A Degenerate Exhibition
National Review, April 8, 1996
Worker & Kolkhoz Woman, Moscow, February 1991 © Andrew Stuttaford
London this season has been playing host to two thought-provoking exhibitions. The first, "Africa: The Art of a Continent," has been on display at the Royal Academy since October. Meanwhile, across the Thames, the Hayward Gallery's "Art and Power" attempts to cast a new light on an even darker continent—the totalitarian Europe of 1930-45. The latter exhibit opens promisingly enough, taking advantage of the Hayward's brutalist architecture with an eerily lit antechamber dominated by symbols and monuments of the departed dictators. Pharaonically sinister, the room is compelling, a guilty pleasure on a par with the best horror stories. Writing of fascism in 1936 the philosopher Walter Benjamin commented that mankind's "self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order." Unintentionally, perhaps, this room proves that point. It is the highlight of the exhibition.
Most of the rest is depressingly unimaginative, an uninspired display of the usual suspects. We see an avuncular Stalin and a pompous Hitler, but so what? The iconography essential for understanding such pictures is missing, and without it they become routine official portraits, no different really from the drab canvases to be found in many an American boardroom.
Unexplained too, is why much of the work on display should be seen as "totalitarian." Hitler's favorite painter, the leaden Adolf Ziegler, may show why he was known as the "master of the German pubic hair," but, at that time, his völkisch style would not have been out of place in many a European museum. In the Italian section, at least, there is some attempt at serious analysis. Embarrassingly, however, it comes from the Fascists, who were deeply divided on how to control art, if at all.
To be sure, many of the paintings on display are irritatingly didactic, but that is only to be expected. They date from the age of Eleanor Roosevelt, an era when the self-important were out of control. Aleksandr Monin's Shock Workers' Avenue may be a product of Stalin's Soviet Union, but it would not be out of place in any WPA-decorated post office. The allegedly totalitarian architecture too was hardly unusual. Across the world big government was dressing for success. In the 1930s that meant chunky statues and neo-classicism. It was true for Berlin, Rome, and Moscow, but it also held good for London and Washington.
These connections are never really explored, but that is hardly surprising. "Art and Power" is itself a bureaucratic product, sponsored by the Council of Europe to "remind" (rather unwisely, I think) Europeans of "their common history and cultural heritage." Far easier, therefore, for it to caricature totalitarian art as a simple blend of dull art and portentous buildings. Hitler's kitsch thus becomes just another round in the Manichean struggle between the figurative (bad) and the abstract (good).
In effect, then, this exhibition reflects the prejudices of a second-rate art faculty. Naturally enough, it also comes steeped in conventional, leftish pieties. No opportunity is missed to take a swipe at the fallen fascists, while the Soviet Union gets off comparatively lightly.
Some of the distortions are simply childish. An accompanying booklet tells us that 12 million Jews perished in the Holocaust, but fudges collectivization's death toll in the Soviet countryside. The Moscow Metro is singled out for praise, not least because it opened ahead of schedule. Making the trains run on time is clearly an achievement—so long, that is, as they are Soviet trains.
So far as the art is concerned the bias is more subtle. "Nazi" art is mainly represented by rural scenes, peasant girls, and Albert Speer, The relatively more cheerful eroticism of what might be called its "Vargas" school is absent. In marked contrast to the Soviet section little of the regime's perniciously effective posterwork is shown. No war paintings are on display—a curious omission, given that war was central both to the Nazis' dreams and to their destiny.
Space cannot have been a constraint, given the presence of a large section dedicated to the opposition to Hitler, itself rather strange in an exhibition allegedly devoted to totalitarian art. Was someone worried that the devil had the best tunes? There was no need. The "opposition" includes some of the most powerful works on display. Felix Nussbaum's concentration-camp paintings give the lie to Otto Dix's remark that "one cannot paint despair," while Ernst Barlach's The Terrible Year of 1937 speaks for itself.
Appropriately enough, the destruction of modern or "Jewish" art—and, all too often, artists—by the Nazis is highlighted. The destruction of religious art by the Soviets is ignored, however. The burned icons and vandalized churches may have ended a tradition stretching back a millennium, but apparently this is not an aspect of Europe's "common heritage" about which we need "reminding."
Naturally the Nazis' grotesque "Exhibition of Degenerate Art" (1937) comes under scrutiny, and it should. That attempt to put modern art into the pillory was a low point of totalitarian Philistinism. However, it was hardly unique. No comparison is made, for example, with the major Moscow and Leningrad exhibitions of 1932, with their one (very small) room for works by artists who "had been infected with all kinds of Formalist diseases and influenced by their bourgeois experiences."
To have made such a comparison would have been to dispel the atmosphere of cozy ambiguity that prevails in discussing the USSR. There is no separate section on the artistic opposition to Stalin. Emigré art is ignored. A wide range of artwork is displayed, but it is often difficult to discern whether it would have been approved or not. Perhaps deliberately, this creates an image of greater tolerance than there really was, particularly in a country where the state was, on the whole, the only client. Various "Stalins" are on display, but they are eclipsed by Rublyov's extraordinary portrait of a wily dictator reading Pravda, a sinister dog at his feet. Could this ever have been shown? We are never told. Rublyov knew. He kept the picture hidden and pursued a successful career as an official artist.
Instead we are given a simplistic picture of a USSR where political and artistic repression marched in lockstep. Modernism is crushed by socialist realism and, by implication, the bright promise of Lenin's revolution is betrayed. Rodchenko turns to painting clowns, while Malevich goes to jail accused of "Cézannism." In reality, of course, whatever the wonders of their art, these men had been paid propagandists for a Soviet regime that had been openly murderous from the outset.
Sadly, they did their work all too well. The Great Utopia still beckons. There has been no Soviet Nuremberg, no final reckoning with Communism. In Russia that failure may lead to disaster. In the West, it merely leads to misleading "reminders" of a "common European history" at the Hayward Gallery and a souvenir shop that sells postcards of Stalin. But not of Hitler. That would be in bad taste.