Elizabeth M. Grady

All rights reserved. Copyright 2000.

(A talk given at a symposium on art and politics in the Weimar Republic at DePaul University on February 4, 2000)

Introduction
    In the wake of the 1918 German revolution, dramatic changes were made in the exhibition and acquisition policies of the National Gallery in Berlin. Before the revolution, the Kaiser had maintained firm control over the museum, frequently exercising his veto power over acquisitions, and effectively excluding modern art from its collections. The Kaiser’s abdication and the formation of a democratic government provided a new opportunity for the expansion of the National Gallery’s collections. In response to the director’s own taste, and to the demands of revolutionary artists’ groups that the museum embrace the work of all living artists - including modernists - policies of acquisition and exhibition were changed. The museum began almost immediately to collect Expressionist art, and the importance the director placed on exhibiting it was confirmed by the establishment of a special exhibition space for modern art in the former palace of the crown prince.
    However the changes made were not popular with everyone. Many critics and art officials opposed the introduction of Expressionist art into public museums, believing it had not yet proven itself as a viable historical movement. And in some cases, their attacks on the National Gallery, its director, Ludwig Justi, and his policies took on a heated political tone. This tone was partly the result of the fact that, because of the national figurehead status of the museum, it was seen as an important expression of the nation’s identity. When it began to exhibit the Expressionist art associated with the Revolution, some saw this as an embrace of the economic and political chaos of the first years of the Republic, making the choice a nationalist issue. It was in this climate that Justi chose to exhibit a series of drawings and watercolors of the Ruhr industrial region by Conrad Felixmüller. The director’s choice of artist and subject had the potential to substantially fuel the flames of criticism. This was due to the sensitive nature of the ongoing French occupation of the region, and the well-known leftist political allegiances of the artist. And this was not lost on the cultural minister, Haenisch, and his assistant, Nentwig, whose administration oversaw the National Gallery’s activities. The Cultural Ministry protested the exhibition on political grounds, indicating its trepidation about the potentially damaging responses of critics in the press. The interchange of letters between the cultural minister and the director of the National Gallery regarding the exhibition of Felixmüller’s Ruhr images indicates that there were forces working to politicize modern art and the exhibition policies of the National Gallery in an effort to discredit them. Contrary to the popular belief, then, that such tactics only became widespread with the foundation of the National Socialist Fighting League for German Culture in 1928, I will demonstrate that the roots of parts of their ideology and their strategies to change the nation’s cultural policy in fact are to be found much earlier. This paper will explore both the nationalist motivations for wanting to discredit modern art and National Gallery policies, and the repercussions of politicizing them.

What was at stake in the National Gallery?
    The National Gallery’s figurehead status is key to understanding the heated tone of the debates that accompanied the exhibition and acquisition policy decisions made by its director, Ludwig Justi. Any government institution with the power to control the ideological projection of the nation’s self-image was a participant, willing or not, in national politics. This issue of national self-representation and art took on special importance because there was a general conviction that the leading styles in art were expressive of the state of society, and were the outcome of the historical conditions that influenced it. The stakes in controlling the museum were doubly serious because the National Gallery was one of the last and most visible public institutions remaining from the Wilhelmine empire. For those who feared the political changes that accompanied the revolutionary upheaval of 1918-1919, and who longed for the restoration of the economic and political stability and national pride that the Wilhelmine empire represented, any change in this institution was likely to be seen as a negative one, mirroring the chaos of the historical moment.
    That the director, Justi was aware of the real and symbolic functions of the museum is clear from his pronouncements and actions. He believed the main task of the National Gallery was to exhibit modern German art, educating the people about their culture. And he believed that when he presented Expressionist art, he was presenting a manifestation of the "collective spirit", promoting a spiritual movement born of community. Although he was not explicitly nationalistic in these descriptions, he was working to establish Expressionism as the next phase in the development of German art. However, in light of the nationalistic implications of the museum’s activities, this choice became a highly contested one. As a reflection of the state of society, Expressionism was both embraced and rejected in the first years of the new Republic. Either its idealistic visions of social change could represent the hope of a spiritual revitalization of culture and society, or it could be seen as the expression of the tumultuous times in which it was produced. As it happened, it became irrevocably associated with the political instability, and the economic catastrophe of hyper-inflation, that marked the immediate postwar years. It was this negative association that lent so much strength to the arguments of critics who sought to discredit modern art, and the National Gallery’s policies supporting it.

