Epilogue: Anselm Kiefer's Zersetzungen/ Disarticulations

The Art Bulletin 80, No. 3, 1998

On the surface, such an event, cosponsored by the French and German governments, appears astonishing. The Preussische Akademie der Kiinste, responding to Nazi directives, had recently expelled its "degenerate" members (including Ernst Barlach, Otto Dix, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, and Oskar Kokoschka). That same year the Nazis' notorious exhibition Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) opened in Munich. And the artists so courteously received by Nazi officials in Berlin in 1937 had had their works removed from the German museums that owned them, starting in 1934.2 On closer examination, the apparent contradictions of the exhibition disappear. Documentation shows that each government used the occasion of an outwardly cordial gesture to further its own propagandistic ends. The French ultimately

Art in the Third Reich - Seduction and Distraction, 2023

This book coincides with the exhibition "Art in the Third Reich - Seduction and Distraction" in Museum Arnhem, the Netherlands, from 12 November 2023 until 1 April 2024. Info: www.museumarnhem.nl Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler, also called the “Third Reich,” represents one of the darkest pages in modern European history. The period is dominated by dictatorial repression, World War II, and the Holocaust. It is not a time typically associated with visual art. Nevertheless, modern art played an important role in National Socialist propaganda and the reputation that the Nazi party wanted to create for Germany as one of European culture’s leading nations. On the one hand, the Nazis banned modern, experimental art movements and vilified them as “degenerate art.” On the other hand, the Nazis gave unprecedented government support to the majority of artists who did meet the regime’s criteria. Held annually in Munich from 1937 to 1944, the Great German Art Exhibition was a driving force for regime-approved art in the Third Reich. Nazi leaders, first and foremost Hitler himself, purchased thousands of works of art there as a token of their appreciation and support. The exhibitions were widely attended and were popularized by commercial printing and the uncritical press. This book is about the art that was created, exhibited, and traded on a large scale in the Third Reich. The editors combine their perspectives with those of experts to highlight how the Nazis set up their art system. This book also delves deeper into the work of dozens of artists who reached the height of their fame during this period. The contributors look at how artists and their art related to National Socialist propaganda and how they benefited from the regime. This volume explores who these artists were and how we should judge their very diverse and sometimes exceptionally artistic qualities. Edited by Jelle BOUWHUIS and Almar Seinen. Contributions by Sabine Brantl, Christian Fuhrmeister, Gregor Langfeld and Gregory Maertz. Includes 47 artist biographies and a chronology. Illustrated works from the German Historical Museum and other institutions, as well as private collectors and various archives. Available at the museum, WBOOKS and in your (online) bookstore!

Oxford Art Journal, 2016

Ploil notes that the Viennese were reluctant, in 1939, to claim artists of their own as degenerate for the major exhibit, and were far more focused on the 'Jewish' elements in art, than the criteria, for example, of 'mental illness'. 8. The most thorough exploration of Hitler's taste in artistic matters is Spotts. Hitler's preferences for art are most clearly seen in the works envisioned for the planned Führer Museum in Linz. On the Führer museum, see the writings of Birgit Schwarz.

Technologies of Memory in the Arts, 2009

In 1926 and 1927, Adolf Hitler and his personal photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann, took a series of photographs in which Hitler posed before a mirror while listening to recorded versions of his own speeches. The subject and his photographer were engaged in the search for an image of the master orator. Unlike the proliferation of images of Hitler that were propagated in the 1930s and 1940s, the Rednerposen, or orator poses, were not made with publication in mind. These are images of a Fuhrer in the making; they are engaged in a search for an image not yet found. Not only does the photographic aesthetic reveal a stylistic experimentation that at times exposes the image to be in process, but the subject — Adolf Hitler, the dictator of the German people — is also a work in progress.

Flucht in die Bilder? Die Brücke-Künstler im Nationalsozialismus. [Escape into Art? The Brücke Painters in the Nazi Period]. Edited by Meike Hoffmann, Lisa Marei Schmidt, Aya Soika, Hirmer: Munich, 2019

Study of the lives and work of Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Max Pechstein and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff during the period 1933 – ca. 1948. German and English editions. Co-author, together with Meike Hoffmann (9 chapters in total, single author of chapters 1-6). Co-editor, together with Meike Hoffmann and Lisa Marei Schmidt for Brücke Museum, Berlin. The book accompanies the exhibition at Brücke-Museum and Kunsthaus Dahlem, Berlin (24.04.-11./18.08.2019) [Co-Curator of the Exhibition of the same title, with Meike Hoffmann und Lisa Marei Schmidt]

