Art and Politics: Between Purity and Propaganda 9789048531516

Citation preview

Art and Politics

Art and Politics Between Purity and Propaganda

Joes Segal

AUP

Originally published as: Joes Segal, Kunst en politiek. Tussen zuiverheid en propaganda, Amsterdam University Press, 2015 [isbn 978-90-8964-789-4] Cover illustration: Vandalized Lenin Bust, 1965/89, The Wende Museum, Los Angeles Cover design: Studio Ron van Roon, Amsterdam Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout Amsterdam University Press English-language titles are distributed in the US and Canada by the University of Chicago Press. 978 94 6298 178 2 isbn e-isbn 978 90 4853 151 6 (pdf) e-isbn 978 90 4853 152 3 (ePub) nur 654 © J. Segal / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2016 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher. For works of visual artists affiliated with a CISAC-organization, copyright is governed by Pictoright Amsterdam. © c/o Pictoright Amsterdam 2016

Contents Introduction 7 1. Positive and Negative Integration

17

2. Between Nationalism and Communism

31

3. National and Degenerate Art

45

4. Internal and External Enemies

61

5. From Maoism to Capitalist Communism

79

6. The In-Between Space

99

The First World War in France and Germany

Diego Rivera and Mexican Muralism

The Third Reich

The Cold War

The People’s Republic of China

Kara Walker’s Shadow Murals

7. A Heavy Heritage

Monuments in the former Soviet Bloc

111

Conclusion 129 Notes 137 Bibliography 153 Index of names

163

Introduction In an interview from 1962, the American Abstract Expressionist painter Barnett Newman reviewed the meaning of his abstract artwork: ‘[Art critic] Harold Rosenberg challenged me to explain what one of my paintings could possibly mean to the world. My answer was that if he and others could read it properly, it would mean the end of all state capitalism and totalitarianism.’1 What is striking about this statement is not just that Newman apparently saw his abstract art as a tool to help defeat political systems, but also that he, in the heat of the Cold War, rejected both American ‘state capitalism’ and Soviet ‘totalitarianism.’ In the meantime, the US State Department, supported by the United States Information Agency (USIA) since 1953, had aided, mostly behind the scenes, the organization of a series of traveling exhibitions of American art outside the United States. The idea was to showcase the high quality and diversity of contemporary American art in order to convince an international public of the open, tolerant and progressive character of American society. Among the traveling works were paintings by Newman. The American government used his work to engage in soft diplomacy or, to put it more crudely, in cultural propaganda. However, the works by Newman and other abstract American painters were not very popular among conservative critics and politicians. Congressman George Dondero (Rep., Michigan) even recognized in these incomprehensible and ‘ugly’ works a communist conspiracy, organized by the Soviet Union in order to destabilize American society. According to American politicians, the works of Barnett Newman, with their anti-capitalist and anti-communist intention,

exemplified true American values and posed a subversive communist threat. Newman’s example illustrates that the relations between art and politics are seldom straightforward. Even when the artist has well-defined ideas about the political meaning of his or her work, critics can interpret it in a radically different way. Moreover, politicians and government agencies may project their own ideas, interests and fears on artworks. This is due to the fact that the visual arts cannot easily be reduced to unambiguous statements or clear-cut arguments. Even the interpretation of a photograph, in itself a mechanical and ‘objective’ reproduction of everyday reality, derives its meaning in large part from ‘subjective’ elements like perspective, framing, lighting, focus, timing, caption and contextual presentation. In the visual arts the subjective element tends to be even stronger, because most artists do not aim to ‘represent reality.’ In the course of world art history, they have abstracted, idealized, romanticized, criticized and ridiculed this reality in every conceivable way. Moreover, the interpretation of art is seldom unambiguous. This is understandable when we realize that we interpret visual images on the basis of a shared knowledge of interpretative traditions. Iconography, the sub-field of art history dealing with the symbolic meaning of visual motives, reconstructs historical meaning that is for us no longer self-evident or even comprehensible, because social, religious or cultural changes have disentangled the relation between image and traditional interpretation. On the other hand, the artist has the power to develop or refine existing traditions, or to appropriate them in accordance with his own views. Around the middle of the nineteenth century, the idea of an artistic avant-garde took root in parts of Europe: an art that would do justice to the quick 8

and radical changes of ‘modernization.’ Exactly because these avant-garde artists consciously separated themselves from well-defined artistic traditions, which they believed had lost their topical meaning, they could no longer rely on traditional associations between image and interpretation. This naturally implied a loss of guidance for the art public. Interpreting modern art became an adventure. The essays in this book focus on one specific aspect of artistic interpretation: the political meaning of art. This meaning is in no way restricted to artworks with a declared political intention. The most interesting cases tend to be those works which at first sight are politically ambiguous or have no political meaning at all. According to the dominant view of post-war Western art history, modern art is considered ‘pure’ and ‘autonomous.’ American art critic and art historian Clement Greenberg expressed this idea in a very principled way: the ultimate aim of modern art is fundamental research into its own means of visual expression. Art, on the other hand, that is not self-referential but refers to external reality, real or imagined, should be dismissed as pseudo-art or kitsch.2 Although hardly ever expressed in such polemical terms, most reference books on modern art are clearly informed by Greenberg’s view, for instance in their sketching a ‘logical’ development towards abstract art and in their lack of interest in figurative and, for that matter, non-Western art forms. To this day, reference books in which Socialist Realist art receives the same attention as modern art are sparse. That is in no way self-evident: interesting and important artworks have also been produced in socialist regimes. In this collection of essays I use another perspective by analyzing the political implications of the very idea of a pure and apolitical modern art. 

9

Why this book? Surprisingly, there are not many publications that explicitly focus on the multiform relations between art and politics in an international perspective. Historical studies tend to emphasize historical ruptures and preferably use the visual arts to illustrate such moments of fundamental change and discontinuity. Art historians, on the other hand, are less inclined to ‘reduce’ artworks to their historical context, but tend to emphasize the evolution of artistic styles and ideas as a dynamic process of action and reaction within the more or less autonomous realm of ‘art.’ In these essays I try to combine both approaches by focusing on the often complex and even paradoxical relations between art and politics. My thesis is that any attempt to define a clear opposition between ‘political’ art on the one hand and ‘pure’ or ‘autonomous’ art on the other, is fundamentally flawed, because these are theoretical concepts that do not reflect historical reality. In this sense, my approach differs from most other books on art and politics.3 The aim of this book is to find out how the visual arts in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have related to political dreams and realities. On the basis of seven case studies I want to explore how artworks can express, illustrate, support, construct, qualify, criticize or subvert political ideas, ideals and ideologies; and, vice versa, how they have been and are being used, directed, contested, dismissed, censored or reinterpreted by politicians and others. As Barnett Newman’s example clearly shows, art’s political meaning is constructed at various levels. Four of these will be prominently addressed in this book: artistic intention; critical reception; art historical and historical contextualization; and political use or abuse. In other words: what does the artist want to express with his or her work; how is it interpreted by professional critics and 10 

the art public at large; how is it presented as part of a meaningful (art) historical process; and how is it deployed by politicians, governments and secret agencies to serve political interests? A complicating factor is of course that critics, (art) historians and politicians may have radically different viewpoints among themselves. Even the seemingly unambiguous level of ‘artistic intention’ can be problematic, as artists might not have a clear opinion about the political content of their work, might adjust their ideas according to the political circumstances, or might develop ideas that cannot be reduced to any political meaning whatsoever. The concept of ‘art’ itself is far from unambiguous and constantly subject to more or less (un)inspiring attempts to define it. The borders between art and visual culture are hotly contested within the relatively new academic discipline of Visual Culture Studies, and increasingly within the more traditional Art History departments worldwide as well, and the same holds true for the traditional borders between ‘high culture’ and ‘low culture.’ This is a positive development, in my view, as the social and political meaning of visual culture is not restricted to the traditional domain of ‘visual art.’ However, in this book I take a pragmatic stance and focus on those visual works that played a significant role in the discussions on political identity and ideology. Commercial advertisements, traffic lights, and selfies posted on Facebook are therefore not to be found in this book. The essays cover the years 1914-2014 and specifically focus on the role of art in times of political tension, crisis or rupture. At the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, an important transformation took place in Western art. Influenced by the Enlightenment and the American and French Revolutions, history came to be 