Justi’s choice
    However, this negative association of modern art with a difficult period in German history was certainly not always apparent in critical reviews of art exhibitions – both private and public. It was typical even for those critics opposed to it, to criticize it on formal rather than political grounds. And for this reason, the Ministry of Culture had no reason to take issue with the exhibition policies of the National Gallery before 1923. This raises the question of why the Felixmüller show suddenly provoked criticism – and on explicitly political grounds.
    Justi’s choice to exhibit Felixmüller’s work is not particularly surprising if one places it in the context of the other art that he was showing and collecting. He had demonstrated a clear preference for Expressionist art by acquiring a number of works by Kirchner, Heckel, Pechstein and Schmidt-Rottluff in the immediate postwar years. In particular, he favored the artists of the Brücke, or Bridge, group in Dresden. Felixmüller was seen by many as an heir to this legacy. He too was from Dresden and had exhibited at the Galerie Arnold there, which had been a common exhibition venue for the group. Thus, by exhibiting the work of a very young artist who, however, was working within a preferred modernist mode, Justi could answer the demands of artists’ groups to show the latest modern art without giving up his predilection for the Brücke and its brand of Expressionism. In addition, Felixmüller had come to be seen as one of the rising stars of the new generation of artists. He had been a child prodigy, beginning a study of drawing at the School of Applied Arts in Dresden at the age of 12, and entering the Academy at 17. He had shown at several of the major modern galleries, including the Sturm Gallery and I.B. Neumann in Berlin, and his work had traveled fairly extensively within Germany. The choice to exhibit his work was therefore a natural one.
    Justi also preferred to avoid politically controversial art in both his acquisition and exhibition policies. Although it was his mission to make the National Gallery a major modern art museum, he carefully avoided art that might provoke controversy, preferring to collect landscapes and still lives that were unlikely to be morally or politically misconstrued. And in spite of his embrace of most modernists - at least in exhibitions of loaned works - he usually avoided the socially critical work of artists like Grosz, Schlichter, and Scholz. That this was a policy decision made to avoid public criticism of the changes he was making becomes clear in the examples of the artists chosen for major exhibitions. These predictably included Kirchner and Heckel of the Brücke, but also the artists Macke and Marc. The latter two had both fallen in World War I, so even in the cases of conservative critics who disliked Expressionism, these artists were acceptable due to their war-hero status.
    Based on the fact that Felixmüller would have seemed an obvious choice to Justi, and on the fact of the director’s tendency to dodge controversy, it seems probable that he anticipated little controversy to arise over the 1923 show. In fact, in his response letter to the cultural minister’s criticism, he claimed that the exhibition had no political meaning, particularly since the images had been made some time before the Ruhr conflict came to a head. However, this assumption appears in retrospect to have been rather naïve.
    Felixmüller’s work had long been concerned with the mining workers of the Ruhr region. And his letters and his Communist Party membership indicate that this interest was politically motivated. When he won the Saxon State Prize in 1920, he used it to study in the Ruhr for two years – the only artist ever to win the prize who did not use it to study in Rome. He had made a remarkable number of images of the lives of workers, including several with clear political connotations. He expressed deep sympathy toward the Red Ruhr Army - a militia organized by unions to oppose the March, 1920 Kapp Putsch in Berlin, which was then brutally suppressed for fear of its revolutionary potential after the putsch attempt had been foiled. These images had begun to be exhibited as early as the fall of 1920. They were also among the first to become well known by a nationwide audience.
    By 1923, as a result of the exhibition of the Ruhr images, Felixmüller was widely known as an artist of the industrial proletariat. Although, as was frequently the case with socially critical art, his work was usually evaluated by critics on its formal merits, a couple of key articles indicate the widespread awareness of the political motivations behind it. On the occasion of an exhibition in Heilbronn, the local critic Franke characterized Felixmüller as having a special love for the proletariat. Further, he said that in the work one sees the brutality of everyday existence for the workers. The use of the term proletariat indicates the author’s awareness of the artist’s political convictions, and his insight is elaborated in his description of the scenes as brutal. That this was typical of a general awareness is further indicated by an article by the leftist critic Carl Sternheim in the nationally circulated arts magazine Der Cicerone, likely written before the National Gallery exhibition opened, but published in the month of the show (October). He claimed that Felixmüller’s art unmasked the proletariat, which had previously been invisible to the bourgeoisie. He said too that Felixmüller had been criticized by unnamed critics as a Communist. So even someone as sympathetic to the artist as the critic Sternheim conceded that his work had been subject to criticism on political grounds.
    Therefore, although Justi was apparently acting in line with his overall mission, and presumably had not abandoned his strategies to avoid potentially damaging criticism of his policies by showing controversial art, it seems that he inadvertently offered his opponents – of which there were many – a prime opportunity to politically justify their ongoing criticism in this show. This opportunity was created by first choosing a demonstrably leftist artist, and additionally choosing an artist whose latest and best-known body of work was made up exclusively of controversial subject matter. Long before the Felixmüller show was mounted in the fall of 1923, the politicization of the criticism of the National Gallery had already begun. It offered the public, which was newly exposed on a widespread scale to modern art, and still in the process of forming its opinions, a stilted and negative viewpoint. This viewpoint was rarely countered in the press by overwhelmingly positive and enthusiastic evaluations of modernism – at best, the vast majority of articles were neutral or ambivalent. Thus the choice to exhibit Felixmüller’s images of mining workers in the Ruhr valley had the potential to feed the flames of this politicization, giving opponents of the National Gallery a tangible justification for their opinions, and making their ideas more convincing to the public at large. It was precisely this potential that motivated the first recorded intervention in the activities of the National Gallery in the Weimar Republic by the Cultural Ministry that oversaw it.

