Art: Hofer & Co. Come Back

Berlin’s first major postwar art show was strictly non-Nazi. Every one of the 25 exhibiting artists had been in bad odor with Adolf Hitler, the onetime house painter.

Best known in the U.S. was Professor Karl Hofer, 67, a steady follower of Cázanne, and a venerated teacher at the Berlin Academy until the Nazis, kicked him out. In 1938, the Carnegie International jury gave its $1.000 first prize to Hofer’s The Wind, which pictured two defenseless figures huddling against a swirl ; it might well have been the ill wind faced by non-Nazi Germans. Herr Goebbels, the furious Fährer of Nazi art, who had previously let Hofer paint but not exhibit in Germany, thereupon forbade him to paint at all. But Hofer managed to keep at it— although he was twice bombed out of his Berlin home, and lost all his work. Last week’s show included 18 Hofer canvases.

Most of the others had also been banned by Goebbels—because they were Jews, democrats or “degenerate artists.” Their work, as now seen, proved to be essentially conservative. Only 10% of the show’s 180 paintings and sculptures touched on war.

The Berlin show had an understandable bread & butter motive; 30,000 marks worth was quickly sold, with the artists getting 85% of the take. Appropriately, the exhibit was staged in Goebbels’ former rubber-stamp art works, the Reichskultur-kammer.