The Sad, Strange History of “Degenerate Art”

“Crazy at any price!” read a sign above the modern art masterpieces at the Nazi-sponsored Entartete Kunst (“Degenerate Art,” in English) exhibition in Munich, Germany, in 1937. The fevered brainchild of art-obsessed Adolf Hitler, Entartete Kunst aimed at showing not only what “Jewish” and “Bolshevik” art looked like, but also arguing how the degeneracy of those artists and their work threatened the spiritual health of the German people, the “master race” Hitler believed would rule the world, with him as their leader. The Neue Galerie in New York City revisits that sad moment in modern art history with the exhibition Degenerate Art: The Attack on Modern Art in Nazi Germany, 1937, which runs through June 30, 2014. The exhibition gathers together many of the “crazy” works labeled as degenerate, holds them up against examples of the Hitler-approved German art, and takes us down the long, strange road that led up to that Munich show. The result is a sad, strange history that will leave you shaking your head at the past, but will also make you wonder if it could happen, again, here and now. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "The Sad, Strange History of 'Degenerate Art.'"

Should the Old Masters Give Way to the New Ones?

Perhaps the one unavoidable fact all museums must face is the reality of limited space. Who stays? Who goes? Most importantly, who makes those decisions? In Germany, these questions have taken on a whole new degree of importance. The Gemäldegalerie—home of Berlin’s most prestigious Old Masters’ collection, with works by Vermeer, Rembrandt, Dürer, Jan van Eyck, Raphael, Titian, Caravaggio, Rubens, and others—faces a move to another, smaller location to make room for the expansion of the Neue Nationalgalerie, where masterpieces by some of the biggest names of 20^th century art will be displayed. Germans seem split between those who want their Rembrandt (shown above, in his 1630 etching Self-Portrait with a Cap, Openmouthed) right where he’s been and those who would like to see Germany finally to have a world-class modern art museum. As other museums and countries eventually face this same problem, we’ll all have to ask if the Old Masters should give way to the new ones? Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Should the Old Masters Give Way to the New Ones?"


[Image: Rembrandt. Self-Portrait with a Cap, Openmouthed (detail), 1630.]

Walking the Tightrope

“We are all tightrope walkers. With them it is the same as with artists, and so with all humanity,” Max Beckmann said in a 1948 speech titled "Letters to a Woman Painter." Born February 12, 1884, Beckmann served as a medic in the German army during World War I until he suffered a nervous breakdown in 1915, the year he painted his Self-Portrait as a Medic (above). Whereas before the war, Beckmann painted in an Old Master style, after his experiences, he became an Expressionist, reproducing the products of his tortured soul onto canvas. From a very early age, Beckmann studied philosophy, always seeking some meaning in the world. When that meaning became distorted in the trenches of the Great War, face to face with death and dismemberment as a medic, the world reflected in Beckmann’s eyes became a distorted nightmare.

As the years passed, Beckmann turned to painting in the New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit) style, the counter-reaction to the excesses of Expressionism and a more social type of art. Beckmann taught and shared in the hopeful, sometimes decadent freedoms of the Weimar Republic. The rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, however, spelled the beginning of the end of Beckmann’s involvement in German art. In 1932, Beckmann painted the highly personal triptych Departure (above). Beckmann said of the right hand panel featuring a figure holding a lamp: “You can see yourself trying to find your way in the darkness, lighting the hall and staircase with a miserable lamp, dragging along tied to you, as part of yourself, the corpse of your memories." The “corpse” of Beckmann’s memories of a free Germany haunted him until his departure in 1937, after the “Degenerate Art” exhibition sealed his fate and that of all modern art in Hitler’s Germany. Beckmann, however, retained some sense of hope in his Departure in the center panel’s image of the queen carrying the treasure of freedom as her ship travels through darkness and brutality towards a better world.

Beckmann fled to Amsterdam until the end of World War II. He later emigrated to the United States, where he continued to paint large triptychs based on mystical and mythological themes, such as The Argonauts (above, from 1949-1950). Beckmann finished The Argonauts just before his death in 1950. To the end, Beckmann walked the tightrope, balancing himself emotionally and artistically through the exploration of ancient themes through the most modern of artistic styles.

