Franz Radziwill and the Contradictions of German Art History, 1919–45 by James A. van Dyke (review)

For years after 1945, the visual culture of the Third Reich was associated by most with kitschy images of blond, blue-eyed workers and farmers, of happy and often large families, of nursing mothers and statuesque young men and women, and of kindly peasants and heroic warriors. Modern art had no place in this picture; the infamous “degenerate” art campaign and exhibition confirmed for most that modernism was anathema to the Nazis, who drove its practitioners into inner or actual exile. This narrative—shaped by the Cold War and the tendencies of the times to polarize; by the arguments of those who had fled Germany; by the Allied denazification process that slotted Germans into neat categories of guilt and innocence; and by the German postwar cultural elite who protected their own by contrasting their flourishing culture with that of the alleged wasteland of the Third Reich—persisted for decades.

The story began to unravel in the late 1960s when Hildegard Brenner and Barbara Miller Lane uncovered administrative chaos and aesthetic inconsistencies between purported ideals and actual artistic endeavors in the Nazi era. Yet Brenner and Lane were isolated voices at the time, and for years to come most who studied the arts in Nazi Germany continued to focus on (and condemn) the supposedly dominant Nazi aesthetic mix of kitsch, stylistic regression, monumentality and overt political propaganda while constructing hagiographies of the victims. Some thirty years passed before, in the 1990s, a new generation of scholars that included Alan Steinweis, Jonathan Petropoulos, Michael Kater, Glenn Cuomo, Olaf Peters, and others began to scrutinize anew the Nazi cultural legacy with an eye toward complicating the narrative.

James A. van Dyke follows in these footsteps while also treading new ground. Through a close examination of the career and politics of Franz Radziwill, a modern artist who for a time strongly supported National Socialism and was celebrated and denigrated alike by National Socialists, Franz Radziwill and the Contradictions of German Art History, 1919–45 offers a case study of a complicated painter living in complicated times, adding further shades of gray to the stark blacks and whites that until fairly recently have dominated scholarship on National Socialist culture.

Make no mistake: this is no traditional art historical monograph, which may disappoint readers who anticipate a close chronological reading of Radziwill’s entire oeuvre as screened through his biography and times. Van Dyke is not, for example, especially interested in the details of the artist’s personal life, except when they pertain to class or politics. Though we hear in chapter one about how his family’s struggle with poverty doubtless contributed to the formation of an identity that would sometimes find antibourgeois expression in Radziwill’s self-image as an outsider, we learn relatively nothing of his relationship with his wife or how it might have affected his artistic practice and production. Nor do we hear much about the painter’s early career. We are told in a few brief pages of Radziwill’s decision to pursue art immediately after the war, of his early association with prominent Expressionist artists, and of his growing dissatisfaction with the spread and commodification of deskilled art together with his autodidactic focus on old master techniques—all topics to which other authors might devote chapters. As well, readers will not find detailed information here about all the genres in which Radziwill worked; though the artist made over the course of his career many portraits, figure paintings, and, especially, still lives and landscapes, only a few such works receive consideration in van Dyke’s book.

These are hardly criticisms. On the contrary, by focusing tightly on Radziwill’s art of the late Weimar and Nazi eras and, mostly, on history painting, van Dyke is able to probe deeply into the production and reception of individual art works, illuminating both the artist and his times...