Hitler flunked out of art school and then threw one of the deadliest bitch-fits in history. Though the degree of correlation between the two events is questionable, that’s just a fact. Not necessarily a fun one but anyone who knows anything about Adolf (the capital A is for Asshole) knows that he wanted to study at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts long before he ever was a politician. It’s one of those passive pieces of information that doesn’t really change anything but makes you stop for a second and go ‘huh.’ (Like how Sigmund Freud used to medically prescribe himself cocaine; on reflection it’s not terribly shocking).
Here is that phrase which I’m certain has been programmed into my factory settings: language and art are at the heart of culture. As many times as I say it, it never becomes less true. How we speak about the world around us, how we materialise it, influences so much of what we are and what we become. Here, both matter as much as each other. The art, and also the way it’s spoken about. In this sense, art is a useful tool in propagandising an ideology. Our reflection of the world around us, in our art, influences the way that we think we should live and then the cycle perpetuates itself again. During the early 1900’s Hilter’s genocide wasn’t only concerned with ‘ethnic purity’ but a similar degree of culturally purity as well. He saw modern art and its artists as being in a state of moral decay. The Nazi Propaganda Minister insisted that the ‘violent’ nature of the art could only be the result of sick minds or corrupt character. Surrealism was seen as a manifestation of illness. Avant-garde, a product of insanity. It was at this point they began to confiscate many different works of art (just a year before the takeover of Austria where the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts fell under control of the Third Reich). For those who have not read Mein Kampf, (I’d hope many) Hitler considered himself a ‘connoisseur’ of the arts and had a personal grievance with modern artists.
The Nazi’s set up a large scale exhibition in 1937 using this ‘degenerate art’ (in German: Entartete Kunst) in Munich. Despite the organisers’ intentions and active discouragement of appreciation, the exhibition saw an estimated 2 million visitors during its time open. The work displayed varied from things like expressionism and surrealism to cubism. Intentionally set up in an unflattering way, the artwork was accompanied on the walls by labels that said things such as ‘Madness’ and ‘Sick Minds’. The entire event was a display that was supposed to promote an idea of German purity. A political tactic that positioned non-German influences on art as lesser and unflattering. There was an overall theme of idealisation perpetrated by the Third Reich, Nazi propaganda that sought to propose that the modern artworks were ‘cultural documents’ that were representative of impurity, madness and indulgence.
After the (unwanted) popularity of this travelling exhibit, with German citizens lining up outside the doors in some showings) the Nazi party further took around 20,000 works into their possession. Not only propagandistic in nature, these seizures were also presumably motivated by a will to hoard wealth, using it to further fund the regime as a whole. Around a third of the artworks confiscated by the Nazi Regime are still lost to time. Potentially sitting in private collections or rotting in a storage unit.