The second in a 3-part series that traces the historical and cultural influences that spurred the rise of modernism from the flames of conflict in early 20thcentury Western Europe

Germany

Art- Painting ‘The Bridge’ to the Future

The story of German modernist art begins where France’s leaves off. Its course and place in history are very different, however. Its path to glory was short and tumultuous; its light burning bright and furiously for a matter of just three decades or so, before it was snuffed out by unforeseen political events. Like their brethren in England and France, the German artistic community rose to prominence opportunistically, in response to social and political events around them. But unlike England and France, the radical message of modernism, as embodied in the paintings, designs and writings of the German intelligentsia (significantly, many of whom were Russian ex-patriots) would be viewed as anathema to the political goals of the ruling élite, with them and their work eventually marginalized, outlawed or destroyed. Germany’s rapid rise to power and prominence and its equally dramatic decline in the first few decades of the 20th century, had profound and tragic consequences for millions, not the least of whom were the small number of artists and other creative agents for change who met with ridicule, forced emigration and even death. fine arts magazine

Throughout much of the 18th and 19th century, Germanic styling in art and design remained locked in the traditions of previous generations. After setting the stage for radical reform in artistic expression, the northern European regional style of Brueghel, Dürer and Rembrandt from centuries earlier settled into a pattern that reflected Romantic Revivalism and pastoral allegorical styling, burdened with images of shepherds, milk maids, grazing cows and quiet country scenes. As though ignoring lessoned learned, German painting seemed little-affected by the same Enlightened thinking responsible for much of the cultural innovations found in England and France and the European ‘Low Countries’ during the same period. According to Harman, the lack of a cohesive response to cultural thinking and aesthetic movements unfolding elsewhere in the Europe at the time was due, in large part, to the lack of an overarching political identity for the fiefdoms and small nation-states that comprised the regions of northern and eastern Europe at the time. For a brief period, after the formation of the Second Reich in 1871, there could be seen a resurgence of interest among artists in classical Greek and Roman themes of courtly celebration and heroic battle scenes; but, it was short-lived and more political ‘theater’ than a serious, thematic artistic trend (Harman History: 379-386).

Only after 1905, and for reasons that will be explored in the next section, did a cohesive German ‘school’ of painting emerge and this, in direct response to a recently- emerging German nationalistic agenda and a sweeping call for radical change in governance and social institutions being heard in neighboring Italy, Russia and Slavic nations in the region, at that time. German art during this period was called Expressionism, and its mood was somber and challenging. Far from idealizing the themes of industrialization and modern technology, artists like Eric Heckel, Ernst Kirchner (Artillerymen, 1915) and Constantin Brancusi were issuing visual manifestos through their paintings, calling for an end to conflict and violent confrontation. Artistic communities consisted of a mix of Germans, Russians and some Scandinavians, most of whom espoused views colored by Marxism, Bolshevism and communal solutions to problems associated with urban tensions and mass labor unrest. Worst of all, many were Jews.

The inspiration for a new, experimental form of painting in Germany came from a short-lived French post-Impressionist movement called Fauvism (French for ‘wild animal’). From 1905-10, Fauvism was the rage of the avant-garde in Paris, in the work of van Gogh, Matisse, Derain and Rouault. Its use of daring, bold colors, distorted figures and hard-edged forms and abstraction suited the German art community well. In its directness, they saw the opportunity to communicate their increasing dissatisfaction with the world around them and specifically, with the social and political turmoil that was roiling the intellectual community at the time.

“Although based largely in Germany, Expressionism rose from the banal vestiges of 19th century sentimental aesthetics to become a northern European, regional art movement expressing profound unrest and the search for ‘truth’ through experimentation with color and form. Artists like Erik Nolde, Gustav Klimt (The Scream, 1893), Wassily Kandinsky and Max Beckman explored the destruction of genuine feelings by a society, which they felt needed to be ‘cleansed’ or ‘purified’. The artists often depicted these themes through representations of natural or man-made disasters or the inhuman conditions of everyday life” (Little 104). Foreboding at first, as these artists began to chronicle the catastrophic impact of the Great War, their painting morphed into a bizarre reflection on the profound impact of war and political dissent on the human psyche.

