German artist Rudolf Belling’s 1924 sculpture Dreiklang (Triad) is a ragged twist of interlocking prongs made from lustrous birchwood. Inescapably modern, it is a pioneering example of abstract sculpture, and was Belling’s first real success. Its split structure might symbolise the schools of painting, sculpture and architecture that Belling sought to unify – or foreshadow his work’s disjointed reception in the tumultuous decades that followed its creation.
In 1937 Dreiklang was one of more than 650 artworks exhibited in Munich’s infamous Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition at the former Institute of Archaeology in the city centre’s Hofgarten. Conceived by Reich propagandist Joseph Goebbels and authorised by Adolf Hitler, the show took aim at modern work that was deemed “decadent” or “racially impure” by the National Socialist party – but its presence underlined the confusion and complexity surrounding the Nazis’ cultural approach. Away from the Hofgarten, Belling’s more traditional sculpture of the German boxer Max Schmeling was simultaneously shown in the state-sanctioned Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung (Great German Art Exhibition) in Munich’s Haus der Deutschen Kunst, the House of German Art. When the authorities realised the coincidence, Belling’s “degenerate art” pieces were quietly removed.
Today, Dreiklang and the sculpture of Schmeling sit within sight of each other in the neoclassical Hamburger Bahnhof contemporary art museum in central Berlin. More often associated with its post-1960 collection featuring Joseph Beuys and Gerhard Richter, the venue currently hosts around 60 works that would ordinarily be displayed in Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie, which is dedicated to 20th-century art. While the Nationalgalerie’s Mies van der Rohe building undergoes renovation, works from the modern art collection will be shown in a series of exhibitions at the contemporary art space, starting with Die Schwarzen Jahre (The Black Years), which opened last week. This first show features art acquired by the national gallery, or seized by the Nazis, between 1933 and 1945, alongside work created at the time.
Curatorially, this is fertile ground. Since last year, work from the era has been exhibited at the Neue Galerie New York, the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich and the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, where 50 pieces from the Berlin national collection are now on loan. In an attempt to carve out a niche for itself, and avoid Manichean oversimplification, the Hamburger Bahnhof show employs extensive wall text to tell the complex stories behind art that was both celebrated and despised at different times by the regime. Its curator, Dieter Scholz, has organised the show principally into art-historical chapters. While some of these are familiar – there is necessarily a section on “degenerate art” – others, such as art venerated by the Nazis, are less so, and expose the Nationalgalerie’s collection to scrutiny.
The exhibition’s opening room, described as a “prologue”, is dedicated to 15 paintings acquired in a deal between the German and Italian governments in 1932-33, and epitomises the strengths and weaknesses of a collection show. Scholz has partially recreated the hang seen in a 1933 photograph of the newly acquired Italian work at the Kronprinzenpalais in central Berlin. Three of the four paintings visible in that picture, including Giorgio de Chirico’s Serenade (1909), are displayed side by side on an end wall. There, De Chirico’s oil is impactful, its mystical figures looming out of a murky surrealist landscape. But the group suffers from the absence of its most impressive piece, Amedeo Modigliani’s Mädchenkopf (Girl’s Head) of 1917-18, which was sold in 1939 and is represented in a reproduction.
The exhibition proper begins with Karl Hofer’s Die Schwarzen Zimmer (The Black Rooms) from 1943, a nightmarish image of a naked man beating a drum in a bare room. Displayed on its own, the picture’s dark walls echo the temporary black partitions dividing different themes within the gallery. A 1928 version of the painting was destroyed when Hofer’s studio was bombed in 1943, and he repainted it. It serves as both a premonition of and a reflection on the horrors to come.
The extent to which the Nazis politicised aesthetic issues remains unrivalled in modern history. In a section entitled “Emigration”, we learn how Paul Klee was one of many dismissed from academia, in his case from the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 1933, before he left for Switzerland; he produced the watercolour Die Zeit (Time) the same year, its collage-like clock hands pointing to an uncertain future. He also had work shown at the Hofgarten in 1937. In the adjacent “Degenerate Art” section, we find Lyonel Feininger’s Teltow II (1918), a geometric rooftop vista. Feininger, a former teacher at the Bauhaus, still hoped to win professional acceptance in Germany until 1937, when he boarded a ship to New York, arriving there with two dollars in his pocket.