Mother and Child

That is what you understood: the ripe fruits.
You placed them in bowls there in front of you
and weighed out their heaviness with pigments.
And so you saw women as fruits too,
and saw the children likewise, driven
from inside into the forms of their being.
And you saw yourself in the end as a fruit,
removed yourself from your clothes, brought
yourself in front of the mirror, allowed yourself
within, as far as your gaze that stayed huge outside
and did not say: ‘I am that’: no, rather: ‘this is.’
So your gaze was finally free of curiosity
and so un-possessive, of such real poverty,
it no longer desired self: was sacred.

From Requiem for a Friend by Rainer Maria Rilke

When Max Beckmann told Marie-Louise von Motesiczky that she could one day be Germany’s greatest woman artist since Paula Modersohn-Becker, that was high praise indeed. Born February 8, 1876, Modersohn-Becker brought a female perspective to German Expressionism, especially in her exploration of her own sexuality and role as a mother. In Mother and Child Lying Nude (above, from 1907), Modersohn-Becker paints a woman and child in all rounded fertility, as if they were the “ripe fruits” to which her friend Rainer Maria Rilke alludes to in his requiem to Modersohn-Becker after her death. Artists have depicted the female nude since the beginning of art, but such images from the imagination of a female artist add a whole new dimension, seeing the sexuality from within. Again, to use Rilke’s words, Modersohn-Becker looked at her gender and said not “I am that” but rather “This is,” affirming rather than objectifying her body and it’s procreative power.

Modersohn-Becker painted many portraits, landscapes, and still lifes in her career, but after 1906 she painted a series of self-portraits that redefined both the self-portrait and the nude for female artists. Her Self-Portrait: Half-Naked with Amber Necklace (above, from 1906) shows the artist looking directly at the viewer, adorned with an almost primitive looking amber necklace. This painting inspired Rilke to write the following in his Requiem:

Why do you want me to believe that in the amber beads
at your throat there was still some heaviness
of that heaviness that never exists in the other-side
calm of paintings: why do you show me
an evil presentiment in your stance:
what do the contours of your body mean,
laid out like the lines on a hand,
so that I no longer see them except as fate?

Modersohn-Becker’s nudes lack any sexiness. They’re heavy and monumental, like a statue. Instead of clothes, she wears the assets of her sexuality like accessories, which the necklace accessory itself accentuates. The “contours of her body” that befuddle Rilke become a statement of “fate”—the fate as a woman that Modersohn-Becker does not regret (i.e., sorry that she’s not a man) but rather embraces as a challenge and a blessing.

It’s hard not to look at Modersohn-Becker’s Self-Portrait on Her Fifth Wedding Anniversary (above, from 1907) and feel sad. She depicts herself proudly pregnant, her body swelling physically as her soul itself seems to grow larger. Modersohn-Becker gave birth to a daughter, named Mathilde, in November 1907. Less than a month later, Paula Modersohn-Becker died from an embolism. She left behind a long legacy of love and friendship despite the relative shortness of her life and career, inspiring Rilke to write his Requiem a year later and inspiring German and female artists ever since to look within to see their world.

A Greed for Life

Marie-Louise von Motesiczky, Self-Portrait with Red Hat, 1938, oil and charcoal on canvas, 50.7 x 35.5 cm. Marie-Louise von Motesiczky Charitable Trust, London

In Self-Portrait with Red Hat (above), the artist Marie-Louise von Motesiczky looks penetratingly at the viewer with her large, dark eyes and touches the brim of her hat, “as if in a gesture of farewell to the country she had been forced to leave behind,” writes Jill Lloyd in The Undiscovered Expressionist: A Life of Marie-Louise von Motesiczky, the first biography and in-depth study of the woman Max Beckmann, mentor and friend, once believed could be Germany’s greatest female artist since Paula Modersohn-Becker. Motesiczky, forced to flee her native land to escape Nazi persecution, constantly finds herself in a state of semi-exile—from the aristocratic world of her lineage in her choice of the bohemian life of an artist yet also from the wilder excesses of modern art in the fundamental conservatism of her artistic practice. Caught between so many different worlds, Motesiczky provides a unique tale of the conflicts the modern woman artist faced in the early twentieth century.

Motesiczky descends from a long line of powerful, intelligent women. “These gifted women were undoubtedlyan inspiration to Marie-Louise,” Lloyd writes, “but their frustrations and resulting histories of depression and psychosomatic illnesses cast a shadow over her life.” Sigmund Freud treats one of her grandmothers among his earliest patients. Her father, a talented musician, allegedly plays with Brahms himself. Several of the women in her family history take illustrious writers as lovers, something Motesiczky herself does in a 40-year relationship with Nobel Prize winner Elias Canetti. Although her family always surrounds itself with the great artists of Austria, Motesiczky maintains the essentially conservative values of her family, which lead to a life-long suspicion of “intellectual” abstract art. When Max Beckmann visits the family in 1920, however, Marie-Louise begins to see possibilities in a career in art.