Modernism/modernity, 2008

The existence of a collection of 9,250 Nazi-era works of art, which was formed by the U.S. Army in 1946-47, has long been suspected by journalists and scholars of fascism and the Third Reich, including Brandon Taylor (1990), Frederic Spotts (2000), and David D'Arcy (2007). 1 Mysterious as its origins are, elements of the "German War Art Collection" have been featured in museum exhibitions, discussed in the mass media, and reproduced in books. 2 But aside from a few familiar, frequently exhibited objects, such as Hubert Lanzinger's Der Bannenträger (1937) [The Standard Bearer] [Figure ], knowledge of the whereabouts, the full contents, and the provenance of this collection, the largest surviving remnant of Nazi culture, has eluded researchers for over sixty years. Legal, commercial, and scholarly interest in the restitution of Holocaust assets has mushroomed in the past decade. As a consequence, scholarship on U.S. handling of German cultural property has focused almost exclusively on restitution rather than on investigating the U.S. Army's official art looting campaign that targeted contemporary German art and functioned for two years in the American zone of occupation. 3 Perhaps it is because the idea of sanctioned art theft conflicts with the heroic story of the U.S. Army's rescue and restitution of art treasures looted by the Nazis in occupied Europe that scholars have not observed how the same Army personnel that led the restitution effort-Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives (MFAA) officers-were also responsible for the confiscation of German art. They did so both

A survey of the visial and art dimension of the Nazi regime and its racist ideology.

2014

How do you destroy an artwork? You can hide it, scratch it, tear it, put a slogan over it, burn it, or, as the Nazis did in 1937, simply show it to millions of people.

Vibrant Metropolis, Idyllic Nature: Kirchner—The Berlin Years, 2017

On the recto of the canvas, two fierce-tooking whores cruise a Berlin street. On the verso two nude young women splash in the surf (Two Women on the Street and lwo Bothers in Surf) pp.1e6-1e7 . The two sides of this singte canvas exemptify the two sides of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's art during these years: on the one, the edgy, intense maelstrom of the metropolis; on the other, a seemingly prelapsarian paradise on a remote, isolated corner of the Baltic Sea island of Fehmarn. There Kirchner, together with his companion Erna Schilting, spent part of each summer from 1912 to 1914. What to make of the acute contrast between these two image wortds? For some they have suggested an antagonistic relationship: modern urban anxiety and alienation contrasted with harmonious wholeness within a timeless nature; a critique of the one and a celebration of the other.l Donatd E. Gordon, author of the first scholarly monograph on Kirchner and the catalogue raisonn6 of his paintings, believed Kirchner's images of Berlin revealed "better than the vision of any other twentieth-century artist [...] insight into a desperately diseased European society whose few remaining days are numbered."2 For Wotf-Dieter Dube, co-editor of a catalogue raisonn6 of Kirchner's prints, the undertying theme of the artist's images of Bertin was "the hectic and unnatura[ condition of the modern metropotis'] revealing the "desolation of the atienated man, which he was himself",3 Although by no means universally shared, this dark, apocalyptic view of these pictures has persisted to this day.a Nearly thirty years ago I argued against this interpretative dichotomy.s I proposed that "on the whole Kirchner's images of Bertin were born of an essentially affirmative attitude toward the metropotis", that he "saw his art not as an expression of urban alienation and anxiety, but as a contribution to an aestheticization of urban [ife".6 ln making this case I considered several factors. First there were Kirchner's own remarks about these works. ln his Berlin street scenes, he wrote in retrospect, he had deployed "new means to give the relations among human beings a new poetic expression".t There are many such statements by him. With rare exceptions they were devoid of any suggestion of the negative world view art historians later read into his Bertin paintings.

The American Historical Review, 1997

Culture, Theory and Critique, 1999

2011

This paper explores strategies and positions in contemporary art that have been at the center of many debates surrounding the 2005 exhibition Regarding Terror: The RAF-Exhibition at KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin. It discusses artworks that aim to go beyond the criticism of sensationalism, or historicization and glorification of traumatic social events, such as the crimes of the Red Army Faction in Germany. By emphasizing the power of art to transform and change audience members are enabled to shape more individual and nuanced perspectives on some of the forms of terrorism today.

Unmastered Past? Modernism in Nazi Germany. Art, Art Trade, Curatorial Practice, ed. by Meike Hoffmann und Dieter Scholz, Berlin: Verbrecher Verlag , 2020

This essay explores the Geaarde Kunst exhibition in Arnhem, which was received as surprising by many: my contemporaries and I fail to recognize the artworks displayed as exemplary of Nazi art, even though they were, indeed, acquired by the DVK during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands between 1940 and 1945. An analysis of the paintings reveals to what extent the art works of the Geaarde Kunst exhibition relate to the National Socialist ideology. The methodology of this research includes the analysis of formal and thematic aspects of paintings among those on display, using scholarly contributions on Nazi aesthetics as a guideline. The investigation of the themes on display demonstrates that classical genre paintings were those favoured, as they were the predominant kind at the exhibition. More surprisingly, the formal examination indicates a variety of painting styles. Resemblance to some modernist art movements such as Impressionism, Expressionism and Magical Realism is discernible in the painting techniques of some of the artworks displayed. The findings of this research suggest that the presumption about the existence of a single type of Nazi art and its presupposed unity regarding ideology and style among art works is incorrect.