Two schools emerged (1905-20). “The first, Die Brüke (the Bridge), rejected classical traditions, turning to nature and the ‘primitive’ (as artifacts of African colonialization became available for inspiration) to redefine and rejuvenate German art. Working in Berlin during the second decade of the 1900s, their work came to be seen as harbingers of destruction and loss. According to Little, in spite of that, they saw their role as exploring the essence of German cultural identity and tradition. The second school (in fact, a communal collective] …included a significant group of Russian artists and, through their paintings and writings, reflected a more overtly mystical and spiritual truth to be discovered in the world. [Named the Blue Rider Group after a painting of a blue horse by Franz Marc (1911), left, that came to symbolize their philosophy of empowered change]… their paintings adopted a softer color range and more abstract themes. Both groups shared the conviction that art could express an intrinsic human truth and restore meaning to people’s lives” (Little 104-5).

The other German artistic movement of consequence to emerge after the war was the Bauhaus school (literally, ‘house for building’), founded in Weimar in 1919. The Bauhaus was founded by combining the now-defunct 19th century Weimar Art Academy and the Weimar Arts and Crafts School, in an effort to embrace long-lost Germanic values of craftsmanship and industriousness. More an academy of art and functional design than a distinctive art movement, the Bauhaus spawned a faculty-student initiative in both the arts and crafts that was to define the term ‘modern’ in the arts, architecture and utilitarian objects (e.g.-chairs, kitchen utensils, graphic design, group housing, theater, painting), some of which persist to this day. With Walter Gropius as its founder-director, well-know faculty also included Josef Albers, Marcel Breuer (his chair design, 1923, from bicycle parts, right), Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Mies van der Rohe and Lazlo Moholy-Nagy.

The Bauhaus school was founded at the dawn of the Second Weimar Republic to rebuild the country after a devastating war and also form a new social order. As a social program, the Bauhaus’s ideals were that the artist must recognize his social responsibility to the community and likewise, the community must accept and support the artist. In the artistic theory, the Bauhaus school strived to produce a new approach to architecture that incorporated artistic design, craftsmanship, and modern machine technology. Their aim was the use the principles of Classical architecture in its pure form without ornamentation. Bauhaus set the tone for what modernist design would eventually become on both sides of the Atlantic for the first half of the 20th century.

The major goals of the school were to encourage craftsman and artists to collaborate, to elevate the status of crafts, and to maintain relations with industry and craft leaders and to eventually become independent of government control. Like most small, independently-run experimental arts programs, it soon ran into administrative and political difficulty. In 1925, the School was forced to move to Dessau. When Gropius resigned as leader of the Bauhaus in 1928, he was later succeeded, in 1930, by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. He eventually turned the institution into a private academy in Berlin in 1932, a liberal and largely Jewish institution now sitting on the front doorstep of the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP) and Hitler’s perverse ambitions. With a violent knock on the door on April 13, 1933, the Nazis officially closed the Bauhaus institution’s doors forever.

After the school’s closing in 1933, many of its artists moved to the United States in hopes of finding the freedom to pursue their own artistic expression. The functional design proponents of the Bauhaus school dispersed, along with their desire to articulate contemporary culture through the creation of new forms, designed for everyday living. The Bauhaus Style, then used in the production of everyday items, had also spread into fields, such as typography and theater. In the U.S. and France, it influenced the geometric, Art Deco Movement and continued to influence fields of art and design until well into the 1950s.

In the United States, leaders Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, Marcel Breuer among others, helped to promote the beauty and value of Bauhaus architecture. “Bauhaus buildings characteristically have flat roofs, smooth facades, and cubic shapes. The materials and colors preferred were basic and affordable. The buildings’ floor plans are usually open in design and the furniture is functional. It was re-named the International Style after the book written under the same title by historian and critic Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Connecticut architect, Philip Johnson. The book was published in 1932 at the same time an introductory exhibition was held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In America, the International Style became a symbol of capitalism rather than social reform and was the favored style for office buildings and upscale homes” (Dempsey 213).

