Adolf Ziegler's “Four Elements: Fire, Water and Earth, Air” which Hitler displayed at home.
By HOLLAND COTTER
ART REVIEW
When the Artists Voted for the Politics of Order
Guggenheim Museum is giving us the opposite in its major fall exhibition, “Chaos and Classicism: Art in France, Italy, and Germany, 1918-1936.”
In Germany the time would soon come to an end when a painting like Hoch’s could be safely made. But during the postwar Weimar era, artists still had options. The same year Hoch painted “Roma” the art critic Gustav Hartlaub published an authoritative list dividing German modernists into two opposing, evenly populated categories: right-winger classicists and left-winger realists.
Within a few years such distinctions would be meaningless. They meant less than nothing to a new man in power, Hitler, who hated modernism, period. At the same time he loved the idea of classicism, with its cult of perfection and disdain for emotion. He even managed to make a case for the direct descent of Teutonic Germans from ancient Greeks.
It’s with Nazi- and Fascist-sponsored classicism — classicism as political bludgeon — that the show concludes in a gallery at the top of the Guggenheim’s ramp. Here the repressed memory of an earlier war seems to erupt into hallucinations of another to come in Georg Kolbe’s towering bronze brute of a male nude warrior and Arturo Martini’s sculpture of Athena as an avenging Valkyrie.
Most chilling of all is a painted triptych by Adolf Ziegler of four young, nude blond women personifying the four elements. The picture, with its kitschy hyperrealist style, is harmless enough, apart from one detail of its history: That is the painting Hitler chose to put over his apartment mantelpiece when he became leader of the Third Reich.
One final work, a short clip from Leni Riefenstahl’s “Olympia” (1936-38), takes us up to the eve of World War II. Mostly it’s a fluid tour, with a triumphalist score, of Greek temple ruins at Olympia and the Acropolis, interspersed with shots of sculptures. Suddenly a sculpture, the “Discobolus” of Myron, comes to life in the form of one of the German athletes who competed in the 1936 Berlin Olympics, the film’s main subject. In a stroke of trick editing, a link between two golden ages, Periclean Greece and Nazi Germany, is made.
The transformation is ingenious and ridiculous; appalling, though not really shocking. If post-modernism has done nothing else, it has long since disabused us of the notion that art is, by definition, an expression of any culture’s better nature. “Olympia” can be admired as an aesthetic monument and loathed as political artifact.
In his rigorous and relentless exhibition Mr. Silver extends the same bifurcated moral assessment to many other works of art more and less “great,” and some really bad, though by the time you reach the end of the show, such differences don’t matter. By that point you’re not really seeing objects. You’re seeing scorch marks and bloodstains on the Guggenheim’s pristine walls.