The minister’s protest
    Shortly after the opening of the exhibition, which was around the middle of October, 1923, reviews of it started to appear. While some were positive and others negative, aside from the occasional reference to the proletarian subject matter, they did not mention the political implications of the works, much less predicate their criticism on politics. However, in a letter of 29 October, the cultural minister let it be known through his deputy Nentwig that he was quite displeased that Justi had mounted the Felixmüller show without consulting him. In particular, he cited a negative review published on October 19 in the daily newspaper, the Berliner Tageblatt, saying that in the future he insisted that Justi notify him of exhibitions before they were discussed in the press – particularly, as in this case, when they had political implications. However, as in the other reviews, the article cited bases its criticism on the style, not the politics, of the artworks. Since the review itself lacks explicit political references, and certainly does not criticize the art on a political basis, but rather formally, the minister’s own politicization of the exhibition is peculiar. This raises the question of what he believed was at stake in avoiding the politicization of the exhibitions in the National Gallery.
    Nentwig protested in particular the review’s characterization of the exhibition as one whose theme was the Ruhr region. He drew the conclusion from this that the exhibition was a "matter of political significance". In order to understand this statement, we will have to briefly examine the events in the Ruhr at the time of the exhibition.
    At the end of 1922 the French marched into the Ruhr on the pretext of guaranteeing war reparations shipments of coal and other materials, which had been delayed. By January 11, 1923 they firmly occupied the region. This move met with a strong nationalist response from the Germans, who feared that France was trying to permanently separate the Rheinland from the rest of the country. They initiated a policy of "passive resistance" in which all industrial and railway workers were encouraged to do whatever they could to avoid lending any aid to the French in carrying out their plans. The workers were compensated by the German government, which financed its plan by printing money, sending inflation skyrocketing. By the end of the summer it was clear that the policy was not working, as the French were bringing in more cooperative workers to further their goals, and the printing of money was crippling the German economy. On the 26^th of September, 1923, the policy was ended, and the French had won an apparent victory.
    It is certainly significant that images of the Ruhr called to mind heated political issues, and this played a role in the minister’s protest. However, since the Revolution the National Gallery had not been criticized once by the Cultural Ministry until the Felixmüller show. Therefore, I believe that there was more at stake than the Ruhr crisis. The normal interactions between the National Gallery and the Ministry involved the support of Justi’s policies and actions. All acquisitions had to be approved by the Ministry, so it was well aware of his campaign to make the National Gallery the premier museum of modern German art. Previously, even in the extremely rare cases when a critic attacked the National Gallery, naming specific politically controversial images, such as in the 1921 critique in Der Tag where George Grosz’s Barricade Battle is mentioned, the Cultural Ministry stayed firmly out of the fray. Thus the occasion of the 1923 protest is all the more peculiar, as not only was the press criticism based on formal rather than political grounds, but it was quite out of character for the Ministry to involve itself in the day to day activities of the museum. Nentwig’s apprehension cannot be adequately explained, then, by examining the political issue of the Ruhr occupation. Instead, it is the issue of the politicization of the criticism of the new policies of the National Gallery and its director that must be explored.