Politics- Burning ‘The Bridge’ to the future

“Prior to national unification in 1871, central Europe was a maze of more than 300 city-states, duchies, principalities and independently-run fiefdoms, depending largely on feudal-style serfdom and an agrarian economy for their livelihood”(Peukert 35). The historical factors leading up to unification and the formation o the German nation-state are too complex to consider for purposes of this document, but a brief summary highlights the defeat of Napoleon in 1815 and with it, the end of French control over portions of what was to become the German Confederation (Deutsche Bund) and with it, the end of the old Holy Roman Empire. “Consisting of large portions of Austria, Prussia and a variety of German states, this coalition attempted to agree on terms of unification over several decades (including the March Revolution of 1848), but to no avail. Under Prussian King Frederick William IV and his brother William I a series of conflicts during the 1850s and ‘60s with its neighbors to the north and south expanded the borders of the Germanic peoples” (Peukert 48-9).

By Davies accounting, William I’s most significant accomplishment as king was the nomination of Otto von Bismarck (left) as chancellor in 1862. His vision for a unified Germany, realized through a combination of military cunning, political acumen and a swift victory in the Franco-Prussian War in 1870-71, was realized when French Emperor Napoleon III was taken prisoner. In Paris, a new republic was hastily announced. Realizing that a victorious Germany would demand territorial acquisitions, the French resolved to fight on. In response, the Germans settled down to a grim siege of Paris. The starving city surrendered in January 1871, and the Prussian army staged a victory parade on the streets of Paris followed by an assembly in the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles, where Prussian King Wilhelm I would be crowned ‘German Emperor’. France was forced to pay indemnities and to cede Alsace-Lorraine. It was a bitter peace that would leave the French thirsting for revenge; a price exacted some forty years later when they entered the Great War against Germany.

With Otto von Bismarck once again established as chancellor, the new German empire was swept with a sense of intense national pride. The pace of industrial growth quickened and the economy, historically lagging behind other western nations, experienced rapid expansion. Under the terms of unification, the constitution of the Second German Reich gave the emperor exclusive power to appoint or dismiss his chancellor. He also was supreme commander-in-chief of the armed forces and final arbiter of foreign policy. But freedom of speech, association, and religion were nonetheless guaranteed by the constitution. Railroad lines soon crisscrossed the country and industrialization expanded with earnest. Bismarck’s influence ran to every corner of national policy, from foreign treaties, to promoting colonization in Africa and Asia, to legislative initiatives aimed at quelling labor unrest (Davies 766-74).

Another perceived threat was the rise of the Socialist Workers’ Party (later known as the Social Democratic Party of Germany), whose declared aim was the establishment of a new socialist order through the transformation of existing political and social conditions. “From 1878, Bismarck tried to repress the social democratic movement by outlawing the party’s organization, its assemblies and most of its newspapers. Through the introduction of a social insurance system, on the other hand, he hoped to win the support of the working classes for the Empire” (Peukert 70). During this protracted period of industrial build-up, Germany, under Bismarck’s leadership entered into, what Moore refers to as, “a rough working coalition between influential sectors of the landed upper class and the emerging commercial and manufacturing interests…Where [this] coalition succeeds in establishing itself, there has followed a prolonged period of conservative and even authoritarian government, which…falls short of fascism” (Moore 436-7). But the center was not to hold.

With Bismarck’s resignation under the new Emperor William II in 1890 (and his death in 1898), Germany pursued an ambitious plan of national influence and internal militarization to protect against a possible Franco-Russian alliance, which would trap them between two countries with a history of aggressive action against them. With the assassination of Arch-Duke Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo in 1914, the tangled web of alliances and mutual defense pacts that Germany had entered into with their neighbors over the decades drew them inexorably into World War I. It was a war that everyone believed would be over in a few months. But, instead, it dragged on for five long years. Eighty percent of the war was fought on French and German soil and the subsequent loss had devastating consequences for German national pride, an entire lost male generation and its national economy and infrastructure.