After meeting Beckmann, Motesiczky travels to Holland and encounters the world of Van Gogh first hand. “It was Van Gogh’s sun which in the cold Hague spring was a revelation to me,” she writes in letters home. Like many German artists of the time, Van Gogh’s life story and strikingly powerful letters, newly translated into German, spark the imagination of Motesiczky. Lloyd does a great job in capturing the spirit of Van Gogh-mania in its early years, something she wrote on at length in the catalogue to the exhibition Van Gogh and Expressionism at the Neue Galerie last year (which I reviewed here). The expressive power of Motesiczky’s Self-Portrait with Red Hat owes much to Van Gogh’s own revealing self-portraits with hats and other accessories.

Marie-Louise von Motesiczky, The Travellers, 1940, oil on canvas, 66.7 x 75.3 cm. Marie-Louise von Motesiczky Charitable Trust, London

In the late 1920s through the 1930s, Motesiczky lives in wild Berlin, thriving in the bohemian atmosphere that shocks her conservative family. A photo of Motesiczky frolicking topless shows just how far she had come from the staid halls of her family’s wealthy home. In The Balcony (painted in 1929) Motesiczky paints herself nude, peeling away the final layers of “respectability” and embracing the life of an artist free of all constraint. Around 1934, Motesiczky herself undergoes psychoanalysis, following which her paintings take on a more introspective feel. The increasing power of the Nazis may have also contributed to her increased thoughtfulness. After his inclusion in the “Degenerate Art” exhibition in 1937, Beckmann flees Germany and Motesiczky follows a year later with her mother and childhood nurse in tow. The Travellers (above) captures some of the absurdity of this exodus from the life and traditions Motesiczky and her family knew. The nude figure in the center holds a sausage, as if it were a treasured possession. Landing finally in England, Motesiczky finds solace in the German artistic community already there, including the artist Oskar Kokoschka and the writer Canetti, whom she meets in 1939. Lloyd mines Canetti’s memoir Party in the Blitz for much of the feeling of what it was to be a German in England at that time. In the midst of all the uncertainty of homelessness, Canetti provides an anchor for Marie-Louise. “In the inauspicious circumstances of exile, her belief in Canetti’s powers as a writer seems to have filled the gap she perceived in her life,” Lloyd writes. Both Motesiczky and Canetti unwaveringly believe in art’s power to give meaning to the world and fervently hold on to that faith over the next 40 years of their life together—a relationship based largely on self-deception, as Canetti remained married to his wife Vera and then married another woman after Vera’s death rather than Marie-Louise.

Marie-Louise von Motesiczky, The Old Song, 1959, oil on canvas, 101.7 x 152.6 cm. Marie-Louise von Motesiczky Charitable Trust, London

Motesiczky decides to remain in England after the war. Her mother, bedridden for much of her life, becomes one of her greatest subjects. In a sequence beginning in 1929, Motesiczky paints her mother over the course of the next 50 years in works such as The Old Song (above). Motesiczky paints The Old Song after an inspirational visit to the Louvre, deciding to make “allegories just as a pretext—and leaving the symbolic to look after itself.” In an honest, tender examination of the dynamics of aging similar to that of the self-portraits of Rembrandt, whom Motesiczky loved, Motesiczky paints her mother becoming more and more child-like and simple in spirit as well as appearance as the end nears. Throughout, Motesiczky strives, as she put it, “to capture mother’s yearning expression, that almost greed for life.” The joy of life behind so much of Motesiczky’s paintings, even in the face of displacement and failed affairs, proves that she too shared in her mother’s greed for living.

When Motesiczky’s mother finally dies in 1978, she finds herself completely “free” for the first time in her life at the age of 72. Marie-Louise gives “full rein in later years to the unconventionality that was part of her family tradition, taking advantage at last of the freedom that was her émigré status and advancing years afforded her.” Travels to India, Turkey, Egypt, and Israel add adventure to her later years. Although unable to identify with the feminist revolution of the 1960s, Motesiczky appreciates the modern woman’s sense of independence, perhaps wondering what she would have accomplished if she had been born in a different time and place.

