Art Criticism - The State University of New York

Between World War I and World War II, Max Nordau's Degeneration
of 1892 became popular reading in Gennany. The work denigrated Tolstoy,
Nietzche, Zola, the Pre-Raphaelites, and artists of a romantic nature as examples
of social deterioration. In Nordau's eyes, nineteenth century realism
was the culmination of tradition in the arts. The avant-garde came to be seen as
on the same level with the insane, being labeled antisocial for their hyperindividualism
and their attempts to explore emotions. They were the unhealthy
in art, as opposed to the tradition of empirical realism, and so the terms of
"degenerate" and "healthy" came-to be used to describe art.
A group of art philosophers built on Nordau's theme of the deterioration
in modern art. Hans Guenther, in his Race and Style, declared that the
Hellenistic image of beauty is purely Nordic. His book connected the style of
an artist with that artist's race, art becoming a representation of man and his
race. The consequence was that nineteenth century naturalism, which would
become Hitler's favorite genre, became associated with the Nordic, while styles
like Impressionism were de-Nordic because they accept~d ugliness as reality.3
Guenther defined the task of the Nordic race, the epitome of pure health in his
eyes, as protecting itself from the degeneration of society indicated by the
work of the avant-garde. The illness indexed by the avant-garde was also
associated with Jewishness, as nineteenth century German psychiatry believed
the Jew to be more susceptible to insanity and inherently degenerate. 4
Similar things were written by Ferdinand Clauss, and these ideas were later
picked up by Hitler, who, in 1935, would state that the artist should never
depict dirt for dirt's sake, or depict "cretins as representatives of manly
strengths."5 Instead, Hitler believed German artists should glorify the racial
structures of their people. 6
In 1928, Paul Schultze-Naumburg published his book Art and Race, in
which figures painted by Impressionists and Expressionists were juxtaposed
to photos of the diseased and deformed. Here, Guenther's connection between
race and style became hereditary determinism; every being tried to continue
the lineage of its kind and it used art to this end. What the artist portrayed was
his conquering ethnic specimen. The art of "inferior" races deviated from the
naturalism of Nordic art, just as that inferior race has itself deviated from the
healthy Nordic race, similar to Nordau's idea of degeneration. These thoughts
culminated in Alfred Rosenberg's Myth of the Twentieth Century in which he
characterized German Expressionism as infantile and claimed that it was Nordics
who built German cathedrals, Greek sculptures, and Italian Renaissance
masterpieces. One third of Rosenberg's text was devoted to art's importance in
society, and his synthesis of Guenther, Clauss, and Schultze-Naumburg was
popular, though he would later find out at the Nuremberg trials that even the
high officials in the Reich had not read his texts very closely.7 Nonetheless, in
1933, soon after Hitler had been made chancellor, Rosenberg was made "Cus-
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Art Criticism