"Modern German Art for Thirties Paris, Prague, and London: Resistance and Acquiescence in a Democratic Public Sphere" by Keith Holz

Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004. 359 pp.; 6 color ills., 86 b/w ills.

It is not his purpose to relate yet another "history of artists," fashioning biographical narratives "rendered all the more compelling by the displacements and hardships brought on by cataclysmic historical circumstances." Many such individual histories have been written, devoted to major figures of the Weimar art world--and of modernism--such as Max Beckmann and Paul Klee. By contrast, Holz focuses on "the discursive and institutional settings in which artists worked and lived" (p. 283) in those three cities. The result is indeed a different model--one might call it a political history of art--that privileges collective political action over individual aesthetic achievement, explicitly political subject matter over "autonomous" art.

It is therefore hardly surprising that most of the principal figures in Holz's account are artists largely forgotten today--the Prague art academy professor and painter Willi Nowak, for example, or, in Paris, the emigre graphic artist Max Lingner and the exiles Eugen Spiro and Heinz Lohmar. They and others equally or even more obscure played an instrumental role in the political activities of their respective exile communities. (Spiro's papers, seized by the Nazis and today housed in the state archives in Berlin, served as a major source for Holz.)

Of canonical artists, Holz's history most prominently features John Heartfield and Oskar Kokoschka; Max Ernst, who had moved to Paris in 1922, also participated in the activities of the exile community there. Heartfield and his brother Wieland Herzfelde fled Berlin for Prague in April 1933, where Herzfelde reestablished his Malik Verlag, which included the magazine AIZ (Arbeiter-illustrierte Zeitung), for which Heart-field continued to make his brilliant anti-Nazi photomontages, albeit for a now drastically smaller readership. The political deterioration in Austria led Kokoschka to relocate to Prague a year and a half later. Although Kokoschka kept aloof from exile activists in Czechoslovakia, strangely, they named their organization, Oskar-Kokoschka-Bund, formed in December 1937, after him. We are never told why; perhaps it was to valorize their own efforts by association with the name of a major artist. Moreover, as Holz writes, if his "renown enabled aloofness ... he seldom turned his back on the many refugees with far less clout or acclaim" (p. 75) than he enjoyed. Kokoschka lent support and his voice in certain exile initiatives, and his early portrait of Robert Freund, slashed by the Gestapo in a Vienna house search in May 1938, became an icon of Nazi barbarism. In the early war years he even took up explicitly political subject matter.

Although German scholars have previously dealt with many of the cases Holz discusses in his book, most of this material will be new to Anglophone readers. In addition, Holz's exhaustive research in archives, contemporary newspapers, and periodicals has yielded much new or little-known information, including invaluable photographic documentation by the Paris exile Josef Breitenbach. Further, he is the first author in any language to offer a synthetic overview of the activist German exile culture in Europe. By and large it is a sad, depressing tale of idealism and impotence in the face of the crimes of the ascendant and increasingly aggressive Third Reich, one in which the work of these organizations was repeatedly compromised or thwarted by the forces of appeasement or incomprehension. In this respect, Holz's study presents a trenchant contrast to the story of German exiles in the United States, where many Weimar refugees found acceptance and some--like Josef Albers, Walter Gropius, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe--not only flourished but went on to exert a significant impact on American art and architecture.

A number of German exile organizations figure in Holz's narrative. He concentrates on four: the Kollektiv deutscher Kunstler in Paris, which folded in March 1937; it was followed by the Deutscher Kunstlerbund (DKb) in September, which later renamed itself the Freier Kunstlerbund, or FKb; the Oskar-Kokoschka-Bund in Prague; and the Free German League of Culture in London. Holz sees them as a continuation, on foreign soil, of the progressive artists' organizations of the Weimar Republic, such as the Working Council for Art, the Cologne Progressives, the Red Group, and others.

The exhibitions in which the exiles were involved took various forms and had different agendas. Only two of the five shows on which Holz focuses--a caricature exhibition held in Prague in the spring of 1934 and the now famous Exhibition of Twentieth-Century German Art, shown at London's New Burlington Galleries in the summer of 1938--were art exhibitions in a conventional sense. The other endeavors, organized chiefly by the German exile community in Paris, suggest a growing realization that Hitler could not be effectively combated by art or even by caricature. Accordingly, the November 1938 Paris exhibition Freie Deutsche Kunst (Free German Art), vastly scaled down (100 to 120 artworks) from its original concept because of compromises necessitated by increasingly tense geopolitical circumstances, consisted of two parts, one devoted to German exile and emigre art, the other assertively political. Significantly, few of the works in the first section had any explicit political content. Consistent with the exhibition's title, they were intended to exemplify work produced under conditions of artistic freedom, and among them were artists (Klee, Beckmann, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner) who had remained aloof from any organized resistance. An exception was the slashed Kokoschka portrait, hung below a reproduction of a drawing by Auguste Renoir that had also been vandalized by the Gestapo in the same incident, its inclusion evidently intended to make the point that it was not only German art that became the target of Nazi barbarism. Apart from these two objects and a few other works with explicitly anti-Nazi subjects, the political message of the exhibition was con-fined to the second section, which included, without commentary, reproductions of Nazi art (as if the works themselves were their own indictment) and photographic documentation of Nazi human rights abuses.

