated by Nazis, returned in 1945)
Mostly though, the sale of modern art was handled by four art dealers, among them Hildebrand Gurlitt (Figs 13, 14) who “assembled an extensive personal collection including many stolen and confiscated works, part of which was seized in 1945 and restored to their legitimate owners.” Gurlitt, as the world discovered in 2012, secretly held onto many works, falsely claiming that they had been destroyed by bombing, which as we saw in the first room of this exhibition, was sadly true in many instances.
Figure 13. Some of what Hildebrand Gurlitt kept
Figure 14. Two Nudes on a Bed, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, 1905 ‘acquired' by Hildebrand Gurlitt
Five works by Georg Schrimpf were confiscated in 1937, including this one. (Fig 15) Schrimpf’s paintings demonstrate that the art labeled “degenerate” was more fluid than one might expect. Rudolf Hess collected Schrimpf and asked to have him removed from the list of degenerate artists. We don’t know whether his request was approved or denied. This painting was taken by one of the art dealers in 1939. He exchanged it for another painting with Hildebrand Gurlitt in 1941. Gurlitt then sold the painting to a collector who donated his collection to the City of Cologne. Did Gurlitt keep the money?
Figure 15. Young Woman in front of a Mirror, George Schrimpf, 1926
Four works by Pablo Picasso were confiscated from German museums and appeared in the 1939 state auction of Degenerate Art. Among them was La Buveuse d'absinthe which was bought by the dealer Bernhard A. Böhmer, who exchanged it for a painting by Antoine Van Dyck. La Famille Soler was Picasso's riff on the theme of a déjeuner sur l’herbe. (Fig 16) It had been commissioned in 1903 by Barcelona tailor Benet Soler, who sold it in 1912 to gallery owner Daniel Kahnweiler. In 1913, it entered the collections of the Cologne museum, from which it was confiscated in 1937. Eventually it was bought by the City of Liege, where it still is.
Figure 16. Solar Family, Pablo Picasso, 1903
There is an addendum, here, World-Wide Reaction to Degenerate Art Exhibition. Here’s one example, in November 1938, an exhibition "L'Art allemand libre" [Free German Art) opened in Paris. A group of German and Austrian artists organized it. A letter from one of the exhibition's organizers, requesting Picasso’s support, is in the archives. Comparable events were held in Switzerland and the UK. The support for modern art/artists in France was short lived. Pétain couldn’t wait to get rid of as many Jews as he could so he personally expanded the Nazi criteria for who was Jewish and who he could deport to the death camps. Among his victims: Otto Freundlich, Max Jacob, Élisabeth de Rothschild and Béatrice de Camondo.
Sebastian Smee concludes his review like this and I will too: “So yes, call it a ‘culture war’ if you like. Only consider how the underlying mechanism dovetails with actual war, murder and annihilation and try, if you can, not to be haunted by Kosnick-Kloss’s plea to Picasso: “Tell me what to do before I die of sorrow.”
Thanks again for reading these posts and commenting upon them. Gros bisous, Dr. B.
Thanks again for the Comments, both private and public. They are much appreciated.
New comments on “Modern art on trial under the Nazis”:
I love your take on Musk--what disgusting excuse for a human being, so much like Trump. Keep up the good work, there is so much to be told, and your words should fall on many American ears. Vincent
B - couldn't put it down.
what a great review of an important exhibition. It couldn't be more timely, especially when you consider what's happening at the Smithsonian in D..C. Thank you for sending and for your good work, Susan
Incredible insights in this first article touring the rooms in the DA exhibit especially the sadness of the artists who fled Germany or killed under some pretext of the ‘1000 year Reich.’. And distressing of the many painting that disappeared after the exhibition, i.e. three of the five paintings by Van Geogh >>>I suspect they may be located in some private galleries in Switzerland. Again, your articles on the DA deserve wider circulation among the general public. Bill/Ohio
Bonjour Dr. B. Just a quick thank you for the wonderful though frightening and depressing comprehensive tour of the Degenerative Art exhibition. My brain is exploding. What is happening in this country is incomprehensible. The parallels are on my mind day and night. Now the monster has targeted the Smithsonian Institution, an icon of American culture. Next he will invade the National Gallery and start removing paintings. He is particularly concentrating at this time on the Women's Museum and The African Museum(surprise, surprise.) every day it is something new...some new revenge to assuage his fragile ego. He is even going after the National Zoo(part of the Smithsonian). The economy is a disaster and he has time to deal with this pettiness?! We can only hope the voters wake up and change things. I could rant on for pages but really .I only did want to thank you for your post and look forward to the next. You are lucky to be away from all this. All the best, Shirley
New comment on Pearls before Swine:
I loved Ginevra’s photo. I loved this installment too. Pearls are my favorite type of jewelry and I admit to having too many pieces of pearl jewelry. I appreciate your comments on the background of the pearl industry as well as the gold history. I also enjoy your “ jabs” on our political situation here in the states. Can’t wait to see what Trump does with the Kennedy Center. (Or maybe I can) Deedee