The High Road to the Moon: Paintings by R. A. Smith by Bob Parkinson (review)

Books 71 Art in the Third Reich. Bertold Hinz. Robert and Rita Kimber, transl. Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1979.268 pp.. illus. Paper, €5.50. ISBN: 0-63112511 -6. Reviewed by Joseph Acheson* Berthold Hinz is Professor of Art History as the Pedagogic Institute in West Berlin. He was a leading contributor to a catalogue of art in the Third Reich, prepared in conjunction with a major exhibition in Frankfurt in 1974. This book is a summary of the substance of the catalogue and the exhibition and the Professor’s debates with students during the two years prior to the exhibition. Professor Hinz claims that his was the first work to concern itself in depth with the art of National Socialism between the years 1933 and 1945, so filling a gap in German art history which had existed since World War 11. Within a few years, the State was able to impose totalcontrol upon all forms of art and design. Simultaneously it launched an attack upon all alternative forms, until finally they were eliminated from any public showing within Germany, except for ridicule. The suaess of this operation,as of National Socialism itself,was possible only because of a strong popular base. The systematic corruption and exploitation of this base is the main theme of the book. Artist and architect manque, Hitler accorded to the visual arts the highest social value. One of his first actions after coming to power in 1933 was to lay the foundation stone of a ‘temple in honour of the Goddess of Art’, the House of German Art in Munich. Here was to be housed the eternal German art, tribute to the nation’s ‘bloodand soil’as befitted the destined 1000-year Reich. Professor Hinz draws upon eight exhibitions held in this building between 1937 and 1944 as principal source material of his research. ‘Degenerate’ art which defiled such an ideal had first to be eliminated. This embraced all work which could be labelled as ‘Marxist, Jewish or culturally Bolshevist’, above all that by those international modern artists hated most by Hitler, and dismissed as ‘Dadist sensationalists, Cubist plasterers and Futurist canvas smearers’. Dr Wilhelm Frick, who became the first National Socialist to head a Ministry, that of the Interior, set the example for oppression of the arts, with the destruction of the Bauhaus and a purge of all modern art from Weimar. At his order, films by Eisenstein, Brecht and Pabst and the music of Hindemith and Stravinsky were banned from public performance throughout the Reich. In 1936, under Goebbels, the Ministry of Culture intensified the campaign. Membership of the Ministry’s professional organisations was now made compulsory for everyone involved in the arts, from architecture and fine arts to design photography and auctioneering. Correspondingly, membership was denied to all whose racial or political origins or work was suspect. Art criticism was silenced and censored art reports substituted. Professor Ziegler, once a minor painter and dubbed ‘master of pubic hair’ under Goebbel’s direction, led an assault on the German museums and collections. Starting with the National Gallery, directors sympathetic to modern art were dismissed and their collections confiscated, to be sold abroad or misappropriated into Goering’s private collection. In 1939 the undisposed-of ‘dregs of degenerate art’ were burnt publicly in Berlin. In contrast, the ‘finished and unproblematic’ work of favoured artists seems to our eyes to be utterly banal and depressing, both in form and subject. The painting of 16c Netherlands and 19c German genre provides a spurious base of respectability. ‘Simple German types’, farmer and peasant, work with their animals in the fields until the needs of war demand a more heroic triad-farmer, industrial worker, soldier. ‘Pure landscape’ represents the ‘soil of the Fatherland‘. But, above all, female nudes abound, their ‘idealbiological form, a precondition of all folkish and spiritual rebirth’, often disguised by classical or symbolic titles, they remain voyeuristic objects, the last area of domination for state-enslaved males. The book concludes with some discussion of the huge and useless monuments which dominate the architecture of the Third Reich. Reflecting both bastion and tomb, even unfinished they aspire already to the grandeur and pathos of antique ruins. Professor...