Two other exhibitions were explicitly and exclusively didactic. Funf Jahre Hitler-Diktatur (Five Years of Hitler Dictatorship), which opened in January 1933, was organized for Paris by Lingner, Lohmar, and other artists associated with the DKb to mark the fifth anniversary of Hitler's seizure of power. Mounted in three rooms of a trade union building, it consisted of a dozen large panels of text and images documenting religious and racial persecution, concentration camps, book burnings, and other crimes of the National Socialists. Two days after the opening the German ambassador, on instructions from the German foreign minister, protested to the French government, which acted swiftly. Within twenty-four hours the police had draped the most offensive exhibits with white cloth, removed an inflammatory brochure, and canceled two scheduled lectures. Nine days later, reacting to further German protests, the government ordered more objects removed from exhibit.

Even before Free German Art was mounted, the DKb/FKb, in correspondence with German exiles in New York, began planning an even more ambitious didactic exhibition for the planned "Freedom Pavilion of the Forthcoming New York World's Fair." Titled Germany of Yesterday--Germany of Tomorrow, it consisted of thirty-three didactic panels of text and images that presented an overview of German history and culture, intended to dramatize the aberrations of the present. But the project was dead by January 1939. Once the sharply polemical thrust of the panels became clear, many backers of the Freedom Pavilion grew wary of provoking Germany. Meanwhile, the German embassy in Paris successfully petitioned the Bureau International des Expositions to kill the project.

So what of Holz's alternative model for a history of modern German art? In an earlier essay on the aborted World's Fair project, he wrote that "to describe these collaborative picture-text panels as a major achievement of exiled German artists ... directs art historical inquiry beyond modernism's focus on paintings, prints, and sculpture--often embraced without question as 'modern German art'--to include that potentially unwieldy expanse of materials often referred to as 'visual culture.'" (3) This recalls Martin Warnke's formulation that "if one considers all visual artifacts that are made with the aim of generating an effect as objects of art history, then the decisive criterion is no longer origination through an individual creative act but rather exertion of an influence through optical means." (4) This certainly fits the present case. Yet Holz, in his eagerness to valorize politically motivated visual practices, elides distinctions that were operative for the very artists whom he seeks to rescue from oblivion. One need only read the many quotations from his protagonists to discern that rather than demanding a politically engaged art, they vigorously affirmed the democratic principle of artistic freedom even as, through other means, they sought to educate a public about the nature of the Nazi state. At the opening of the Free German Art exhibition, for example, Spiro stressed that the FKb wanted to "avoid all political tendencies and opinions," affirming the principle of "individual freedom in art" (quoted in Holz, p. 229), even as, in the documentary section of that same exhibition, they launched a visual polemic against the Nazi regime. Earlier that year, many of these same FKb artists had mounted the trenchantly political Five Years of Hitler Dictatorship exhibition. A major artist like Max Ernst could continue to paint "autonomous" pictures even as he participated in the design of the World's Fair panels. This was not an either/or situation. It is tempting to draw the conclusion that in the virulent political crisis brought on by German fascism these artists learned an important lesson: they discovered the limits of their art's political agency and deployed their visual skills in more effective ways.

CHARLES W. HAXTHAUSEN is director of the Graduate Program in the History of Art and Faison-Pierson-Stoddard Professor of Art at Williams College [Williams College Graduate Program, Clark Art Institute, 225 South Street, Williamstown, Mass. 01267].

Notes

1. Holz relates one illuminating anecdote, evidently forgotten until he discovered it in the Reich-friendly Anglo-German Review. Shrewdly embracing a policy of what might be termed "Spitzweg diplomacy," Hitler sent Neville Chamberlain a painting by the Biedermeier master that the British prime minister had admired in the fuhrer's collection during a visit to Berchtesgaden.

2. See the definitive work on the "degenerate art" phenomenon by Christoph Zuschlag, "Entartete Kunst": Ausstellungsstrategien im Nazi-Deutschland, Heidelberger Kunstgeschichtliche Abhandlungen, n.s. (Worms: Wernersche Verlagsgesell-schaft, 1995).

3. Keith Holz, "Scenes from Exile in Western Europe: The Politics of Individual and Collective Endeavor among German Artists," in Exiles + Emigres: The Flight of European Artists from Hitler, ed. Stephanie Barron, exh. cat. (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art; New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1997), 43.

4. Martin Warnke, "Gegenstandsbereiche der Kunstgeschichte," in Kunstgeschichte: Eine Einfuhrung, by Hans Belting et al., 3rd rev. ed. (Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag, 1988), 21.