The history of politicized criticism
    The policy changes made by the director of the National Gallery first began to be subject to criticism on political grounds in 1920, on the occasion of the very first show in the National Gallery’s modern affiliate. The criticism of this show of modernist works was particularly damaging because its primary source was the highly respected critic and influential magazine editor Karl Scheffler of Art and Artists, whose ideas received wide distribution in the press at large. It marked the beginning of an ongoing and extremely damaging public debate between Scheffler and Justi over the inclusion of modern art in the museum’s collections and exhibitions, which came to a head in Scheffler’s book Berlin Museum War of 1921.
    In it, he accused Justi of promoting politically revolutionary ideas by introducing modern art into the National Gallery, linking modernism with radical politics. He railed against Justi’s policies to embrace supposedly political modern art in a diatribe intended to discredit the director by attacking each aspect of his professional activity in turn. It is on the basis of these criticisms that he called for the removal of the director. Although he received little initial support for this radical step, the firing of Justi became a rallying cry for right-wing ideologues in the last years of the Republic. This raises the question of Scheffler’s motivations in trying to make modern art and those who supported it appear to be politically subversive.
    Scheffler’s motivation appears to have been nationalism. He revealed this perspective when he stated that such policies as Justi’s would be to the detriment of the well being of the very German nation itself. This charge, and the fact that such a prominent critic as Scheffler promoted it, contributed significantly to the perception that both modern art and the activities of the director of the National Gallery were subversive and somehow potentially dangerous. He also suggested that if Justi were to remain the director of the National Gallery, he would surely make a caricature of the art of the Republic, and went on to call for changes in museums for the sake of the pride of Germany, reiterating the appeal to his readers’ national pride toward the end of the book.
    Scheffler’s attacks were intended to have two results. The first was that people would associate modern art with an extremely unpleasant chapter in their nation’s history, the Revolution, and thus oppose its introduction into the museum. The second was that they would view the art thus associated with revolution as inappropriate for a museum whose job was to represent the nation’s cultural identity, thus fomenting opposition to Ludwig Justi and his policies to acquire and exhibit modern art.
    The debate in the press over the changes made in the National Gallery, and particularly those regarding the acquisition and exhibition of Expressionist art, publicized a politicized view of both the museum and the art, with criticism rooted in a nationalist perspective. In protesting an exhibition whose subject matter indirectly addressed such a strongly nationalist issue as the Ruhr crisis, the cultural minister feared, I believe, precisely this sort of criticism, and its potential to facilitate the development of a widespread negative and politicized public opinion of modern art.

Justi’s response
    Justi’s rebuttal of November 15, 1923 indicated his belief that the minister’s concern about the impact of the show on public art opinion was not justified. It also demonstrated his opinion that politics was only dangerous in this context when it was used as a tool to discredit his actions and policies. He refused to acknowledge that Felixmüller’s art was political, saying that it couldn’t possibly have been referring to the Ruhr struggle, as the images were made before the French occupation. In fact, Justi said, he had tried to avoid conflict by postponing the show until the passive resistance in the Ruhr was over. In addition, to the best of Justi’s knowledge, not one critic had indicated a link between the exhibition and the Ruhr struggle. But the following passage in the letter is telling. He indicated his own sensitivity to political issues, describing unnamed critics who had been trying to discredit him by ascribing political motivations to his actions. Although the critics remained unnamed, he said that they used terms such as the "Politics of the Streets" and the "Proletkult", to which he was supposedly subscribing, to describe his new policies. Significantly, these are the terms that were used in the most virulently politicizing sections of Scheffler’s Berlin Museum War. It is almost as though Justi had read between the lines of Nentwig’s protest, cutting to the heart of the issues that were, in fact, motivating his caution. Those issues included the nationalist-motivated politicization of the activities and policies of the National Gallery and its director. Its goal was to discredit them, causing Expressionist art and other "undesirable" representations of national identity to be removed from the museum.