11

viewed as a process that was not primarily steered by fate or providence but by human intervention. This belief in human agency informed a series of competing utopian and ideological fantasies of a better or ideal future in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Thanks to the rise of public museums, exhibitions, and an art market that became accessible to a rapidly growing number of people, many artists were less dependent on traditional commissions from the Church, the Court, and the aristocracy. Some of them served the growing tide of popular nationalism, others expressed social critique in their work or severed the ties with artistic traditions they believed were no longer able to express the modern sense of life. In short, the artist became part of public discourse. However, it is not without reason that this book starts in 1914. With the outbreak of World War I in August 1914, the worlds of art and politics almost completely merged for the first time. All over Europe, artists volunteered for military service, supported the national cause with artworks and pamphlets, and all of a sudden publicly identified with an art history rewritten along exclusively nationalist lines. The war immensely reinforced a tendency to define the art world in terms of bipolar oppositions, a phenomenon that would define much of twentieth-century art history. Public debates during the First World War focused on national art vs. ‘internationalism’; in Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich national art was opposed to ‘degenerate’ art. During the Cold War, Western art critics and art historians played out the free, autonomous, pure, and modern art of Western democracies against the visual propaganda or ‘kitsch’ produced under state socialism; in the socialist world, on the other hand, future-oriented artistic engagement at home was confronted with formalism and ‘bourgeois 12 

decadence’ in Western capitalist art. In all these cases, the struggle against the artistic Other implied a fight against the internal enemy: those artists and critics who identified with art forms now associated with the external enemy. In short: since the First World War, art has become a means to ‘measure’ political identity. The very structure of these debates show remarkable parallels in completely different historical contexts, as I will try to show. The seven case studies in this book discuss the First World War, the Mexican painter Diego Rivera, the Third Reich, the Cold War, the People’s Republic of China, AfricanAmerican artist Kara Walker, and public monuments in the post-socialist states of the former Eastern bloc and the Soviet Union. These topics exemplify different intriguing aspects of the interaction between art and politics. The first chapter takes a close look at the public debates on art and identity in France and Germany between 1914 and 1918 and makes the point that, paradoxically, there were strong parallels in the way both countries started to present their own art as ‘truly national.’ In the second essay, I describe the dilemmas which confronted communist painter Diego Rivera in the 1920s and 1930s when he accepted commissions from the anticommunist Mexican governments and from American capitalists. The next chapter, about the Third Reich, highlights the absurdities of a strict watershed between ‘good’ and ‘evil’ in the world of art, and places the discussion in a broader historiographic perspective. The fourth case study focuses on the early years of the Cold War in the Soviet Union and the United States, analyzing the discrepancies between national and international art politics in both countries and their striking parallels, in spite of unbridgeable ideological differences. The following chapter juxtaposes the art world in the People’s Republic of 

13

China under Mao Zedong with the radically different situation that gradually emerged after Mao’s death in 1976 as a consequence of far-reaching economic reforms. The politics of artistic story-telling and the dynamics of ‘minority’ versus ‘mainstream art’ are discussed in the following essay on Kara Walker, whose works, referencing American slave history, have met with a wide range of extreme responses. The final chapter relates the fate of socialist public monuments after the regime changes of 1989-1991 in the countries of the former Eastern bloc. What happened to these monuments, how did their meaning change in a completely different political environment, which monuments were destroyed, what came in their place? In the Conclusion, I take up the central question about artistic purity and propaganda, and try to pinpoint the relevance of the seven case studies for our understanding of the interaction between art and politics since the early twentieth century. The selection of these seven topics is largely subjective. It would have been possible, for instance, to write about the intricate relationship between Italian Fascism and Futurism, to discuss the artistic repercussions of the Spanish Civil War, or to analyze the tensions between artistic regionalism and federalism in former Yugoslavia. It would also have been interesting to speak about the clash between modern, socialist and religious imagery in 1970s Iran, to confront the competing art traditions of North and South Korea, or to analyze the various constructions of artistic identity in post-apartheid South Africa. The options are manifold. My choice is based on a combination of expertise and the development of a rich and more or less coherent argument. The respective case studies are organized around different questions, and these questions impact the choice of source material. For instance, in the first chapter about 14 

World War I, my argument is largely based on the contemporary art debates in France and Germany, in the second chapter on Diego Rivera I make extensive use of biographical studies, whereas in the chapter about the Third Reich I mainly focus on the art political structures and ideology in theory and practice. The aim of these case studies is not to construct an idealized matrix of different forms of interaction between art and politics. Starting from a number of radically different cases, my hope is to convey a deeper insight into the sometimes tragic, sometimes (tragi)comic parallels, contradictions and misunderstandings between both worlds. Although this book is limited in size, it covers a wide field. I am well aware of the risks this entails. Behind the concise case studies lies a world of complex and intense academic debates that cannot possibly be summarized in all their nuances and intricacies. Nevertheless, I hope that I have somehow succeeded in integrating the essence of these discussions where directly relevant to my broader argument. Of course I take full responsibility for the content, but not without thanking a few people who have been enormously helpful during the writing and translating process. The concept for this book was developed from a series of university courses I presented at my former home university, Utrecht University, as well as at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). Stimulating discussions with students both in the Netherlands and in the United States helped me to further develop my ideas. My friends Ruurd Bakker, Job Creyghton, Patrick Dassen, Joris van Eijnatten and Sophia Zürcher provided me with very useful comments and criticism. I am grateful for their time, commitment and sagacity. Conversations with Marieke Drost, who invited me to present some of my ideas on Dutch national radio 

15

in a series of three interviews, have been a great source of inspiration. Marjolijn Voogel and Inge van der Bijl from Amsterdam University Press critically read the original Dutch manuscript in its preparatory phase and helped me a lot with their enthusiasm and good advice. Chantal Nicolaes, Jasmijn Zondervan and Toon Vugts were of great help during the production phase of the Dutch version. I wrote the English translation of this book in Los Angeles, where I have been working as Chief Curator of the Wende Museum of the Cold War since September 2014. I am very thankful again to Amsterdam University Press, and to Inge van der Bijl and Chantal Nicolaes in particular, for their trust and support in realizing the English translation. My friends Debra Marlin and Donna Stein helped me a lot with their critical comments on the first draft of the English version; Jessica Hoffmann did a wonderful job in very thoughtfully reviewing the whole manuscript. Justinian Jampol, Executive Director of the Wende Museum, was a great source of help and inspiration throughout the process. Last but not least, this book would never have been written without Patricia and Semna, the two most important people in my life.

16 

1.

Positive and Negative Integration The First World War in France and Germany

Exuberant crowds in the streets of London, Paris, Berlin and St. Petersburg define our image of the early days of World War I. Countless photos document the impassioned way Europe’s urban populations greeted the war in those days. Not everyone was happy. Recent studies have shown that especially among workers and the agrarian population, anxiety and skepticism might have been predominant. These feelings were, however, largely absent among the urban middle classes and the political, intellectual and cultural elites. For many years, conservatives and die-hard nationalists had pressed for a ‘purifying war’ to enhance the nation’s international power status, to release its vital energy and, last but not least, to exorcise the forces behind the alleged cultural crisis and decadence of fin-de-siècle Europe. But also liberals, social democrats, national minorities and even former pacifists expressed their full support for the national cause, albeit mostly in a somewhat less exalted fashion. They all recognized the moment of truth. Visual artists did everything to carry the moment. Georges Braque, Fernand Léger, Max Beckmann, Paul Klee and Otto Dix served in the army, August Macke, Franz Marc and Albert Weisgerber died in battle, Oskar Kokoschka was severely wounded. Forty-seven-year-old Henri Matisse protested the fact that he was considered too old for active service; Pablo Picasso, who as a Spaniard living in Paris did not directly participate in the war, painted a still-life 

17

with a vase with two crossed French flags and the text ‘VIVE LA’. Raoul Dufy, Georges Rouault, Max Liebermann, Kasimir Malevich, Natalia Goncharova and many others produced propagandistic war art for the masses. And the list could almost infinitely be expanded. 4 Remarkably, for many years art historians have more or less neglected this nationalist phase in the history of European modern art. Apparently it was considered painful that these artists had been swept away by political emotions that resulted in one of the most devastating wars of the twentieth century. Bellicose artworks, publications and personal notes were considered part of a brief episode of collective blindness, or were altogether ignored. However, the First World War is of central importance for a better understanding of the modern relation between art and politics. In this essay I focus on the public art debates in France and Germany. In these two countries the most intense, articulate and alarming discussions on art and war took place, discussions that would largely shape the reflection on art and politics in times to come. Why is it that artists and art critics joined the war with so much zest and conviction? How did the art debates construct the distinction between national and enemy art, and why was that problematic? What impact had the war on art historical narratives? And how did the gradual turn from idealism to disillusion and cynicism in the course of the war impact ideas about art and society?5 * Looking back one hundred years later, it is hard to understand the role ascribed to the visual arts in Europe in 1914. Not just artists, critics and art historians, but also 18 

politicians and intellectuals considered visual art to be a mirror of the nation, reflecting its innermost feelings and instincts, a fundamental expression of national connectivity and identity. They expected and demanded from the artist a spiritual hold in times of crisis and external threat,

1. Friedrich August von Kaulbach, Germania, 1914, oil on canvas, 75.6 x 57.9 inches (192 x 147 cm), Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin 

