Salvador Dali was a fascist, I made a whole video about it and, aside from the comments
of people sympathizing with his worldview, many people commented that Dali’s opinions shouldn’t
affect our perception of his art. It’s the whole “can we separate the artist from his art” debate.
I want to bring up another fascist artist,
more specifically a Nazi one, not because I want to discredit his art,
but because I think we can learn a lot from his experience, as a Nazi artist, with fascism.
Let’s take a look at Emil Nolde’s Art and how it was received in Nazi Germany.
Emil Nolde was quite a successful and accomplished artist when the
Nazis took power. He was a member of the notorious Die Brucke group,
he was one of the pioneers of expressionism, often bringing religious motifs into modern art.
But Nolde was also a Nazi, as in he was a member of the nazi party. He would even denounce his
rival artists, such as Max Rechstein, as jews, despite them not being jewish.
In 1933, the same year Hitler took power, the 65 year-old Nolde attended a dinner
party with no other than the dictator himself. He would write to his wife:
“the celebration was deeply moving. We saw and heard the Führer for the first time ... The
Führer is high-minded and noble in his goals, an inspired man of action. Only a swarm of dark
spectres are responsible for clouding him in an artificially created cultural fog.
But it appears that soon the sun will break through, dispersing the fog.”
See, Nolde agreed a lot with Hitler, including on the jewish question which Nolde, along with
his wife, tried to answer by proposing a plan to forcefully deport all jews from Germany. However,
Nolde disagreed with Hitler on one thing, the future of German Art.
To talk about the debate surrounding the future of German Art in Nazi Germany, we
need to learn about the concept of Degenerate Art. Degenerate art is the nazi term for modern art,
an art which, to them, is un-German, Jewish, Communist. Nazis hated modern art and linked
it to “cultural bolshevism”, the idea that art (or culture broadly) was controlled by a
leftist jewish cabal seeking to destroy the white race. Nowadays, they call it “cultural marxism”.
So this degenerate art, one of the deranged mind, one of the jew,
was ultimately seen as a threat to Germany’s purity. So Hitler went to war with it.
This war mostly consisted of an exhibition seeking to discredit modern artists called
the “Entartete Kunst” exhibition. As I said in the video I made about that exhibition,
the objective was to kill degenerate artists, not by executing them, but by taking away their
status of artist, by convincing the public that what they did wasn’t art.
The Nazis confiscated over 16,000 works of art.
Otto Dix, Edvard Munch, Picasso, Van Gogh, Matisse, Kirchner… and Nolde.
Out of all degenerate artists, Nolde was the one most targeted by the Nazis despite
being a nazi. Himself. Over 1000 of his works were confiscated and,
at the Degenerate Art exhibition, the one aimed at delegitimizing and humiliating
artists, the artist having the most artworks on display was Emil Nolde.
Despite Nolde being a nazi, he was still betrayed by the leaders and the values he
looked up to. Despite being a patriot, despite his unconditional love for his country,
despite his hatred for jews, the nazis still persecuted him.
This persecution wouldn’t end at the Degenerate Art Exhibition. In 1941,
Nolde was prohibited from buying art supplies and from exhibiting his artworks.
This is where his unpainted pictures come in and,
as it turns out, these were just a way for Nolde to rehabilitate himself after the Nazis lost.
“I occasionally worked furtively in a small, partly hidden room. I had been
stripped of the right to obtain materials and it was almost only my small, special ideas,
which I was able to paint and capture on tiny sheets, my ‘unpainted pictures’, which were to
become large, real pictures when they and I were allowed to. Our beautiful picture room ... had,
through the ban, become the prison of my pictures, lonely and locked away.”
Nolde wasn’t banned from painting and had been practicing these small watercolour
paintings before his persecution. This story, pushed by Nolde himself,
was a way to make himself a martyr and rehabilitate himself in postwar Germany.
Here’s an artist who, despite being banned from painting by the nazis, bravely expressed himself
in a small hidden studio until the end of the war where he could paint again freely. Until recently,
the story didn’t mention that this brave artist was a nazi, even through his supposed ban.
For more on this, I invite you to read To The Bitter
End by Adam Tooze from The London Review of Books.
Fascism is undeniably on the rise, more concerningly in the United States, so what can we
learn from the fascist artist who got suppressed by fascists, but remained a fascist nonetheless?
I think there are two lessons we can learn from Nolde’s story
(and if you can think of any other, please share them in the comments).
First, it’s that fascism is an illness, an illness which is really difficult to cure. Nolde was
an extremely successful and popular artist and, through the authoritarian government he supported,
his art was censored, hidden and only revealed to the public in order to make a mockery out of it.
Nolde was mocked, ridiculed and humiliated by the nazis, but, nonetheless, Nolde remained a nazi.
This submissiveness of the authoritarian mind is almost pathological and should
be prevented because curing it is extremely difficult.
Second, if there are any fascists who got this far in this video,
in your ideal fascist state, you are not safe. Nolde thought he would be, and he wasn’t.
Authoritarianism is dangerous whether you’re on the side of the oppressor or not.
However, it’s hard for a fascist to recognize these dangers because, very often, the fascist
doesn’t know he’s a fascist. The fabricated external threat irrationally justifies his
positions, whether it be jews, communists, black people, gay people or trans people.
Emil Nolde was so caught up in these fabricated threats, these conspiracy theories,
that even when the nazis repressed him and his art, made a mockery out of him, he still
considered himself a nazi. When Hitler called Nolde a swine, Nolde still supported Hitler.
These fabricated threats are dangerous, not only for the people labelled as threats,
but for the people who believe these threats. Nolde was a great example of that.
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