Published: 9 August 2018
Last updated: 4 March 2024
The Wiener Library, with holds approximately 70,000 books and pamphlets, 45,000 photographs and more, is the oldest known depository of Holocaust-related material. It was founded in 1933 by Dr Alfred Wiener, a Jew who fled his native Germany after several years of documenting the growing tide of anti-Semitism in his country of birth.
The library’s current exhibition, London 1938: Defending 'Degenerate' German Art, pays tribute to a proud moment in art history when a small number of European art lovers decided to overturn the Nazi definition of “degenerate” art.
In 1937 the head of the Nazis’ Chamber of Visual Art organised the Degenerate Art Exhbition in Munich, one of the darker chapters in the annals of art history. Showcasing over 700 works of art that had been confiscated from German museums, it included work by Jews, naturally, but equally, modernist, avant-garde pieces by Gentiles which under any other definition were deemed contemporary masterpieces.
For the Nazis, the exhibition was an opportunity to illustrate that modernism was the result of genetic inferiority and society's moral decline.
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In 1938, in a direct challenge, the largest retrospective of modern German art in the English-speaking world was held in London. Twentieth Century German Art – which the Wiener exhibition is celebrating - showcased over 300 works by over 60 artists persecuted under the Third Reich.
The 1938 landmark event secured the backing of cultural figureheads, such as Virginia Woolf, HG Wells, and Picasso. Artists featured included Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, George Grosz, Paul Klee, Max Liebermann, Kurt Schwitters, Max Beckmann, and Wassily Kandinsky.
The main organisers of the exhibition were an English couple, a Swiss art dealer and a German critic. Noel 'Peter' Norton, whose gallery in Mayfair specialised in European modernism, and husband Clifford - who worked on UK-German relations at the Foreign Office - played a crucial role.
When Noel Norton was visiting Switzerland, she met with art dealer Irmgard Burchard, "the driving force" behind the London exhibit, whose Swiss passport enabled her to travel freely to meet with potential lenders in Switzerland. Burchard also made good use of the art contacts of her abstract artist husband Richard Paul Lohse.
The fourth key figure was émigré German-Jewish art critic Paul Westheim, who founded a 'German Artist's Association' in Paris in September 1937, although he eventually abandoned his London colleagues in favour of the more political Free German Art exhibition in Paris.
Their aim, as stated in the 1938 catalogue was "not concerned with the political aspect of this situation". Instead, "they merely affirm one principle: that art, as an expression of the human spirit in all its mutations, is only great in so far as it is free".
Although the Wiener Library exhibit is small in scope, it tells this remarkable story compellingly: original artworks, photographs, and other archive material narrate how this great curatorial challenge was met (with over 90 collections lending works), as well as the lives behind the so-called “degenerate” artists and collectors alike.
A select number of the original works from the London exhibition are displayed, including one by the inimitable George Grosz, Martini Cocktail (from a private collection, it is not dated): just a few pen strokes are enough to conjure up bar stools, a man feeling up a grotesque female figure, breasts exposed; a German bureaucrat in suit and tie sitting at the back looking onwards; all inter-war decadence and sleaze. Grosz was a staunch anti-Nazi, immigrating to the US with his family in 1933.
Ironically, the oil portrait on display, Junger Gelehrter (The Young Academic, 1918), by Expressionist Emil Nolde, a rabid anti-Semite, actually belonged to a German Jew, Ernst Nelkenstock (1893-1980), a lawyer who resettled in Britain in 1936. (As for Nolde, even his Nazi Party credentials did not prevent hundreds of his works being later removed from German museums.)
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Another German-Jewish family by the name of Plesch also donated prominently to the exhibition. Dr János Plesch, a Budapest-born doctor and famous society physician in Berlin, resettled his family in Britain after Hitler came to power. The Impressionist painter Max Slevogt gave Dr Plesch his 1931 work The Panther as a gift for having cured the artist of a stomach complaint.
The exhibition makes brilliant use of Wiener's extensive archives. There is an original copy of Pelican Press's Modern German Art, the first written on the subject in English, which was published to coincide with the exhibition and distributed to visitors.
The book, reads the cover, "treats art, not as something isolated from contemporary events, but as a mirror of its time in which one can learn to understand oneself and society".
Material relating to art history more broadly from this period is also included and provides fascinating background. One item is the original translation, scribbles and all, used at the Nuremberg Trial, of a letter from Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg to Hitler. In it Rosenberg details, in the desire to bring "some joy for [Hitler's] birthday", the seizure of prized art from Jewish collections.
"The Jewish owners and collectors only judged these collections by their monetary value", he writes, shockingly. "Consequently, they did not recognise the historical value and therefore showed no inclination to make these collections available for research."
The last vitrine in the exhibit contains a selection of the original correspondence between a German psychologist, Paul Plaut, with the artists Kandinsky, Max Lieberman, and Käthe Kollwitz (who the Nazis banned from showing her work, and whose international reputation ultimately saved her from the Gestapo).
Amusingly, Lieberman trashes the work of certain "established art scholars that know nothing about art”. “On the other hand,” he notes, “there are laymen that have a strong sense for art and have an accurate understanding of art, even modern art that has not been acknowledged yet”.
He concludes simply, “for those who are not born with it, any and all study of art will not help”. It’s a fitting note on which to end an exhibition denouncing the Nazi understanding of art.
Main photo: Hitler visits the 1937 Degenerate Art exhibition in Munich