19

an expression of collective values, feelings, dreams and ideals in a form accessible to all. At the same time, they deplored the spiritual crisis that had plagued their respective countries, the result of modern culture with its chaos and decadence, loss of purpose, spiritual fragmentation, base materialism and rampant individualism. From war and art they expected nothing short of a redemption from this state of cultural decadence.6 French and German artists and critics welcomed the war in terms of purification and healing. It was credited with a sudden renaissance of national spirit and solidarity which, in Germany, was symbolically sealed with Emperor William II’s Burgfrieden (literally: castle truce), and in France with President Raymond Poincaré’s union sacrée (holy unity). Both Emperor and President invoked a persistent sense of national unity that no longer could be corroded by political, economic, social, religious, ethnic or cultural differences. Times of crisis are times of strict priorities, and the first wartime priority was adherence to the nation. This was more than just a practical consideration: the war was thought to end all discord and decadence, and to bring about a resurgence of national values and national culture. ‘In all German hearts one finds the same holy rage. A holy rage, a sanctifying rage, a healing rage. […] We are cured,’ exclaimed the playwright and art critic Hermann Bahr in 1915.7 Expressionist painter Franz Marc, who together with Wassily Kandinsky had founded the art collective Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) in Munich in 1911, accepted the war as ‘blood sacrifice.’ In an essay written at the front he maintained that the people instinctively realized the war would purify them.8 For Bahr and Marc, the war was not so much an exciting adventure as it was a necessary social and cultural catharsis. 20 

Healing implies sickness, and the source of infection was recognized in the culture of the enemy. The French sculptor Auguste Rodin, who before the war had been a welcome guest in Germany where he had many friends, in 1914 radically changed his view of the neighboring country. He now warned his compatriots to stay at arm’s length from any German influences since these were ‘the illusory concoctions of a sick mind.’9 A comparable sea-change affected German art historian Julius Meier-Graefe, who had been living in Paris for a long time and was one of the most outspoken proponents of French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art in Germany. He opened his first war essay in August 1914 with the words ‘We are different since yesterday.’ According to Meier-Graefe, the time of pure aesthetic pleasure was over now, art had to reflect deep values. France was nothing but an ‘aesthetic community’ that had lost its vital energy in abstract ideas and pleasurable artworks. Meier-Graefe, who is still hailed as one of the spiritual fathers of modern art history, summoned the German soldiers to let justice prevail before mercy in dealing with this decadent enemy.10 * The logical counterpart of artistic unity in terms of the German Burgfrieden and the French union sacrée was a radical rejection of ‘enemy art.’ Because art was considered the deepest and most fundamental expression of the nation, art history had to be revised. This happened during the war on a large scale and on the basis of the most bizarre arguments. The discussions about the origin of Gothic architecture might illustrate the point. In September 1914 during their march through France, German troops bombarded the cathedral of Reims. Germans and French held each other responsible for 

21

the bombardment. According to the French, the Germans had consciously aimed at destroying one of the pearls of French culture. By burning the historical library of Louvain (Belgium) and the destruction of Reims cathedral, the Germans had shown their true face as a nation of barbarians without any respect for the superior culture of other nations. The Germans in turn accused the French of barbarism by using the cathedral, in glaring violation of international conventions, as commando post and for weapons storage, so that the German troops were left no choice but to use violence.11 Such propagandistic assignments of blame are not uncommon in war situations. But in wartime France and Germany they became part of a whole new interpretation of European cultural history. French art historian Émile Mâle, more than half a century after his death still an authority in the field of Gothic architecture, indicated in an essay on the origins of French Gothic that it was his sad duty to devote a few words to the Germans, who claimed a creative part in the development of Gothic architecture. According to Mâle, such a claim was out of the question. Germans had never created anything of cultural importance and could only express themselves by destroying other people’s culture. Therefore it was inconceivable that they had any part in the development of the Gothic style.12 Mâle’s German colleague Cornelius Gurlitt took up the challenge, explaining how the Germans, because of their racial superiority, had logically turned into the political, social and artistic elites among the people on French territory. And these elites were responsible for Gothic architecture, both in France and Germany. During the French Revolution, the ethnic inferior Celts had led the elites to the guillotine, which is why, according to Gurlitt, there had been no more culture in France since the late eighteenth century. He concludes 22 

his essay with the remark that French historians violate historical truth in order to put their country in a better light, whereas the Germans are only interested in retrieving and relentlessly presenting the objective facts.13

2. Reims cathedral with war damage, 1920, postcard from the series ‘Reims après les bombardements de 1914-1918’ (Reims after the bombing raids of 1914-1918), France 

23

German art historian Kurt Engelbrecht proved that one could take this line of reasoning even one step further, claiming that artistic creativity is exclusive to the German people. When one nonetheless encounters this quality among foreigners such as Dante or Michelangelo, one has to conclude they were of German descent.14 The ideas of Mâle, Gurlitt and Engelbrecht clearly illustrate the mechanisms of wartime artistic nationalism. Culture and spiritual values were exclusively associated with one’s own country, everything that went against them with the enemy. * It should not come as a surprise that the union sacrée and the Burgfrieden didn’t last long in the French and German art worlds. The moment artists and critics started to define artistic unity in more specific terms, tensions arose. For instance, conservative French art critics rejected French Cubism as a ‘German’ art form. The fact that of the two founders of Cubism, Pablo Picasso was a Spaniard living in Paris and Georges Braque was born and raised in France, and that there were hardly any followers of Cubism in Germany, did not in the least dissuade them from their conviction that Cubism was essentially German. Several French critics recognized a conspiracy by German-Jewish artists, critics and art dealers to contaminate French culture – a metaphor later echoed in the Third Reich and in American Congress, as we will see. A French caricaturist drew a quasi-Cubist portrait of William II, suggesting that the German Emperor would identify with this German house style.15 A remarkable thought, if only because William was notorious for his arch-conservative artistic taste. 24 

In Germany, the Expressionists became the main target of conservative colleagues and critics. Artist Momme Nissen assumed a causal nexus between artistic Expressionism and the war waged against Germany, and characterized this movement as ‘art from hell.’16 But the German Impressionists were under attack as well, not only because the origin of this art movement was evidently French, but also because

3. Max Liebermann, Self-portrait, 1916, oil on canvas, 44.1 x 36.2 inches (112 x 92 cm), Bremer Kunsthalle, Bremen, Germany 

25

Max Liebermann, arguably the most prominent German Impressionist painter, was Jewish and therefore, according to nationalist critics, not a real German. Prominent critic Karl Storck argued that Jewish artists like Liebermann had no place in a time of awakened German self-awareness and pride. The fact that Liebermann produced nationalist war art did not change his verdict; according to Storck, Jewish artists would not become more German because of the war, ‘simply because their mind and blood are not German.’ In a war essay published in 1915, he commented on the fatal influence of the Jews on German art and called for a trench war against the internal enemy, who had to be exterminated like vermin.17 To defend themselves against such attacks modern artists and critics used a double strategy: they situated their own art within a strictly national tradition, while rejecting colleagues who allegedly deviated from the national norm. Both in France and in Germany, Impressionists and Expressionists described each other’s works as decadent and lacking in national feeling. Robert Delaunay emphasized the central importance of measure and harmony in his work, making him a true heir of the French classical tradition. But he fiercely dismissed the art of ‘foreigners’ whose ‘hysterical works’ were publicly presented under the label ‘made in Paris,’ even if there was nothing French about their work.18 In Germany, Liebermann viciously wrote about the ‘Hottentot art’ of the Expressionists, whereas art critic Adolf Behne, an early advocate of German Expressionism, rejected Impressionism as the ultimate form of artistic materialism and internationalism, specifically accusing Liebermann of a lack of monumentality and national feeling.19 Art history and art criticism had swapped the domain of aesthetic judgments for the domain of artistic treason. 26 

4. Félix Vallotton, Verdun, 1917, oil on canvas, 44.9 x 57.5 inches (114 x 146 cm), Musée de l’Armée, Paris

In the course of the war years, disillusion and embitterment about the war inevitably entered the art debates. What according to politicians and publicists should have been a quick and decisive victory in the course of a few months, deteriorated into a trench war that lasted many years and took millions of lives. Not purification and healing but mud, vermin, exhaustion and desperation defined the war experience. Qualities like national fervor, courage and heroism, considered preconditions of victory at the start of the war, proved ultimately meaningless and even suicidal in a war fought with machine guns and poison gas. The idealism of August 1914 was replaced by disillusion, sorrow and cynicism. An artistic expression of this new attitude was the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, Switzerland, out of which in 1917 the Dada movement originated. Instead of 

27

cultural regeneration, national values and collective idealism, Dada celebrated lack of purpose, chaos and nonsense as its artistic principles. It was a radical negation of the culture that caused the war, and at the same time an adequate metaphor for daily life in the trenches. * The French and German art debates during World War I are remarkable in several ways. The task assigned to the visual arts, to express the essence of national unity and identity, was outrageously fantastic. It could not but lead to problems, as there were many different views within the art world as to what was ‘national’ and what was not. Moreover, the debates on national art acquired an existential dimension: national art would spiritually empower the nation, whereas enemy art infected the nation and made it decadent and vulnerable. Aesthetics had become a matter of survival. Also striking is the paradox that the French and German art debates, in their very attempts to antagonize, started to closely resemble each other. In both countries modern artists, in spite of their professed nationalism, were identified by conservative colleagues and critics as representatives of enemy art and implicitly or even explicitly accused of artistic treason. On the other hand, these modern artists defended themselves in both countries by emphasizing their adherence to national traditions and by attacking their false, decadent or internationalist colleagues who did not express themselves in purely national terms. In 1998 German art critic Eduard Beaucamp published a volume with essays under the title The Trapped Artist. Against the Legend of the Immaculate Avant-Garde (Der verstrickte Künstler. Wider die Legende von der unbefleckten 28 

