GERMANY: Leda and Leader

Addressing a session of the annual Congress of German Art last week at Munich, Bavarian Minister of Interior Adolf Wagner welcomed the artists present, assured them that if the present world knew anything about contemporary German art, it would be recognized as indispensable.

Before the Führer’s arrival, Minister of Propaganda Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels next day expounded “the reunion of art with the mass of the people,” maintained that until the Nazis came along, modern German art had been degenerating because the Jews controlled it. “The people wandered away from art because they had no understanding of this [degenerate] art.”

Speaking his piece on the third and last day, Herr Hitler (whose surprising honored guest was George Astachov, Russian Chargeé d’Affaires) was a little more critical. He lamented that no artists had recorded any of the great events in National Socialist Germany with skill, talent and force comparable with paintings of other epochs.

A good idea of what is considered high art in the Third Reich today may be deduced from a purchase made by the Führer himself at Munich’s Congress two years ago. Reportedly to decorate his bedroom, he paid 15,000 marks for Professor Adolph Ziegler’s (President of the Reich Chamber of Graphic & Plastic Arts) full-length, photographic female nude Terpsichore. Prior to the purchase, its voluptuous model had accompanied the Reich Leader through the exhibition. Almost anywhere else in the world Terpsichore would be considered the kind of thing to put on a beer ad calendar. Not so in the new Germany. Last week the Munich show’s 1939 sensation was Paul M. Padua’s Leda With the Swan, equally beerotic.