Art: Nazi Art

Hitler’s taste in art (a big batch of samples has reached the U.S.) was despised by critics, but it was embarrassingly like the taste of the U.S. public. He admired the cloying cleanliness of calendar pictures and the photographic homespun (characteristic of Saturday Evening Post covers), contemned “modern” art. (His taste got no further than 1870.) In sculpture, he went for ferocious eagles and muscular nudes which lacked the serenity of their Greek models. He thought buildings should be monumental in the neo-Roman postoffice style, but more severely simple than the U.S. variety.

The 42 samples of Nazi art which ap peared this week in the October Magazine of Art were brought to the U.S. by a re turned G.I., Lincoln Kirstein, balletomane son of the late board chairman of Boston’s Filene’s department store. Along with the stuff that was just what Hitler ordered was some he didn’t like. Much of his dis like was concentrated on the bold inventiveness which made Germany’s famed Bauhaus school an international incubator of tubular steel chairs, “functional” flat-roofed glass-and-concrete houses, and abstract paintings like Lyonel Feininger’s Glorious Victory of the Sloop Maria.

Hitler tolerated no such experimental painting, sculpture or architecture. The Nazi-approved paintings were technically excellent, detailed, naturalistic studies like Stepp Hilz’s tired pin-up girl Vanity. Hitler’s favorite sculptor, Arno Breker, had ground out dozens of gladiators whose muscles, wrote Kirstein,. “seem pushed to explosion, the brows scowl in furrows with sincere paranoiac delusion. But they are not impressive. . . .”