Avantgarde). The ‘immaculate’ avant-garde he refers to is the stereotypical image of modern art in the United States and Western Europe after 1945: the idea of a non-political, pure and autonomous art that had been purged with all means by nationalists, fascists and communists alike. Apart from a few embarrassing exceptions, like the Italian Futurists and the Russian avant-garde, who temporarily stood in the service of Mussolini’s fascism and the Bolshevik revolution respectively, modern art supposedly had never betrayed its own artistic integrity. The history of the First World War proves that this idea is completely flawed. Modern artists and critics were no less engaged in this war than their conservative counterparts, and their artworks and texts were on average no less radical. It is a mistake to conclude that because conservatives, nationalists, fascists, national-socialists and communists all hated modern art during large parts of the twentieth century, modern artists themselves were immune to ideological temptations. A stereotypical view of national art, common during World War I, nowadays seems completely obsolete. But sometimes an echo of the past resounds. In April 2013 the Louvre in Paris opened the exhibition De l’Allemagne (About Germany), an overview of German art from Romanticism to the Third Reich on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the treaty of friendship between France and Germany that symbolically terminated a long history of enmity between both countries. The organization of the exhibition was originally a shared responsibility of art historians from the Louvre and the German Art Historical Institute in Paris. But after a series of mutual disagreements, the French took over. After the opening, German politicians and media responded with consternation. They perceived as the central message of the exhibition that Germany had 

29

completely lost track by the end of the nineteenth century, reveling in uncontrolled emotions and vague mysticism. From the late nineteenth-century works by Franz von Stuck, the exhibition suggested a direct development towards National Socialism and the Holocaust, according to the German critics. They interpreted the exhibition as a new phase in European politics, in which friendships were frustrated and European nations were alienated from each other.20 A full century after the First World War, it was once again art history that heightened the political tension between France and Germany.

30 

2.

Between Nationalism and Communism Diego Rivera and Mexican Muralism

Diego Rivera arguably is one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century. Measured in terms of art historical attention, Pablo Picasso and other modern artists might have been more successful, but the impact of Rivera’s murals both on professional artists and amateur street artists worldwide is unparalleled. Rivera explored new paths in the creation of political images for a broad public that were complex yet pervasive. His creativity in the field of composition, perspective and visual narrative brought him a large number of followers worldwide. Rivera is universally recognized as the most prominent representative of Mexican mural painting. In the 1920s and 1930s he accomplished a large number of murals on the walls of public buildings, most famously the National Palace in Mexico City, and he worked on commission for Edsel Ford and Nelson Rockefeller, among others, in the United States. However, Rivera also was a member of the Partido Comunista Mexicano (PCM), the communist party of Mexico, and considered himself a politically engaged artist. Rivera’s remarkable career provokes a series of fundamental questions about the relationship between art and ideology. This communist artist received his most famous commissions from a series of anti-communist Mexican governments and a number of American businessmen. Did he squander his integrity by accepting these commissions or 

31

did he somehow manage to remain true to his convictions? Why was it that this convinced communist was expelled from the Soviet Union and celebrated some of his greatest successes in the United States? Rivera’s story offers a fascinating perspective on the complex relation between artistic intention, critical reception and political interests in the world of art. * During the decade between 1910 and 1920, an extremely bloody civil war raged in Mexico. Porfirio Díaz, who had risen to power as the result of a coup d’état in 1876, had governed the country in authoritarian style for 34 years, with a four-year interruption between 1880 and 1884. Under public pressure he called elections in 1910, which he was able to win after discrediting or arresting all of his rivals. This strategy led to a civil war that saw constantly changing factions and leaders seizing power and murdering each other.21 The death of President Venustiano Carranza in 1920 paved the way for General Alvaro Obregón to demand the presidency. He proved remarkably successful in restoring peace and order. Although most historians view the Obregón administration as moderately conservative, Obrgón presented himself as a revolutionary leader, fulfilling the promises of the Mexican revolution.22 To this aim he launched a propaganda campaign focused on national unity and pride. José Vasconcelos, Minister of Education, used radio, literature and mural painting as the prime media in this campaign.23 There were good reasons for the government’s use of mural painting. Images had the advantage over written pamphlets because they could also reach the illiterate, 32 

and applied to the walls of government buildings they became part of public space. Moreover, mural paintings had a venerable tradition in the region. They were already in use by the Aztecs and had been further developed under the Spanish colonizers since the sixteenth century. In a manifesto published in 1906, the painter Gerardo Murillo, who called himself Dr. Atl, had advocated a renaissance of mural painting as the national art form.24 Some fifteen years later the Obregón administration supported this renaissance through state sponsorship. By depicting scenes from Mexican history and society, the murals had to convey a fundamental sense of cohesion in a society torn by civil war. National unity was at the heart of Vasconcelos’ political vision. In 1925 he published his book The Cosmic Race (La Raza Cósmica), which describes the unique power of the Mexican nation as directly resulting from its ethnic diversity, in remarkable contrast to ideas about racial purity and degeneration that were on the rise in Europe at the time. 25 Many painters got involved in the state commissions during the 1920s and 1930s, the most famous being José Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros and Diego Rivera, the protagonist of this essay. * At an early age, Rivera recognized painting as his vocation. In 1907, when he was twenty years old, he traveled to Madrid to receive a European art education. During the 1910s he mainly lived in Paris. Initially he was impressed by Picasso’s Cubism, whose influences clearly show in his works from this period, but gradually he started to doubt the potential of modern art, with its focus on formal experimentation, to produce works of art that are socially impactful.26 In 

33

1920, Vasconcelos personally invited him to contribute to Mexico’s program of national mural painting. On the advice of the Mexican ambassador in Paris, he first traveled to Italy to study Renaissance frescoes first-hand. In 1922 Rivera became a member of the PCM, and one year later he joined the socialist artist union Sindicato de Obreros Técnicos, Pintores y Escultores. Its founding manifesto was written by Siqueiros, the communist hardliner among the Mexican mural painters. According to the manifesto, art must have social relevance and contain a message for the people. Paintings for private collectors and museums are unjustifiable; art has to reach out to the larger community, preferably in public space. The manifesto also stipulated that artists are workers who should earn no more than an average worker’s salary.27 Being able to work in public space implied that artists had to accept commissions from the not-so-communist government. Rivera recognized the problem but did not care too much: when the painter is a revolutionary, he will produce revolutionary art, no matter the circumstances and the character of his commissions, he thought.28 The big question is, however, how this works out in practice: how much pressure is exerted on the artist to convey, or avoid, a certain message? On the one hand, the Mexican government could not achieve its goals without the help of mural painters; on the other, the painters would risk their commissions if they refused to make any concessions, and that again would mean they could not share their political ideas with the public at all. Opinions differ about the intensity of political pressure on artists in the 1920s, but art historians generally agree that the artists were left relatively free in the realization of their ideas. 29 34 

5. Diego Rivera, The History of Mexico, 1929-30, fresco, National Palace, Mexico City

In accordance with the founding manifesto of the artists’ union, Rivera painted his murals for an average worker’s salary. But contrary to the spirit of this manifesto, he also accepted commissions from private collectors, for which he received considerable sums of money. For this ‘treason’ he was heavily criticized by his communist friends and colleagues.30 Rivera thus came under attack from two sides: while conservative critics viewed him as a dangerous left-wing demagogue, many communists considered him mendacious and bourgeois. In 1924 Obregón was succeeded by Plutarco Elías Calles as president. Initially Calles threatened to nationalize the oil industry and the mines, which were largely in American hands. However, primarily thanks to the strong engagement of Dwight Morrow, American Ambassador in Mexico, the relations between the two countries 

35

6. Diego Rivera, The History of Mexico, 1929-30, fresco, National Palace, Mexico City

improved considerably during the late 1920s, resulting in the protection and stimulation of foreign investments.31 Calles continued to support mural painting and offered Mexican artists more opportunities to depict scenes from national history on public walls; while Siqueiros refused to work for the ‘reactionary’ government, Rivera accepted the invitation. Rivera’s most famous works are the frescoes for the National Palace in Mexico City, painted in 1929-30, and then again in 1935. The main compositions along the central stairway depict Mexico in the past and present, with sections dedicated to Aztec history and other pre-Columbian cultures, the Spanish occupation of Central America, the Díaz government, and finally ‘the world of today and tomorrow.’32 The sequence seems to reflect a Marxist view of history: from its origins (pre-Columbian Mexico) through 36 

7. Diego Rivera, The History of Mexico, 1935, fresco, National Palace, Mexico City

feudalism (Spanish rule) and bourgeois capitalism (Díaz) to the socialist revolution. The ‘world of today and tomorrow’ depicts farmers and workers with a prominent Karl Marx who, together with three revolutionary soldiers, and against the background of a rising sun, holds a banner with a text on class struggle and socialist society. This last, explicitly communist scene was painted in 1935, when the Mexican 