Why politicization was dangerous
    All of this talk of politicization leads almost inevitably to the question of why it was an important issue at all. So what if a few conservative critics saw the activities of the museum as political? Surely there have always been critics of modern art, and of progressive change in public institutions. What could have been so threatening that the cultural minister would intervene in the National Gallery’s activities and try to forestall such criticism?
    Attacks on Ludwig Justi, the National Gallery, and Expressionism in general began almost immediately after the founding of the Weimar Republic and continued into and throughout the period of the National Socialist government. On the left, Justi was criticized by artists and critics sympathetic to them as being far too conservative, generally refusing to exhibit or acquire abstract and Constructivist art. In the political center Justi found critics who favored Impressionism over Expressionism, disagreeing with his introduction of what they saw as an unproven style into the hallowed halls of the National Gallery. The moderates tended in particular to criticize his taste and specific acquisitions or exhibitions. On the far right the critics complained bitterly of the misuse of government funds in acquisitions.
    The final, and by far the most dangerous and virulent of these attackers were the right-wing middle class cultural organizations, who regularly attacked the National Gallery and its director on nationalist grounds. This was almost certainly because they did not want the culture of the German nation, as represented in the National Gallery, to be associated with a period of economic crisis and political unrest – especially since, in the last years of the Republic, when they were most active, these problems were all too familiar. Their activities began as early as 1920 with the founding of the German Art Society, but began to intensify after the onset of the world economic crisis and National Socialist electoral gains. It was at this time – in 1928 – that the National Socialist Fighting League for German Culture was founded. For these groups, culture had become a tool in the battle for political power, used both to gain the sympathy of socially conservative voters who had not committed politically to the National Socialists, and as a topic of argument in specific electoral campaigns. The roots of the use of politicized criticism as a political – rather than a cultural – tool are to be found in such early events as the press attacks on Justi and the National Gallery by Scheffler. That this was already seen as dangerous is demonstrated by the impact of politicized criticism on the perceptions of the Felixmüller show by the Cultural Ministry.
    The basic issue of nationalism and the function of the National Gallery as the representative of German culture underlie all debates over the introduction of modern art into the museum. These changes were undertaken in a situation which ensured their widespread publicity. Any major act by a public museum was sure to be publicized in this period of heated art debates, and the changes in accessibility brought more people into the museums to witness the changes. Therefore while exposing the public to modern art and enhancing accessibility, the museums were also heightening awareness of the policy changes that had been made, contributing to a situation in which people were more likely to develop strong opinions. The economic hardship that led both to social instability and to profound changes in the art market in the early years of the Republic created an atmosphere of cultural and political conservatism, where people longed for images of a retrospectively idealized past in the years of the monarchy. Partly due to their influence, there was a dramatic rise in the incidence of articles in the daily press critical of modern art. Thus the negative and politicized opinion of modern art, reinforced by the opinions of respected art experts such as Scheffler, was created by a combination of widespread public critique, economic desperation and allegiance to the past. The basic agreement between broad sectors of the middle class and right-wing extremists in the cultural sphere opened new possibilities for the persecution of modern art and its supporters. These possibilities were exploited for political gain in the last years of the Weimar Republic, and were the precondition for the popular success of National Socialist exhibitions defaming modern art, beginning already in 1933.
    Thus the Conrad Felixmüller show of October, 1923 marks one of the key moments when the association of politics with modern art and museum policies favoring it became cemented in the public consciousness. Both the public perception of the political nature of Felixmüller’s art and the Ministry’s strong reaction to it indicate the power it had to reinforce the notion of many people that modern art was inherently political. And the fact that the show was organized by the most visible art institution in the country ensured that the entire nation would witness it. Thus the exhibition confirmed the worst fears and political accusations of the museum’s critics. By exhibiting art that was widely recognized as being politically motivated, and choosing art associated with such a profoundly important nationalist issue as the fate of the Ruhr, the National Gallery - willing or not – was providing the means for the present, but especially the future public rejection of its new policies and the use of modern art as a political tool. As a result of the criticism of aggressive and influential critics such as Karl Scheffler, and the seeming confirmation of their opinions by the Felixmüller exhibition, the political opposition to modern art became a convincing, and thus popular position. Its popularity enabled the far right wing to use it as a rallying cry in their efforts to attract moderate middle class voters. It was also used by the National Socialists to gain support for their aggressive, damaging, and ultimately successful efforts to change Germany’s cultural policy.
    Therefore Nentwig’s politicized criticism of the Felixmüller show, and Justi’s defensive response demonstrate the strength of the nationalist factions’ criticism of the National Gallery and its power to influence the museum. It was this pre-existing strength of politicized criticism to influence people that was adopted, ready-made, by right wing extremists. Thus the highly politicized, anti-modernist actions taken by right-wing and National Socialist-affiliated cultural groups in the last years of the Weimar Republic had their roots in the first years of the period.