Vonbluvens
July 9th, 2008, 05:26 PM
This story of Emil Nolde is fascinating. To be honest Nolde wasn't really known to me a few months ago, apparently Nolde was an ardent National Socialist. According to Peter Selz, who wrote in the Museum of Modern Art catalog, Emil Nolde, published in 1963:
"Blood and Soil," "Art and Race" and similar cultural propaganda slogans trumpeted by the Nazis could not fail to appeal to Emil Nolde, whose own position was consistently that of a pan-German chauvinist. In addition, Nolde felt that all great art had to be "indigenous to the race," which accounts to a considerable extent for his admiration of primitive art. His own position as German artist, as we have seen, had been consistently anti-French and anti-Jewish. He was, however, thoroughly inexperienced politically, and when Hitler and his supporters proclaimed the German National Revolution of 1933 Nolde naively expected to become a part, and indeed the artistic spearhead, of "The Movement."
He was soon to be deeply disillusioned. The petty-bourgeois taste of Hitler himself prevailed against all aspects of modernism, and Nolde in particular was singled out for attack as a "degenerate artist" and "cultural Bolshevik." His friends among the German museum directors, including his champion Max Sauerlandt, were dismissed from their positions as soon as the Nazis took power, and Nolde's own work began to disappear from the walls of museums. An exhibition of his work was closed by the Gestapo.
In the "Degenerate Art" exhibition in Munich in 1937 the Nazi art officials mockingly displayed 27 of his works together with those of most other important modern artists. Soon all his paintings not in his own or other private hands were seized, and some were sold at auction in Switzerland. Unlike most of his contemporaries at work in Germany -- artists such as Albers, Beckmann, Feininger, Grosz, Kandinsky, Klee and Kokoschka -- Nolde did not emigrate. As a Danish subject he could not have been prevented from leaving the country, but he could not conceive of giving up his beloved Seebull, and in any case he still had faith in the eventual acceptance of his German art by the National Socialist government. He continued to petition the authorities and even took new hope when his local chapter of an organization of German nationalists in North Schleswig was absorbed into the Nazi party in 1940.
Yet in the summer of 1941 he was ruthlessly informed that: "In view of the Fuhrer's decree concerning the elimination of degenerate art from the museums, 1,052 of your works have been confiscated... For your lack of reliability you are expelled from the Board of National Culture and are as of this instant forbidden from exercising any professional or avocational activity in the fine arts."
When Nolde wrote to his friend Hans Fehr about this annihilating decree, he nevertheless still expressed his hope and faith in Germany's victory in the war. Still he did not wholly obey the interdiction, but secretly painted many very small watercolors, the "Unpainted Pictures." As late as 1942 he made a final attempt to appeal to Nazi officialdom, traveling to Vienna to see Austria's Gauleiter Baldur von Schirach, only to be rejected once more.
MODS AND ALEX: There really should be a section to discuss ART on VNN or have a subsection of the graphic catagory.
"Blood and Soil," "Art and Race" and similar cultural propaganda slogans trumpeted by the Nazis could not fail to appeal to Emil Nolde, whose own position was consistently that of a pan-German chauvinist. In addition, Nolde felt that all great art had to be "indigenous to the race," which accounts to a considerable extent for his admiration of primitive art. His own position as German artist, as we have seen, had been consistently anti-French and anti-Jewish. He was, however, thoroughly inexperienced politically, and when Hitler and his supporters proclaimed the German National Revolution of 1933 Nolde naively expected to become a part, and indeed the artistic spearhead, of "The Movement."
He was soon to be deeply disillusioned. The petty-bourgeois taste of Hitler himself prevailed against all aspects of modernism, and Nolde in particular was singled out for attack as a "degenerate artist" and "cultural Bolshevik." His friends among the German museum directors, including his champion Max Sauerlandt, were dismissed from their positions as soon as the Nazis took power, and Nolde's own work began to disappear from the walls of museums. An exhibition of his work was closed by the Gestapo.
In the "Degenerate Art" exhibition in Munich in 1937 the Nazi art officials mockingly displayed 27 of his works together with those of most other important modern artists. Soon all his paintings not in his own or other private hands were seized, and some were sold at auction in Switzerland. Unlike most of his contemporaries at work in Germany -- artists such as Albers, Beckmann, Feininger, Grosz, Kandinsky, Klee and Kokoschka -- Nolde did not emigrate. As a Danish subject he could not have been prevented from leaving the country, but he could not conceive of giving up his beloved Seebull, and in any case he still had faith in the eventual acceptance of his German art by the National Socialist government. He continued to petition the authorities and even took new hope when his local chapter of an organization of German nationalists in North Schleswig was absorbed into the Nazi party in 1940.
Yet in the summer of 1941 he was ruthlessly informed that: "In view of the Fuhrer's decree concerning the elimination of degenerate art from the museums, 1,052 of your works have been confiscated... For your lack of reliability you are expelled from the Board of National Culture and are as of this instant forbidden from exercising any professional or avocational activity in the fine arts."
When Nolde wrote to his friend Hans Fehr about this annihilating decree, he nevertheless still expressed his hope and faith in Germany's victory in the war. Still he did not wholly obey the interdiction, but secretly painted many very small watercolors, the "Unpainted Pictures." As late as 1942 he made a final attempt to appeal to Nazi officialdom, traveling to Vienna to see Austria's Gauleiter Baldur von Schirach, only to be rejected once more.
MODS AND ALEX: There really should be a section to discuss ART on VNN or have a subsection of the graphic catagory.