Critic Hitler (Sequel)

One of the softer ironies at which perceptive Nazis squirm became visible last week in Bavaria. Opened by Realmleader Hitler with a 90-minute tirade against post-war esthetics (TIME, July 26), the new, massive House of German Art in Munich drew daily throngs of youths and maidens looking for Strength Through Joy in a collection of conventional paintings by young Nazi discoveries. But for every visitor who paid 50 pfennigs to see what the Fuehrer liked in the way of art, three visitors went down the street a little to see for nothing what the Fuehrer despises. This part of the lesson was provided by the Nazi Ministry of Education, which opened an exhibition of "degenerate art" at the old National Gallery.

To Adolf Hitler all painting is degenerate which either 1) departs from the faithful rendering of natural objects or 2) manifests humor or revulsion at such Nazi ideals as War and Womanhood. Since a great deal of the lively German art of the last 20 years comes under one or both categories, big German galleries have found it politic to pack their modern art collections away in cellars out of reach of Nazi bravos. Nevertheless the Nazi Ministry of Education had a wide field for its selection. Professor Adolf Ziegler of the Reich Chamber of Art, a tall young man with wavy blond hair who paints competent nudes, came from Berlin for the opening and declared:

"I was immeasurably astonished to find that some of these documents of a decadent art ... were still being exhibited until a few days ago in the public galleries. . . . Whole railroad trains would not have been enough to clear this rubbish out of the German museums. This has yet to be done and will be done very shortly. . . . One can say that everything that is holy to a decent German necessarily had to be trampled in the mud here."

Place of honor in Professor Ziegler's rubbish was occupied by a futuristic oil painting, The Adventurer by Satirist George Grosz, done in 1917 and sold in 1928 to the Dresden Stadt-Museum. Gaping Nazis gazed at the figure of a cowboy poised with savage alertness and virility amid cubistic vortices of skyscrapers, smokestacks, scaffolding, jazz dancers, bright lights and detached female contours, the Stars & Stripes appearing over his right shoulder. Not on exhibition were any of Grosz's brambly line drawings of Nazi Jew baitings and miscellaneous bestialities which won him, besides an international reputation, the special hatred of Herr Hitler. Artist Grosz now lives quietly on Long Island's Little Neck Bay.

In a hall devoted to "Insults to the Honor of German War Heroes" were several etchings by Draughtsman Otto Dix, who ranks with Grosz for his skilled and brutal memories of trench fighting (TIME, Aug. 6, 1934). Another section oddly entitled "The Mocking of Christianity" displayed Emil Nolde's Christ and the Thieves which the National Gallery in Berlin bought for $10,000 in 1930. There were also "A Peasant Scene from a Jewish Point of View," "The Manifestation of the Soul of the Jewish Race" and a group called "The Derision of the German Women." But the greater part of the exhibition was devoted to specimens of the cubist, futurist and surrealist schools whose experiments with scientific form and fantastic subject matter have made a Gordian knot of artistic theories. Art critics in Paris, London and Manhattan last week regarded Adolf Hitler's latest slash at this knot as possibly something more than the action of a man who lacks either the subtlety to untie it or the humor to let it alone. European surrealists have recently publicly allied themselves with the French and Spanish Communists, thus provoking the Fuehrer's political enmity as well as his esthetic rage.

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