37

government under president Lázaro Cárdenas (1934-40) had significantly changed the country’s political course to the left. The frescoes in the National Palace invoke a series of questions. Who visited the National Palace, and were these visitors sufficiently aware of the intricacies of national history to understand Rivera’s complex compositions? How many of them would be able to grasp the historical references and understand the underlying political perspective of the painter? Were the frescoes mainly understood as legitimization of the Mexican government, as a left-wing critical interpretation of history, or rather as a colorful mixture of more or less random scenes, figures and symbols painted on a wall? In 1927-28 Rivera went on a nine-month trip to the Soviet Union on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the Russian Revolution. Originally he was invited to paint a mural for the Red Army Club in Moscow, but this commission was never confirmed. Rivera visited Moscow in a politically and artistically turbulent time. He joined the Soviet art group October, founded in March 1928. Like the Sindicato in Mexico, this art collective advocated a recognizable and accessible art for the people.33 And although October explicitly rejected the incomprehensible works of the Russian avant-garde which had been very successful in the early years of the Revolution (see chapter 4), it also opposed hollow propagandistic art without artistic quality, which was exactly the kind of art Stalin would support from the 1930s. Later in 1928, Rivera was expelled from the Soviet Union due to his involvement in unspecified ‘anti-Soviet activities.’ In 1937, Rivera and his wife, the renowned artist Frida Kahlo, would become friends with Stalin’s rival Leon Trotsky, who had fled the Soviet Union via Turkey and 38 

Norway to Mexico, where he was later killed by followers of Stalin.34 Rivera’s relations with the PCM have always been difficult. He became a member in 1922, but decided to leave the party in 1925 because it demanded full engagement and a principled stance in political matters which he felt impeded his work as an artist. One year later he thought the better of it and joined the party again. However, by this time he was mistrusted within the ranks of the PCM because of his acceptance of private commissions and, even worse, his willingness to accept commissions from the anticommunist Calles administration.35 His expulsion from the Soviet Union was not very helpful in restoring trust either, and in 1929 the PCM decided to discharge Rivera from the party – one of the reasons for the artist to try his luck in the United States. Only much later, in 1955, would the party welcome Rivera back in its ranks. * Ambassador Morrow, who, as we have seen, was instrumental in improving the bilateral relations between Mexico and the United States, happened to be a great lover of art. He mediated in the assignment of important commissions to Rivera in Mexico and actively promoted his work in the United States. His higher aim was not only to help ameliorate the relations between the two countries but also to help revise the negative stereotypes of Mexico among the American public.36 Rivera received commissions from, among others, Edsel Ford, Henry Ford’s son, for a series of mural paintings in the central hall of the Detroit Institute of Art, and from oil tycoon Nelson Rockefeller for a mural in Rockefeller Center, New York. Rivera felt the need to account 

39

for his acceptance of these commissions. He stated that an artwork can be meaningful to the proletariat even if it is paid for by a capitalist.37 Moreover, Rivera had a fascination for modern technology and industry, and believed that the machine would eventually contribute to the realization of a classless society.38 His frescoes for Ford and Rockefeller attest to this expectation. In the late 1920s, Rivera’s artwork found a mixed reception in the United States. Some American painters were impressed by his work and came under his influence, but many critics disliked his political engagement.39 This would change in the early 1930s due to the collapse of the stock market in October 1929, which made American artists more aware of their social and political responsibilities. Many of them started to express social criticism in their work, more often than not under the direct influence of the Mexican muralists, especially Rivera.40 In Detroit, Rivera was invited by Edsel Ford and William Valentiner, director of the Detroit Institute of Art, to decorate the large courtyard of the museum with frescoes on the topic of Detroit Industry, in part based on the Ford factory in Dearborn, Michigan. Rivera painted an optimistic image of modern industrial production, where workers, engineers and business owners work together in the service of the common interest (1932-33). 41 Left-wing critics reproached him for not paying any attention to the social misery of workers since the crisis of 1929, and more specifically for completely neglecting the fact that only a few weeks before he started to work in Detroit, five protesting workers who had been fired by the Ford factory were killed by the police during a demonstration organized by the American communist party.42 However, in other works Rivera did express social critique. In an exhibition with seven movable mural panels in 40 

8. Diego Rivera, Detroit Industry, 1932-33, fresco, Detroit Institute of Art, Detroit

New York’s Museum of Modern Art (1931), one panel showed rich Americans bringing their jewels to a bank safe while a group of homeless people have to sleep on a quay in the open air.43 In 1933 Rivera accepted the commission to paint a monumental fresco in Rockefeller Center with the pretentious title Man at the Crossroads Looking with Hope and High Vision to the Choosing of a New and Better Future. The title promises a better future, but does not specify through what ideology it will be reached. Rockefeller approved Rivera’s design, in spite of the fact that it contained some unmistakable left-wing critical details, such as a demonstration by unemployed workers brutally attacked by policemen with truncheons. But in the final version, without acknowledging Rockefeller, Rivera added a portrait of Lenin holding hands with a Russian soldier and an African-American worker. The press received rumors about the fresco and started to comment on the ‘red wall of Rockefeller Center’ that was in progress. Rockefeller 

41

was not pleased and sent a note to Rivera, assuring that so far he had been very content with his work and had done nothing whatsoever to restrict the artist in his vision, but that he now kindly but urgently requested him to replace Lenin by an anonymous person. Rivera, who had suffered fierce criticism from his communist friends for accepting this commission in the first place, suggested that he add Abraham Lincoln to the fresco to counterbalance the ideological reference, but he refused to eliminate the first Soviet leader. Thereupon Rockefeller paid Rivera the full amount as agreed in the contract, sent him away and had the complete fresco chalked over.44 Before it was destroyed, an assistant of Rivera’s sneaked in and photographed the frescoes. 45 These photos were used by Rivera, together with his original design, to reconstruct the paintings in 1934, which since then have been on view at the Museum of Modern Art in Mexico City under the changed but still very pretentious title Man, Controller of the Universe. In December 1933 Rivera returned to Mexico. One year later Lázaro Cárdenas was sworn in as President. He succeeded a series of weak state leaders who had ruled the country between 1928 and 1934, while Calles still pulled the strings behind the scenes. Cárdenas was elected with the approval of Calles as well, but unexpectedly he emerged as a more principled politician who took the revolutionary promises of his predecessors far more seriously. He introduced large-scale agrarian reforms, realized substantial improvements in the standard of living in the countryside, supported unions, realized better working conditions, nationalized the oil industry and allowed the PCM, which was banned in 1930, to reenter the political arena. 46 For leftist artists the presidency of Cárdenas was an important inspiration. It was under his Administration that Rivera, in 42 

his frescoes for the National Palace in Mexico City, made his first direct reference to Karl Marx. * The history of Rivera’s political artwork reads like a history of incongruities. The communist Rivera worked for liberal or conservative Mexican governments and for major capitalists in the United States, and was expelled from the Soviet Union and banned from the Mexican communist party. Rivera’s case is intriguing in terms of the relationship between political artist and client. Did his murals in his home country primarily serve the interests of the Mexican government or did they support his own political agenda? Are his Mexican works essentially nationalist or essentially communist? Or did Rivera succeed in combining these, at least in theory, mutually exclusive ideologies? Clearly, Rivera, in his frescoes for the National Palace, shows a strong affinity with the victims of exploitation and violence, especially with the native population of Central America. But it is also true that only in 1935, under the presidency of Cárdenas, was he explicitly able to reference Marxism and class struggle. In the United States, Rivera had to balance his own political convictions with those held by his capitalist clients, like Ford and Rockefeller. For his frescoes in Detroit he simply abstracted from the tensions between communism and capitalism, for which he was harshly criticized by his communist friends. In New York, on the other hand, he sought confrontation by refusing to eliminate Lenin from his mural. Rivera always had to navigate between his political convictions and the demands from the outside world. Without 

43

concessions there would be no commissions, and without commissions no chance to express his thoughts for a wider public. But too many concessions might compromise these very thoughts. Rivera defended himself with the argument that a revolutionary artist still makes revolutionary art when he works for a conservative government or a capitalist business owner. The mixed responses to his art show that things are not that simple. However, Rivera was not an opportunist. He always remained loyal to his most fundamental principle: making art for the people, always the protagonists and positive heroes of his work.

44 

3.