According to Scholz, several of the artworks created to serve National Socialism have rarely been seen since the second world war, including Josef Müllner’s neoclassical Reiter (Rider) of 1936, steed and master fashioned in lead, and Georg Kolbe’s Herabschreitender (Descending Man) of 1940, a large naked muscled man walking down into the gallery floor. Such pieces appealed by evoking antiquity and Nazi ideology, often portraying idealised, athletic figures. According to Jonathan Petropoulos, in his 2014 book Artists Under Hitler, the likes of Kolbe were favoured by Goebbels as artists “who had modernist elements, but … did not cross over the line into decadence”.
Most illuminating are those who changed their approach to fit in. While Belling’s style moved towards naturalism before the Nazis came to power, Arno Breker is perhaps the best-known modernist who modified his work to suit his paymasters. Though some of his early 1920s work resembled Picasso– the period represented here with a 1927 bronze, Liegende (Reclining Woman) (1927) – his 1935 sculpture Prometheus took inspiration from Hitler’s Mein Kampf and was placed in front of the Reich propaganda ministry. An opportunist whose state commissions rewarded him with immense wealth, Breker remained a divisive figure until his death in Düsseldorf in 1991.
Breker was luckier than the lesser-known painter Erwin Hahs, who lost his job and had work publicly denounced. After battling unemployment, he took on a commission from a school to paint a portrait of Hitler, but the work was rejected because he depicted the Führer in front of burning ruins. He reused the canvas, painting a naked man extinguishing a torch – “a reference to death”, according to Scholz, who has presented the existing painting next to an x-ray in which the original image’s ghoulish Hitler refuses to fade.
The works shown in The Black Years are complex in both content and political backstory, and the complications continue in the present day. Hildebrand Gurlitt – identified here as one of four dealers commissioned to market “degenerate art” abroad during the Nazi era – hit the headlines in 2013 when it emerged that his son Cornelius had been caught with a hoard of 1,406 artworks, 300 of which had been on show in Munich in 1937.
This show benefits from the post-unification increase in information about the parts of the Nationalgalerie’s collection previously held in East Berlin, and can be seen as part of a wider drive towards transparency that has taken place in many parts of German life in recent years. “Twenty-five years ago, none of the work the National Socialist era created and approved of would have been on view in West German museums,” says Stephanie Barron, curator of the influential Degenerate Art show at Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1991, which attempted to recreate the 1937 exhibition. “If they had any of it, it was in the basements.”
Dusted off, the Nazi-approved art has been purposefully placed in opposition to Otto Dix’s Flandern (Flanders) of 1934-36, his anti-war statement comprising dead bodies on a charred battlefield. The piece serves as an introduction to work critical of National Socialist policy, including Picasso’s 1942 Large Reclining Nude, its drab palette a gloomy mirror held to wartime Paris.
By the time visitors reach the show’s conclusion and its largest work, Horst Strempel’s haunting Nacht über Deutschland (Night over Germany) of 1945-46 – a sepulchral altarpiece-like depiction of concentration camp trauma – the arrangement of black partitions feels claustrophobically close. There are difficulties in organising subject matter that refuses to be categorised, but the modernist fragments brought together in The Black Years nonetheless help to reunite Germany’s shattered art-historical past. Providing a space for the national collection to confront its history, the show effectively avoids dichotomies between good and bad, moral or otherwise.
“Is this the right way or wrong way, let’s talk about it,” says the Nationalgalerie’s director, Udo Kittelmann. “Not just hide something. If you hide something, you feel always bad about it.”
- The Black Years: Histories of a Collection, 1933–1945 runs at Hamburger Bahnhof museum, Berlin, until 31 July. smb.museum.
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