Germany emerged from the war in 1919 a pale shadow of its former self. In the years leading up to the war, the German People enjoyed a significant degree of social and economic stability. “Two forces contended for the allegiance of the population: the Prussian state and the million-strong Social Democratic Party (SPD). Each regularly abuse the other, and on occasion engaged in carefully restricted forms of direct action against its antagonist. Neither recognized the legitimacy of the other. Yet neither thought seriously of upsetting the stable framework within which they both operated; a framework whose main components had endured for nearly half a century without serious challenge, and which the state and the Social democracy alike assumed would circumscribe their actions into the indefinite future” (Harman “Lost” 13). Thus, in the wake of Wilhelm II’s resignation after a humiliating defeat by the Triple Entente (United Kingdom, France, Russia and later, the U.S.), The Second Weimar Republic was formed in 1919, embodying many of the features of the Social Democratic systems that had served them well in the pre-war years. In the absence of an imperial leader, a loose parliamentary democracy was established, with an appointed president. “The two biggest enemies of the new democratic order, however, had already been constituted. In December 1918, the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) was founded, followed in January 1919 by the establishment of the German Workers’ Party, later known as the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP). Both parties would make reckless use of the freedoms guaranteed by the new constitution in their fight against the Weimar Republic” (Peukert 103). [Note: the Bauhaus school was founded at this juncture in German political history]

Post-war controls of important regions of German industrial and raw materials’ production were being controlled by the allies. Economic hardship and the rise of competing parties protesting and plotting to capture the hearts and minds of a population, feeling increasingly displaced and dissatisfied with failing governmental solutions, meant that the decade of the 1920s was tumultuous and disastrous for the Social Democratic model.

Harman contends that the failed Marxist revolution on German soil, planned for October, 1923, cleared the way for fascist elements lurking to the far right to make in-roads into a failing representative system of governance. Had it succeeded, he believes that the horrors perpetrated by the Nazi regime would never have occurred and the world would be a very different place today. “Lenin did not believe that a workers’ revolt could succeed on Russian soil. He eyed Germany, recognizing that a small, highly populated and industrially-sophisticated country would be far more likely to offer him a platform for a Marxist-inspired revolt. He misread worker dissatisfaction in 1918-20 and [again] in 1923. He believed that reformist thinking among Social Democrats would not be strong enough or convincing enough to hold the line against a carefully-planned worker revolt against the bourgeois elements in the German industrial and bureaucratic sectors of society. He was wrong…Moscow continued to confuse the Social Democrats with the fascists, ignoring the threat of real fascism on the viability of their movement…By the time the [global depression] of 1929-33 hit, Communist influence in Germany was all but defeated. While the Nazis made their way towards power, the KDP continued to talk gibberish about the danger of ‘social fascism’ and to lull workers to sleep with the slogan, ‘After Hitler, us’ ” (Harman “Lost” 307).

Summary

While England and France experienced serious social and political growing pains during the period of modernization, the central components of a civil and progressive society remained intact, allowing both countries to effectively enter the post-World War II period with their industrial infrastructure and political will to pick up the shattered pieces of their societies and begin to rebuild. Their artistic and intellectual communities had also continued to thrive, variously occupying—during one period-of-time or another in the one-hundred-year interval covered by this document—center stage as the voice and image-makers of rapidly-changing times for their own nation and western democracy, in general.

Germany, on the other hand, arrived late to the table of modern, industrialized nation-states, and then allowed their gluttony for territory, power and a nationalistic agenda to drive them to the brink of obliteration—not once, but twice in a thirty year period! Unlike their counterparts in this comparative analysis, Germany’s feeding frenzy, fueled first by the politically-enfeebled and incompetent leaders of the Second Weimar Republic, followed closely by Hitler’s zeal and hatred for the impure and divergent, devoured the artistic community around them, including that in occupied France, other captured territories and similarly-inclined Italy and Spain. German artistic expression, an admixture of radical visual invention, leftist-leaning political activism and a genuine desire to reawaken a German identity lost to the exigencies of time, was misread as odious to the conservative national agenda, pitting artist against politician for center stage. German leadership saw threats where none existed, complicated by racial and ethnic prejudice and a need to tightly control ‘the message’. There was no room for divergence in a Fascist model of governance, proclaimed by Rocco in 1925 as:

“The Fascist concept then of the nation, of the scope of the state, and of the relations obtaining between society and its individual components, rejects entirely the doctrine which I have said proceeded from the theories of natural law developed in the course of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and which form the basis of the liberal, democratic and socialistic ideology” (Cohen 8).