National and Degenerate Art The Third Reich

Can one adequately discuss the history and art of an abject regime by following a traditional historical or art historical approach? Is it possible to write about art in the Third Reich, in Stalin’s Soviet Union or in Mao Zedong’s China without immediately identifying the artworks with the political regime? Is it even possible to speak about ‘art’ when a totalitarian regime strictly controls the art world and uses art as a means to help express its ideology? Or do these questions overestimate the power of politics and underestimate the creative power of art, even under dire circumstances? Art from the Third Reich has long been neglected by art historians, with the exception of modern artworks deemed ‘degenerate’ by the Nazis. National Socialist art, as far as it survived the Allied bombings and the extensive art theft by Allied troops after World War II, was stored away in the darkest vaults of German museum depots. Until the early 1960s, there was not much public critical reflection on the recent past in Germany. Many people wanted to forget about their traumatic experiences and their sense of shame, and focus as much as possible on building up a new society. 47 The arrest and detention of Adolf Eichmann (1960-61) and the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials (1963-65), however, evoked an intense critical public debate about the Third Reich. The so-called ‘generation of 1968’ in West Germany not only turned against American imperialism and the war in Vietnam but also against its own fathers and grandfathers, who had lived and sometimes served under the Nazis. By this time, art historians had started 

45

to study Nazi art and Nazi architecture, not as valid art forms but as expressions of a thoroughly criminal political system. In the 1980s the study of Nazi art became more differentiated. It is possible that the konservative Wende (conservative turn), beginning in 1982 under the new Chancellor Helmut Kohl, influenced this process, as did the so-called Historikerstreit (battle of the historians), a fierce public debate among professional historians and others about the interpretation of the Third Reich, following an op-ed article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung by historian Ernst Nolte in 1986. Nolte claimed, among other things, that the primary task of historians is to understand the past, not to judge it, and that it is therefore fundamentally flawed to consider the Third Reich as ‘the ultimate evil’ instead of a ‘normal’ historical phenomenon. Among the first to respond to this publication was philosopher Jürgen Habermas, who suggested that Nolte used scholarly ‘objectivity’ as an excuse to trivialize the horrors of the Third Reich. 48 One of the effects of this debate, which did not remain confined to Germany, was that critical questions were asked about the alleged unique character of the Nazi period and its German prehistory. Art historians specifically asked whether it was legitimate to assume that all non-modern art produced in Hitler’s Germany was ‘Nazi art,’ and whether it would not be more appropriate to see this art in the light of a broader European artistic development. 49 Where did the extreme ideas of National Socialist art theory come from? How was the art world of the Third Reich organized in order to effectuate this theory? How was the difference between ‘German’ and ‘degenerate’ art defined, and what were the consequences of this division? And how did the art world of the Third Reich, with its categorical 46 

distinction between good and evil, unwittingly inform the interpretation of art during the Cold War? * The most striking characteristic of the Third Reich is the defining role of racial theory in political practice. Racism, both in its popular and pseudo-scientific forms, did not come out of the blue. Ideas about superior and inferior races were popular in the nineteenth century and strongly informed and legitimized European rule in the colonies, especially in Africa. Scholars and publicists postulated the inequality of human races and the moral duty to civilize ‘primitive’ peoples. World history allegedly had proven the superiority of the white race; mixture with other races would irrevocably lead to degeneration, so it was argued.50 Around the end of the nineteenth century the concept of degeneration was extended to cultural and artistic expressions. In 1892, German physician and author Max Nordau published a two-volume study about intellectual and artistic degeneration, simply called Degeneration (Entartung). In such different thinkers and artists as Friedrich Nietzsche, Henrik Ibsen, Leo Tolstoy and the French Impressionists, he recognized the pathological symptoms of a completely derailed modern culture.51 His study is part of a Europe-wide obsession with national art and cultural decadence at the fin-de-siècle. Extreme nationalism and racism turned in 1920s Germany into an ideology of resentment. Not only had Germany lost the war in 1918, it was also held exclusively responsible for its outbreak and devastating consequences in the Versailles Peace Treaty of June 1919, and it had to pay gigantic reparation fees which economically crippled the country for years to come. At the same time, however, the Weimar 

47

Republic (1918-1933) witnessed an unparalleled cultural creativity. Modern dance, music, theater, film, poetry and visual arts made Berlin in the 1920s the sparkling center of European culture. Some of the modernizing cultural energy was concentrated in the Bauhaus in Weimar, an educational institute that aimed to provide the arts, design and architecture with a radically new foundation. Successful though it was during the Weimar Republic, modern art was far from uncontested. Artists and critics who during the war had attacked modern art as an international, French or Jewish aberration (see chapter 1), saw its public success in the 1920s as ultimate proof that the Republic itself was a product of foreigners and Jews, aiming to humiliate or even destroy the German nation. In 1920, Bettina Feistel-Rohmeder founded the German Art Society (Deutsche Kunstgesellschaft) with the explicit aim of protecting German art against degenerate modern art forms.52 Eight years later, Alfred Rosenberg, who would subsequently become the Nazi party ideologue, started the Battle League for German Culture (Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur), which fought Jewish influences and the process of ‘bastardization and negroization’ in the visual arts.53 In the same year, 1928, Paul Schultze-Naumburg published his book Art and Race (Kunst und Rasse), which compared modern art to portraits of the insane, presenting it as an unmistakable symptom of racial degeneration. His comparison would be used again in the catalogue of the exhibition Degenerate Art (Entartete Kunst) in 1937.54 In the meantime, the Bauhaus fell victim to right-wing protests. Pressured by the conservative government of the federal state of Thuringia, in 1925 the art school was forced to move from Weimar to Dessau. After the National Socialists had won the communal elections of 1931 in Dessau, the Bauhaus had to move again a year later, this time to Berlin. In 1933, after the 48 

Nazis came to power, the Bauhaus was shut down altogether, in spite of attempts by its last director, the architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, to integrate it into the Third Reich.55 * Adolf Hitler was always strongly involved in the visual arts and architecture of the Third Reich. Before the First World War he aspired to be a visual artist, and he painted artworks and postcards, which he sold before becoming a politician. In 1907 he took the entrance examination at the Vienna art academy, but was rejected. In Mein Kampf, the programmatic autobiography he started writing in 1924 while in prison in Landsberg am Lech as a result of the failed Beer Cellar Revolt (Bierkeller Putsch) in Munich, which he had coorganized one year before, the visual arts are prominently addressed. He argued that art is a direct expression of a nation, and can therefore only be understood and valued by the people of that nation. ‘Modern art’ was to him a contradiction in terms, because true art is a timeless part of the universal essence of the people. Even after his appointment as German Chancellor in January 1933, Hitler closely followed the art world. He collected artworks in a grand manner and in 1937 inaugurated the new Haus der Deutschen Kunst (House of German Art) in Munich with a speech. Together with the architect and later War Minister Albert Speer he developed megalomaniac plans for the city of Berlin as the political center of the Third Reich.56 The city of Linz in Austria, where Hitler had lived between the ages of ten and eighteen, was to become the Reich’s cultural center, complete with a new Führermuseum with highlights from German and European art history. During the Second World War, many valuable artworks were sold 

49

under pressure, expropriated or simply stolen from international museums and from Jewish private collections destined for Linz.57 In a famous photograph, taken on February 9, 1945, Hitler is seen in his bunker in Berlin, in the midst of Allied bombings, staring at a large model of his future Linz. After the National Socialists took power in 1933, the German art world was quickly reorganized. The Reich Chamber of Culture became the central institution to control and steer the arts. One of its seven subsections was the Reich Chamber of the Visual Arts. Artists, critics, art dealers, museum directors and curators all had to join the Reich Chamber in order to practice their professions. But not everyone could become a member. Jews, socialists and modern artists and their advocates were automatically excluded. Artists outside the Reich Chamber were not allowed to exhibit, their works were removed from public museums and their name was taboo in art critical publications.58 In spite of these strict stipulations, the discussions about membership were often controversial. During the early years of the Third Reich, the fate of German Expressionist painters was far from clear. As early as the 1920s, their work was described as foreign, Bolshevist, Jewish and degenerate by right-wing critics such as Feistel-Rohmeder, Rosenberg and Schultze-Naumburg. However, the Expressionists also had some prominent right-wing proponents. One of them was the president of the National Socialist German Student League, Otto Schreiber, who in 1933 organized an exhibition in Berlin with works by, among others, Franz Marc, August Macke, Ernst Barlach, Erich Heckel and Emil Nolde.59 Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda Joseph Goebbels not only highly valued the German Expressionists in the early years of the Reich, but also collected works by Barlach and Nolde, among others.60 50 

9. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Three nude figures in the wood, 1933, woodcut, 13.8 x 19.7 inches (35 x 50 cm), Kirchner Museum, Davos, Switzerland

On the other hand, not all artistic victims of National Socialist smear attacks were against the Third Reich. In 1934, one year after the dissolving of the Bauhaus and a flurry of venomous publications on modern art, a group of Expressionist artists and architects, among them Ernst Barlach, Erich Heckel, Emil Nolde and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, signed a call to support the new regime and its political leaders.61 The painter Willi Baumeister, who would be celebrated in 1950s West Germany as one of the founding fathers of German abstract art, considered it a painful misunderstanding that his work was not accepted by the Nazis.62 Ernst Ludwig Kirchner protested that he was not Jewish and not a social democrat, and that he had always supported the interests of German art. His colleague Max Pechstein stated that he had fought in the First World War to defend his fatherland, and that his two sons were members of the National Socialist Storm Detachment (Sturm Abteilung, 

