Transcript In Nazi Germany this term was used to describe - vcehistory

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
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
Triumph of the Will
Read pages 96 to 102 and respond to questions 1, 2 and 3.
The Mad Square Exhibition
http://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/exhibitions/mad-square/
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