September 10, 2012
Modernism is based on the idea that art is too good for us, that only a rarefied academic elite of gnostic initiates is sophisticated enough to reinterpret ugliness and dysfunction as desirable. This mentality pervaded the Romanian-Jewish-Bolshevik art movement known as Dada.
At a Zurich exhibit in 1916, Dada’s uneducated phalanx triumphed. Anyone who did not fall down prostrate and worship Marcel Duchamp’s urinal as a piece of art was branded an uncomprehending hayseed to be crushed.
Ever since, modernism’s elitism and occult self-mythologizing have remained en vigueur.
The Third Reich’s proto-Obamist art scions differed little from their Jewish antecedents. Like the imperious cabalists of Dadaism, cubism, surrealism, and Fauvism, the Nazis continued modernism’s project of divorcing art from reality, but this time through realism because they could draw.
Hitler ingeniously applied the lessons of anti-art to advance his maniacal ends. His Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibit, featuring confiscated modernist paintings and sculpture, was not the only show in Munich in 1937. It accompanied the opening of Hitler’s Haus der Deutschen Kunst (House of German Art). The latter housed a collection mixing uninspired realism with a uniquely Völkisch pornography on a scale of poor taste matched only by Andrew Wyeth’s paintings of horn-wearing Valkyrie Helga Testorf.
Understanding modernism’s not-so-hidden agenda, the Nazis were better off than we are. They recognized modern art for the degenerate thing it is. Today’s art students are taught that 1916 was an annus mirabilis that freed art from the shackles of form, figure, lighting, drawing, perspective, composition, genius, beauty, truth, and the moral principle.
Ironically, the Jewish-Bolshevik art most appreciated by today’s corn-fed self-sophisticates is what led to Hitler’s Deutschen Kunst. The ignorant Romanian Dadaist Tristan Tzara paved the way for Hubert Lanzinger’s portrait of Hitler, “The Standard-Bearer.” Nazis and Jews both transformed art to serve remarkably similar utopias.
One generation of socialists empties art of its divine principles and another subsequently refills it with its own brand of emptiness. The operative Latin proverb is Abyssus abyssum invocat: “One hell summons another.”
The difference is that Nazi modernists were decent draftsmen”not great, but adequate. Unfortunately, good drawing is only a technique, its causality merely instrumental. It can never be art’s causa finalis. When technique becomes art’s ultimate purpose, art can only be good and dead. To be great and alive, something more is required.