51

SA) and the Hitler Youth (Hitlerjugend) respectively.63 Franz Radziwill was expelled from the National Socialist German Workers Party (National Sozialistische Arbeiter Partei Deutschlands, NSDAP), the ruling Nazi party, which he had joined in 1930 out of political conviction. However, the most extreme case by far was that of Emil Nolde. Already before the First World War, Nolde had publicly criticized the destructive role of Jews in the German art world, and already in the early 1920s he had joined the National Socialists. In his autobiography Years of Struggle (Jahre der Kämpfe), published in 1934, he describes modern artists, following the rhetoric of extreme right-wing critics, as ‘half-bloods, bastards and mulattoes’ – evidently with the exception of himself.64 In other words: the fact that modern artists collectively became the victims of National Socialist politics does not in the least imply that they considered themselves as opponents of the regime. * Why did the National Socialists attack modern art? The answer to that question is not self-evident. As stated, some National Socialists highly appreciated German Expressionism and some Expressionists supported National Socialism. Moreover, in Italy the Fascist movement of Benito Mussolini had associated itself with the radically modern Futurists for several years. Undoubtedly Hitler’s personal taste and artistic convictions played an important role, as did the popular association in conservative circles since the late nineteenth century of modern art with decadence and degeneration. However, the campaigns against modern art also served a political objective: the creation of a collective enemy. Exactly because many people found modern art 52 

difficult to understand, it was relatively easy to expose it as a fraud. As Hitler had written in his autobiography, and as National Socialist art critics never got tired of repeating, true art will be immediately recognized and understood by the people. In 1937 two parallel exhibitions were organized in Munich. The First Great German Art Exhibition (Erste Groβe Deutsche Kunstausstellung) in the House of German Art showed works appreciated by the regime; the exhibition Degenerate Art (Entartete Kunst) in the nearby Hofgartenarkaden on the other hand dishonored the works on display. Seen together, these two exhibitions seem to demarcate the borders between National Socialist and modern art; or, from the perspective of the organizers, between national and degenerate art. In June 1937, the painter Adolf Ziegler, president of the Reich Chamber of the Visual Arts, nicknamed by his critics ‘Master of the German Pubic Hair’ because of his forthright renderings of the female nude, received the assignment from Goebbels to prepare both exhibitions with an unrestricted mandate to select degenerate artworks from German museums.65 Ziegler took on this task with zeal and confiscated no fewer than 16,000 works by 1,400 different artists.66 The exhibition Degenerate Art showcased 650 works by 112 artists; the rest were stored away and later destroyed or sold at an international auction in Lucerne, Switzerland.67 Both exhibitions were thematically organized. The First Great German Art Exhibition, for instance, had sections on sport, industry and the countryside, whereas the Degenerate Art show presented sections like ‘agitation for class struggle,’ ‘undermining family life’ and ‘subverting racial consciousness through the glorification of other races.’ The walls of the last exhibition were filled with cynical 

53

10. Fritz Erler, Herdsman, c. 1940, oil on canvas, 37.4 x 37.8 inches (95 x 96 cm), present whereabouts unknown

comments. Degenerate Art was a great success in terms of the number of people visiting the exhibition, but the question is whether that was intended. The exhibition attracted more than two million visitors, many times more than the First Great German Art Exhibition that showcased ‘real German art.’ Audience attendance, of course, says nothing about the motivations of the public. Did they come to condemn modern art, as intended by the organizers, or rather to be able to see one last time the works that were expelled from German museums? Probably the succès de scandale was another important factor contributing to the exhibition’s uncanny popularity. 54 

The strict division between the two exhibitions cannot hide the fact that there were controversies behind the scenes about the criteria for selection. For instance, some of the organizers questioned whether it was at all opportune to exhibit the works of Franz Marc and August Macke, who had given their lives for the fatherland in the First World War, as degenerate art. Works by Marc, Barlach and Käthe Kollwitz were removed from the exhibition when it traveled to Berlin, because they were no longer considered unambiguous examples of degenerate art.68 Even stranger was the fact that some of the works in Degenerate Art had earlier been presented as genuine German artworks at earlier National Socialist exhibitions, and that the First Great German Art Exhibition featured artists whose work had previously been confiscated as ‘degenerate’ by Ziegler. Even Arno Breker, famous for his neoclassical heroic sculptures and arguably the most privileged artist in the Third Reich,

11. Arno Breker, The Party (detail), 1939, bronze, Arno Breker Museum, Nörvenich, Germany 

55

did not escape Ziegler’s cleansing campaign.69 The confusion became complete when sculptor Rudolf Belling was represented with different works at both exhibitions.70 National Socialists characterized modern art as Jewish or communist, but among modern German artists there were hardly any Jews or communists to be found. The categories Jew and communist were used in a metaphorical sense: artists painting in a modern style worked in the spirit of communism or international Jewry. Only two of the German artists in Degenerate Art were ethnically Jewish: Ludwig Meidner and Otto Freundlich, whose sculpture New Man (Der Neue Mensch) from 1912 was featured on the exhibition flyer. Communist artists were hardly represented. John Heatfield’s photomontages with their razor-sharp criticism on the capitalist interests behind Hitler and the National Socialist movement were left out of the exhibition, possibly out of fear they would present the public with unwelcome ideas.71 The qualification ‘degenerate’ was much more based on artistic style than on the artist’s political conviction or even ethnicity. With 27 works, Nolde was the best represented artist at Degenerate Art, which is remarkable, because no modern artist was more supportive of the National Socialist cause than Nolde. Although Goebbels and a few other prominent Nazis initially admired his work, Nolde had to deal with strong opposition within the party from the very beginning, as many viewed him as the very paragon of a degenerate artist.72 Nolde was expelled from the Reich Chamber of the Visual Arts and forbidden to exhibit his work and even to paint. But he did not give up. After the opening of Degenerate Art, Nolde wrote letters to Goebbels and Minister of Culture Bernhard Rust in which he emphasized the German character of his artwork, signed with his name and the party salute 56 

12. Otto Freundlich, My Sky is Red, 1933, oil on canvas, 63.8 x 51.6 inches (162 x 131 cm), Musée d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris

‘Heil Hitler!’73 But to no avail. Nolde was forced to go into ‘internal exile’ and to paint watercolors in the basement of his house in Seebüll, the current site of the Nolde Museum. Painting oil paintings had become too dangerous as the smell might betray him to his neighbors, who might have turned him in for disobeying the prohibition to paint. In the meantime, he remained a member of the NSDAP until 1941. 

57

Not only modern artists fell victim to the National Socialists. Everyone ran the risk of falling out of grace, with all the consequences that might entail. Not even Adolf Ziegler, for many years the most powerful man in the art world of the Third Reich, remained immune. In 1943, when he made a pessimistic comment on the German chances of victory in the Second World War, he was arrested and detained in Dachau concentration camp. Apparently Hitler f irst considered having him executed before he was pardoned after six weeks in Dachau. But he was no longer allowed to exhibit and his name became taboo in the German art world during the last years of the war.74 * At first sight, nothing seems more straightforward than the history of art in the Third Reich. A totalitarian regime repressed free and autonomous art and exchanged it for visual propaganda – clearly a history of well-def ined political perpetrators and artistic victims. But historical reality was more complex. The struggle against Jewish and Bolshevist art was in fact not a struggle against Jewish and Bolshevist artists. Artistic style defined whether an artist was deemed degenerate, and thus Jewish and/or Bolshevist. In the meantime, not all Nazi leaders shared the official criticism of modern art and not all modern artists disagreed with the political ideas of National Socialism. The post-war vision of modern art as victim of the Nazi regime, and the undifferentiated critical approach to Nazi art during the 1960s and 1970s, have largely obscured an awareness of these paradoxes. It is not just the troublesome coming-to-terms with the national past that informed this one-sided approach. Unwittingly, the Cold War, following 58 

the collapse of Nazi Germany, confirmed the ideological interpretation of artistic style as developed during the Third Reich. The seemingly clear distinction between good and evil in the world of art, as defined by the Nazis, was rigorously reinterpreted after 1945.75 In the Western world, modern artists were now hailed as martyrs in favor of a liberal democratic political order, regardless of their political stance during the Third Reich. Although Nolde refrained from political comments after 1945 and never revoked his party membership during the Third Reich, as a prominent victim of National Socialism he was now considered politically uncontaminated. This way, the autonomous and alleged unpolitical character of modern art could be presented as a symbol of Western freedom and independence, in opposition to the totalitarian systems of both Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union. The unpolitical character of modern art had become a political asset.



