Volume 27, Number 11 · June 26, 1980
Art of a Nasty Time
By John Willett
Art in the Third Reich
by Berthold Hinz, translated by Robert Kimber, by Rita Kimber
Pantheon, 268 pp., $7.95 (paper)
It has been common in surveys of the arts to treat the twelve years of Hitler's Thousand-Year Reich as an insignificant break in the story of the modern movement—something too contemptible for serious consideration. Historians, critics, and exhibition organizers, on coming to the 1930s, have concentrated on those parts of the globe (like England and the United States) where the innovations of the 1920s were still being fruitfully absorbed; elsewhere they have either cut the story short, as in the big Paris-Berlin and Paris-Moscow exhibitions at the Centre Beaubourg, or simply skipped its more embarrassing aspects. Thus 'following the enforced suppression of artistic creation during the period 1933-1945,' says the otherwise very useful Ullstein Kunst Lexikon of 1967, 'German art sought to renew its connections with modern artistic tendencies through W. Baumeister, E.W. Nay, G. Meistermann and others.' That is all. Today, however, especially in Germany itself, and especially now that the very idea of modernism has come to seem a bit old-fashioned, it has become natural to wonder just what did happen in those blank years. Surely 'artistic creation' did not simply come to a stop. Was there perhaps (to use a fashionable term) some kind of alternative culture?
Review, 4553 words
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