Although some recognition comes to Motesiczky and other members of the so-called “lost generation” of German artists whose lives were interrupted by the Nazi era through exhibitions of the 1980s and the neo-Expressionism of the 1980s leads to renewed interest in the German Expressionists, Motesiczky’s art has remains undiscovered for the most part. Motesiczky founds the Marie-Louise von Motesiczky Charitable Trust in 1992 to protect her legacy. The Trust owns most of her works and continues to promote her artistic vision today since her death in 1996.

Within German art, Motesiczky’s painting stands up against the finest of the male German Expressionists and certainly can challenge Modersohn-Becker or even Kathe Kollwitz for the title of greatest modern woman German artist. Lloyd analyzes Motesiczky’s works perceptively and places her within the larger context very well—quite a task due to the unconventionality of the subject herself and the male-dominated nature of German Expressionism. I found myself frequently comparing Motesiczky’s art to that of another unconventional woman—Frida Kahlo, born just one year after Motesiczky. Both artists celebrate their dual natures (bohemian and aristocratic for Motesiczky, Mexican and European for Kahlo) while also coming to terms with their own sexuality. Motesiczky never achieves the startling frankness of Kahlo, especially sexually, but few artists ever have. Motesiczky does, however, approach Kahlo’s more surreal moments in works such as The Travelers and The Old Song, but always avoids going all the way in her innate conservatism. Just as Kahlo’s finest art represents the nexus of so many conflicting tensions, Motesiczky’s finest works strike a balance of all the different components of her life. Motesiczky straddles so many worlds—old-world aristocracy and modern bohemia, conservative values and nascent modern feminism, just to name two—that her art provides a wealth of study that has Lloyd’s effort only begins to explore.

The Undiscovered Expressionist: A Life of Marie-Louise von Motesiczky adds another chapter to the ever-evolving story of German Expressionism and makes a significant contribution to the neglected female artists of that period. Female artists today can find a strong role model in Marie-Louise von Motesiczky’s life-long greed for life.


[Many thanks to Yale University Press for providing me with a review copy of The Undiscovered Expressionist: A Life of Marie-Louise von Motesiczky and to the Marie-Louise von Motesiczky Charitable Trust, London for permission to use the images shown above.]

Objectively Objecting

Christian Schad, born August 21, 1894, used his clear eye and steady hand to portray the decadence of the Weimar 1920s in Germany. Along with Otto Dix, George Grosz, and Max Beckmann, Schad painted in the Neue Sachlichkeit or “New Objectivity” style that strived to hold a mirror up to the chaotic society around them. But, where Dix, Grosz, and Beckmann twisted their visions to mimic the twisted soul of the Weimar years, Schad brings an almost Old Master realism to his works, believing that only the objective truth was necessary. Sometimes, he even turned that clear eye on himself, as in the Self Portrait from 1927 (above). Clad in a bizarre see-through shirt with a naked, scarred woman behind him, Schad shows himself taking part in the sexual deviancy of the time that was only a symptom of the larger issues at hand.

Schad excelled at showing the cabaret life of the 1920s in Vienna and Berlin, his two bases of operation during that decade. Sonja (above), from 1928, shows a typical pseudo-flapper in a café, smoking a Camel cigarette with a long holder, the advertising symbol of the camel clearly showing on the package sitting on the table. The hardness and hopelessness of these years comes through the definition given these faces. He paints an eerie lifelessness into their eyes, a deadness sinking down into their souls. Grosz’s work more colorfully captures the cacophony of the café patrons longing to drown out the sound of their own soul-sickness, but Schad’s portrayals capture the quiet desperation behind all the noise—the lonely moments experienced in even the largest, loudest crowds.

There’s a surgical precision to much of Schad’s realistic explorations of the Weimar psyche. Like the vulnerable patient in his 1929 Operation (above), the Germany of the 1920s seemed anesthetized to the chain of events happening within that would lead to the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi movement. Ironically, thanks to his more realistic painting style, Schad eluded the label of “Degenerate Art” that stuck to Grosz and others, driving them and their art from Germany at the moment they were needed most. Schad continued to paint portraits throughout World War II (he faked a heart ailment to escape fighting in World War I) and returned to his Dada roots and his photographic experiments in photograms, which he dubbed his “Schadograms.” These “Schadograms” occupied much of his artistic imagination for the rest of his long life, perhaps as an escape into abstraction from the memories of his realist depictions of the road to Germany’s self-destruction.