Art: Politico-Esthetics

Last week St. Louis’ celebrated Egyptian Cat Case (TIME, Aug. 22), a row fiddled up by local newspapers over the City Art Museum’s expensive purchase of an Egyptian bronze, came to an end when the city Board of Aldermen voted 25-to-3 not to interfere with the museum or its funds.

More than a routine teapot tempest, this controversy stirred art professionals in the U. S. to weighty social thoughts, produced such ringing cries as that of Editor Alfred Frankfurter in Art News: “There is involved here a principle which far transcends the museum purchase. … It is the principle of the right of a cultural institution … toexist on behalf of the public without political interference or dictation.” Meanwhile, political interference and dictation throve mightily over half the continent of Europe. Critics these days are inclined to credit Adolf Hitler with intense political intelligence, but to a big majority of the world’s artists he remains a fool as well as a nuisance. Hitherto, Hitler has contented himself mainly with declaring what bad art is, has attacked all more or less experimental modern art as “Jewish” and “Bolshevist.” Last year he opened a hall of “degenerate” art in Munich which proved a great success (TIME, Aug. 2, 1937). At Nürnberg last month, Realmleader Hitler, having awarded Nazi Culture Prizes No. 1 and No. 2 to Warplane Designers Heinkel and Messerschmitt, surpassed himself as an esthetician with a new pronunciamento on German art. Now, said he. “the true ancestor of German art is Greek art of the golden age; the Greeks were a Northern people run aground on a Southern land.”

German art historians have already explained away German medieval art, which is anything but naturalistic, as, in the words of Herr Alfred Rosenberg, “turned away from its sources by Catholicism.” But. in his demand for neoclassic art in Germany, Führer Hitler did not refer to the fact that Raphael Mengs (1728-79), founder of the German neoclassic school, was half-Jew.