Art and Nazis

With American democracy barely hanging on, I guess I expected artists to go on the attack. Here, there, everywhere. I’m disappointed they haven’t in big enough numbers but am not necessarily surprised. Art is and forever will be, and the opposite of political art, self-mythology or self-exploration, often comes across as us-mythology. An artist merely existing and practicing in this societal context says enough. No need to beat us over the head with sloganeering and caricature, I suppose.

In Nazi Germany, art’s permanence wasn’t guaranteed. I’m not quite sure it’s guaranteed here now, but I feel a tiny bit better speaking about it as if it were than I would have just a couple of weeks ago, before millions took to the streets in unified resistance. And I’m bringing up Nazi Germany because there’s an exhibit about visual art in Deutschland between the world wars right across the street from where our county judge recently tried to confiscate allegedly “obscene” paintings (“Nanny State on Patrol,” Jan 22) that a grand jury ultimately returned (“Grand Jury Returns Art to the Modern,” Mar 29).

Up now through June 22 at the Kimbell Art Museum, Modern Art and Politics in Germany 1910-1945 collects more than 70 paintings and sculptures from the Neue Nationalgalerie, the modern art museum of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. These four decades of way-back German art and politics relate to today in a lot of ways: high times followed by a fascist regime oppressing open-mindedness and free speech. At least those old Nazis lost. Can’t say the same about today’s.

The work at the Kimbell mostly encompasses Expressionism and New Objectivity with various other styles popping up throughout like Surrealism and the Nazis’ preferred neoclassicism. Expressionism took hold in the early 1900s, when German artists rejected the status quo by offering crudely rendered, vibrantly colorful canvases. The approach was often overtly political and ended up covering the coveted walls of assorted German museums after World War I. Two exemplary pieces include Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s “Self-Portrait with a Girl,” a closeup of two green-tinted, angular grotesques wrapped up together, and Emil Nolde’s “Pentecost,” in which several troll-like faces gather around a person with their hands folded in prayer. Years later, the Nazis banned a lot of Expressionist works, classifying them as “degenerate art.” One banned painting, “Sinner,” was not returned to the Nationalgalerie until 1999, 62 years after the Nazis showcased it in a campaign against modern art.

In the same way the Expressionists challenged the way things had seemingly always been, by the 1920s, the New Objectivists rejected Expressionism and other idealistic styles. Depicting reality objectively, and often cynically or satirically, had become the predominant tack of Otto Dix, Max Beckmann, and many other leading New Objectivists. Inspired by German Renaissance art and the new postwar social order in the liberal Weimer Republic, their work pivoted on precise draftsmanship. One of the most iconic pieces is “Sonja” (1928). Christian Schad’s portrait of a young woman seated in a swanky nightclub neatly encapsulates the modern, emancipated zeitgeist. She’s shown among a bottle of Champagne, a tube of lipstick, a compact, and an open packet of Camel cigarettes. Like modern art, women flourished in the Weimer Republic.

The Kimbell exhibit also closely charts the trajectory from Germany’s defeat in 1918 to the rise of Nazism in the 1930s and to a second military defeat, this time in World War II. Three prominent works tell the tale. The first is Wilhelm Lehmbruck’s massive “Fallen Man.” One of the most celebrated examples of early modern sculpture is an obsidian bronze of a thin, nude, featureless man on all fours with his head down. The message is clear: War is hell.

Twenty years later, Lehmbruck’s successor as Germany’s leading figurative sculptor, Georg Kolbe, offered “Descending Man.” A towering bronze nude of a young man taking one step down, it’s an idealized version of beauty in keeping with the Nazis’ emphasis on neoclassicism. The Reich Minister of Economics purchased the piece at the 1941 Great German Art Exhibition, an annual propagandistic celebration. Only five years after “Descending Man” came “Night over Germany.” Horst Strempel’s denunciation of the Nazi atrocities told in a Renaissance polyptych brings the viewer directly into a concentration camp. The elongated, shadowy figures reaching out for help or simply huddling together conjure the hopelessness of the fetid death barracks.

The Kimbell exhibit closes with the ambiguous situation of the visual arts in Germany after two world wars, and reading through the scholarship, it’s impossible not to imagine American artists in similar straits the longer the current occupant of the White House carries on unchecked. “Self-Portrait in a Bar” could be any of us creatives. Beckmann’s painting conveys the ultimate resigned melancholy of a German native who escaped Nazi persecution as a “degenerate” artist only to find himself trapped in the occupied Netherlands, where he completed the piece in 1942. Wearing a reddish-brown suit and seated with his head in one hand and a pipe of sorts in the other, this Beckmann has the look of a worn soul. The artist finally procured a visa to enter the United States in 1947.

Salvador Dali’s journey was much less miserable, and his lone contribution to the show celebrates the power of resistance. After fleeing Paris before the Nazis arrived in 1940, he emigrated to New York City, where he became a celebrity and earned a comfortable living painting slightly Surreal portraits of society figures, including Isabella Tas. Another émigré, she was the Jewish daughter of a jewelry dealer from Amsterdam who had been driven to Beverly Hills by Hitler’s regime. To capture her resilience, Dali juxtaposes her profile with a Renaissance-inspired … outcropping of rock.

There’s a place for both an artist asserting themselves amid a sea of haters and for caricaturing powermongers. The difference is in the breadth and depth of the retaliation from on high. Direct criticism these days can land you in an El Salvadoran for-profit prison. With no outward-facing target, assertions of self do not attract nearly that much dreadful attention. I’m not saying one approach is more important than the other. I also don’t believe that artists aren’t a tactful bunch. They do what they feel. Some struggle with notions of the self — who they are, what they are, how they are — while others battle The Machine every day. Both are equally valid. Neither is unwanted. Never have been.

Modern Art and Politics in Germany 1910-1945: Masterworks from the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin

Thru Jun 22 at the Piano Pavilion, Kimbell Art Museum, 3333 Camp Bowie Blvd, Fort Worth. $14-18. 817-332-8451.