Michael Clarke visits an exhibition of art under 20th century dictators. Until recently, official art produced under European dictators in the 1930s and 1940s has been excluded from books and exhibitions surveying the period. A politically convenient polarisation was created between the supposedly progressive, modernist art of the free nations and an amorphous mass of reactionary, rhetorical art elsewhere.
Such an account is no longer acceptable. In the wake of the demolition of the Berlin Wall and perestroika, not to mention our own post-modern malaise, attitudes have changed. The Hayward Gallery’s Council of Europe exhibition “Art and Power: Europe under the Dictators 1930-1945”, directly reflects the new priorities.
The Hayward show, effectively opening with the 1937 Paris International Exhibition (which was dedicated to peace but which had the awesome German and Soviet pavilions confronting each other across the central mall) then moves on to Josep Lluis Sert and Lluis Lacasa’s unambiguously modernist and republican Spanish pavilion and its contents.
The most celebrated item, “Guernica”, appears here only in a reduced-scale photo-mural. But radical resistance to Franco’s advancing Nationalist forces is made substantially present with very closely related works by Picasso, such as “Mother and Dead Child”, “Head of A Crying Woman” and the very rude “Dream and Lie of Franco” etchings, set beside the equally significant “Still Life with Old Shoe” by Mir”, Dal!‘s “Soft Construction with Boiled Beans - Premonition of Civil War” and Gonzalez’s welded, near armour-plated mother and child, “La Montserrat” .
Three city centres follow, all aspiring to and sometimes achieving grandiose, even megalomaniac architectural and urban projects and each the epitome of the ruling regime. In Rome, two exhibitions only five years apart measure the shift from a still revolutionary, neo-Futurist art to one with an increasingly heavy-handed revival of the city’s imperial past.
In Moscow, the cultural revolution of the 1920s was soon eclipsed by a forceful unionisation of all media and the 1934 imposition of socialist realism. In Berlin, modernist art was removed from public galleries by 1936 and the following year, Goebbels could boast the state cultural chamber was entirely purged of Jews.
But however much the Italians and Germans reinterpreted the classical tradition, albeit in a vulgarised way, there is a distinct difference between Arturo Martini’s sensuous “Boxer” torso and Richard Scheibe’s hardened “Decathlete”, the latter no doubt intended as an image of the chosen, Aryan race but falling far short of its embodiment.
And while the far less rigorous regime of Mussolini tolerated and even exploited diverse modernist artists such as de Chirico, Fontana or Guttose, Stalin and Hitler banished and even murdered many more. If many visitors find Manzu’s tiny “Crucifixion”, a relief, with its obese helmeted guard bearing witness to a naked figure strung up by one arm, the most poignant image in the exhibition, other pieces by Klee, Kollwitz, Nolde and Kokoschka, all branded degenerates by the Nazis, will not fail to move.
Innumerable issues involving economics, sociology, politics and psychology arise out of the fine art, architecture, graphics, photography and film included in this exhibition. The extraordinarily wide range of speakers and talks on offer is an indication of the exhibition’s breadth and depth. But only rarely can one say that the average teenager, even one obsessed with sport and physical prowess, will be just as easily interested as the cultural historian. Without doubt, the dictators responded to and manipulated the rise of the masses.
Teachers and tutors might be encouraged by this. After the education evening spent with two of the exhibition curators and armed with the free information pack, they should confidently take advantage of the in-service training day, “Dictatorship and Propaganda”, organised jointly with the Imperial War Museum.
Then, after accompanying their student group on a guided tour of the Hayward show, take them next door to an exhibition of German photographs of the 1930s at the Royal Festival Hall. A-level, further education and higher education students with an exhibition ticket can book their own one-day workshop, “Monuments, Dictators and Propaganda”.
Hayward Gallery education department, tel: 0171-921 0951 and Imperial War Museum 0171-416 5313.
Art and Power: Europe under The Dictators 1930-1945, Hayward Gallery until January 21.
German photographs of the 1930s, Royal Festival Hall until January 14.
TES2 November 10 1995 Whisper who dares: Felix Nussbaum’s The Secret, from Art and Power at the Hayward Gallery, London