Ironically, much of what Hitler derided, he also secretly admired. While he ordered the Bauhaus school closed in ‘33, he then adopted their styling characteristics in the public buildings and propaganda material he had created. The Volkswagon (‘People’s Car), which he had designed and first appeared in, in 1939, was based on ‘boxy’ Bauhaus styling. He and his henchman regularly derided modern art as decadent, cutting works by Matisse, Picasso and others from their frames and hanging them in highly publicized Decadent Art Exhibitions (seen touring, above with Himmler, rear right, in 1938), together with crude drawings by patients from local mental hospitals; while, for their own eventual enjoyment, they clandestinely hoarded confiscated masterpieces from wealthy Jewish victims and captured museums, in warehouses throughout Europe.

Today, the world celebrates the work of English and French artists from the earliest modern period to the present. The paintings of Turner and Whistler, Monet and Cezanne have come to symbolize what a free and open society can produce. A liberal or permissive political climate, like that of the Georgian and Victorian courts of England and France’s Second Republic and its Third, Belle Epoque trumpeting the end of the 19th century, fueled and inspired by artistic creation.

Conversely, seen in Germany during that same period were:

a. a floundering nationalist agenda, plagued by weak or misdirected political priorities;

b. Lenin and his Marxist ambitions aimed squarely at the German populous;

c. a fledgling, but ambitious military-industrial complex aimed at hegonomy;

d. a multi-layered political infrastructure aimed at meaningful unification, arriving late on the international stage;

e. a struggling social-democratic model that was being progressively weakened by internal power struggles;

f. ultimately, a lost war;

g. crippling reparations and foreign involvement in German affairs that followed;

h. disastrous economic hardships, depression and hyper-inflation;

i. and, then…an introverted, resentful and lonely Viennese art-school reject with political ambitions, who was willing to play the game, waiting in the wings to accede to positions of greater power through a flawed, pernicious and slowly disintegrating ‘democratic’ system.

For those artists who were to survive this deadly and demoralizing period in German history, escape to the west or the eventual and long-delayed discovery by the critical eye of history were their only pathways to notoriety. Gropius’s entrance into that Harvard classroom in 1938 (See Part 1 of this article, December 2010 archive) was merely one small act, symbolizing, in a broader sense, an end to European dominance in the fields of art and design. Its death-throe scenario would ultimately play out violently on the world stage, as Hitler provoked another world war. By its conclusion, in 1945, the center of cultural influence would have shifted to the United States, with New York City as the new locus for artistic influence and cultural gravitas in the world.

In the final analysis, the experimental arts can only flourish in a tolerant democratic environment and, as Germany in the early 20th century demonstrated—in an ironic reversal of logic—creativity and free artistic expression are the ultimate enemies of totalitarianism.

by Richard Friswell, Executive Editor

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Bibliography (citations for Part 1 & 2 of series):

Cohen, Carl (Ed.). Communism, Fascism and Democracy- the Theoretical Foundations.  From a reprinted article by Alfredo Rocco, “The Doctrine of Fascism” (1925 321), New York: Random House, 1962.

Davies, Norman. Europe, A History. New York: Harper Perennial, 1996.

Dempsey, Amy.  Art in the Modern Era- A Guide to Styles, Schools & Movements 1860 to the Present. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers, 2002.

Dunn, Susan (Ed. & Intro.), The Social Contract; and the first and second discourses/ Jean-Jacques Rousseau. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002.

Harman, Chris. A People’s History of the World. London & New York: Verso, 1999.

Harman, Chris. The Lost Revolution: Germany, 1918-1923. London: Bookmarks, 1982.

Hughes, Robert. The Shock of the New. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1991.

Huntington, Samuel. Political Order in Changing Societies. New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1968.

Johnson, Paul. The Birth of the Modern. New York: Harper Perennial, 1991.

Little, Stephen.  …isms: Understanding Art, New York: Universe Publishing, 2005.

Moore, Barrington. Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy. Boston: Beacon Press, 1966.

Peukert, Detlev. The Weimar Republic: the Crisis of Classical Modernity. New York: Hill and Wang, 1992.

Pinkney, David H. Napoleon III and the Rebuilding of Paris . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1958; paperback ed., 1972

Poggi, Gianfranco. The Development of the Modern State- A Sociological Introduction.  Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1978.

Samu, Heilbrunn. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Timeline of Art History– Impressionism, Art and Modernity. Publ. by the Institute of Fine Arts, New York: New York University Press, 2000.

Weston, Richard. Modernism. London: Phaidon, 1996.

Williams, Roger L. The Mortal Napoleon III. Princeton, NJ: University Press, 1971.