59

4. Internal and External Enemies The Cold War The Cold War was a struggle between two great powers that wanted to mold the world according to their principles. Although a direct military confrontation was avoided, both camps were heavily engaged in a symbolic competition. Accomplishments in the fields of production and consumption, social security, technology, scientif ic discoveries, sports and culture were celebrated as proof of ideological superiority. The visual arts were part of this rivalry, and they caused a lot of confusion. At f irst, the artistic borders between East and West were as rigorously defined as in the Third Reich. Socialist Realism, aimed at convincing the viewer of the blessings of Socialism and the eternal wisdom of the communist party, defined the visual culture of the Soviet Union and its satellite states, beginning during Stalin’s times. In the 1950s, modernism became the dominant art form in the West, mostly defined in strictly aesthetic, non-political terms. Paradoxically, this ‘pure’ art was confronted with the propagandistic realism of both the Eastern bloc and the Third Reich as a sign of political freedom in the Western world. On the other hand, precisely the lack of recognizable political and social engagement in modern art became a target for communist critics, who rejected this art as nothing but noncommittal decoration, a typical expression of a bourgeois-decadent society. Nonetheless, once again, reality was less straightforward than it might seem. During the years directly following the October Revolution, modern art was very successful 

61

in communist Russia, while in the United States it did not make much headway until the 1930s. Moreover, the officially sanctioned campaign against modern art after 1945 did not hinder the Soviet authorities from publicly honoring communist modern artists from Western Europe, such as Pablo Picasso, Fernand Léger and Renato Guttuso, at international conferences and festivals organized by the Soviet bloc. In the United States, on the other hand, modern art was hotly contested among those who honored it as a symbol of American freedom and those who fought it as an anti-American cultural conspiracy. How did the canonization of Socialist Realism in the Soviet Union and of modern art in the United States come about? Why was modern art celebrated and hotly contested by both superpowers? In spite of all the ideological differences: what were the parallels between the Cold War art worlds in the East and West? And why have the visual arts largely lost their appeal as a means of cultural diplomacy – or cultural propaganda – since the 1960s? * Following the Russian Revolution of 1917, the propagandistic value of visual culture was quickly recognized by the new political leaders. People’s Commissar of Enlightenment Anatoli Lunacharsky appealed to all artists throughout the country to support the new government through artistic means. With few exceptions, only members of the avantgarde responded to this open invitation.76 In the course of the 1910s, Russian Futurists, Suprematists and Constructivists, partly under the influence of European movements like Futurism, Cubism and Expressionism, had broken away from academic norms. Initially, their formal experiments 62 

did not have a clear political component, nor did they achieve a wide resonance. But all that would change in 1917, when Kasimir Malevich, Vladimir Tatlin and others started to present themselves as artistic forerunners and prophets of the political revolution.77 Thanks to Lunacharsky, Russian avant-garde artists were involved in designing public monuments and stage settings for revolutionary celebrations in public space. They were also invited to reform the principles of art education in accordance with their revolutionary views, and to establish new museums for modern and contemporary art – the first of their kind worldwide.78 But soon enough, it became clear that communist politicians and avant-garde artists were not exactly on the same page. While the politicians focused on seizing and securing power, and sketching out the exclusive path to the shining socialist future as defined by Marxist-Leninist ideology, the artists were primarily interested in a liberation from tradition and a carte blanche for creative freedom.79 The discrepancy was clearly expressed by Lenin himself in an interview with the German socialist Clara Zetkin. Lenin stated that he did not understand modern art and did not enjoy it. The socialist artist should make art for the working people, in a style accessible to all, that would inspire the realization of socialist society.80 That does not mean, however, that modern art was completely marginalized after the founding of the Soviet Union in 1922. Several art movements pleaded for a new connection between art and the working people without giving up the idea of artistic autonomy and quality. The group October (1928-32) with artists like El Lissitzky, Alexander Rodchenko, Gustav Klutsis, Alexander Deineka and Hannes Meyer, the second director of the Bauhaus in Germany, envisioned a proletarian art that stood apart from 

63

both nineteenth-century academic realism and from the inaccessible abstractions of the avant-garde.81 As mentioned earlier (chapter 2), this artistic vision appealed to Diego Rivera, who joined the group in 1928 during his visit to the Soviet Union, before his expulsion. Lenin died in January 1924, and it was only a few years later that his successor Stalin secured absolute power. Henceforth, all political and cultural organizations were strictly controlled. During the mid and late 1930s, Stalin launched a series of merciless campaigns and show trials against so-called opponents of the regime and the bourgeois-feudal class enemy, which was defined in ever broader terms. During these campaigns, millions of people were executed or sent to the gulags, disciplinary concentration camps, where many of them disappeared. In spite of the ideological differences, the 1930s Soviet art world strongly resembled that of the Third Reich with its Reichs Chamber of Culture (see chapter 3). All previously existing art movements were dissolved, including October in 1932. Visual artists had to join the artists’ union, an umbrella organization with regional sections. Membership was a strict requirement to work officially as an artist. Artists who were not accepted by the union were not allowed to exhibit their work, rent a studio or even buy painting materials.82 Around the same time, Socialist Realism became the universal artistic norm. The concept was introduced in May 1932 in the literary magazine Literaturnaya Gazeta, and one year later it was officially attributed to Stalin personally.83 What is Socialist Realism? From the theoretical publications in the course of the 1930s, two ideas stand out. In the first place, socialist art had to be dialectic; it should not depict the world as it is, in all its contingency and imperfection, but as it would reveal itself in all its splendor when the socialist 64 

utopia had been realized. Artists had to isolate and depict those elements of everyday reality that foreshadow this socialist future, and had to avoid all elements that belonged to the ‘old order,’ which had to be overcome. In the second place, the artist had to be an ‘engineer of the soul,’ as Stalin told a gathering of Soviet writers at the dacha of Maxim Gorki.84 He had to invest the reader, listener or viewer with the ideal values of socialist society, consequently contributing to the creation of the New Socialist Man and Woman. What this meant for the visual arts in practical terms became clear all too soon. Artistic experiments were no longer accepted. For inspiration, artists had to look to the Wanderers (Peredvizhniki), a group of artists around Ilja Repin who, at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, had broken free from the tsarist art academy to work in close contact with Russian nature and the Russian people.85 * After a brief period of relative relaxation and artistic freedom during and shortly after the Second World War, a vicious publicity campaign introduced a new reign of terror in the Soviet art world. Andrei Zhdanov, Party Secretary of the city of Leningrad, member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, and since 1946 responsible for cultural affairs, played a decisive role in this process. Between 1946 and 1948 he published a series of four decrees, attacking, among other things, a lack of ideology in Soviet literature, bourgeois decadent influences in Soviet theater, false originality in Soviet music and degenerate characters in Soviet film. In his decrees he specifically swept aside international celebrities like the poet Anna Akhmatova, film 

65

director Sergei Eisenstein and composers Sergei Prokofiev and Dmitri Shostakovich to make his point.86 Although Zhdanov did not specif ically address the visual arts in his decrees, their impact was immediately felt. The tsarist art academy, closed down by Lunacharsky in 1918 in order to reform art education, was reinstalled. Paintings from the years 1947-53 typically avoid any social conflict. Lenin and Stalin figure prominently, sometimes with an almost religious aura. Artists could get in trouble for depicting a drinking pause during work, or for a slightly impressionist rendering of a sun-lit wall in the view of a hair-splitting critic.87 Until 1953, the year of Stalin’s death, Soviet art critics associated modern art with bourgeois decadence, capitalism or even, following National Socialist rhetoric, degeneration.88 One of the most notorious black sheep in Soviet art criticism was Pablo Picasso, whose ‘formalism’ (empty play of artistic forms) was considered a typical expression of the decadence of late capitalism.89 But Picasso was a complex case. In 1937, after exhibiting his Guernica at the Paris World Fair, protesting the German bombings on the Basque city of the same name, Picasso had presented himself as a politically engaged artist. Becoming a member of the French communist party (PCF) in 1944, he would politically express himself in much more explicit terms. In 1951, for instance, he painted his Slaughter in Korea, which shows American soldiers as armored robots, killing a group of unarmed and defenseless women and children. The composition follows Francisco de Goya’s The Third of May 1808 in Madrid from 1814, a painted indictment against the cruelties of Napoleon’s occupation army in Spain.90 At the very time Zhdanov tightened his grip on the art world, the Soviet Union launched an international 66 

13. Boris Spornikov, Spring, 1976, oil on canvas, 54.3 x 46.5 inches (138 x 118 cm), The Wende Museum, Culver City

14. Sergei Alexeevich Grigoriev (copy), Candidate for the KomSoMol (Soviet youth movement), c. 1950, oil on canvas, 74 x 61 inches (188 x 155 cm), The Wende Museum, Culver City 

67

propaganda campaign to win people all over the world for the communist cause. In March 1949, New York’s Waldorf Astoria Hotel featured the Scientific and Cultural Conference for World Peace, with among its prominent American participants the composers Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein, the writers Arthur Miller and Normal Mailer, and the visual artist Anton Refregier. Shostakovich was part of the Soviet delegation, in spite of the fact that he had been viciously attacked by Zhdanov only one year before because of the ‘false originality’ of his compositions.91 At this occasion, he discussed the bitter struggle between capitalist and communist art, sweeping aside his ‘reactionary’ compatriot Igor Stravinsky.92 Moreover, instigated by Moscow, a series of international festivals was organized to connect progressive youth and students from all over the world. For one of these festivals, the Paris Peace Conference in 1949, Picasso designed his famous peace dove, for which he was awarded the Stalin Peace Prize one year later.93 In the international arena, the very symbol of Western cultural decadence was celebrated as an exemplary communist artist. * The idea that modern art would become the international sign-board of the United States in the 1950s would have been hard to predict twenty years earlier, just like the fact that Socialist Realism would eventually become the ‘house style’ of Soviet art could hardly have been foreseen during the Russian Revolution. The Great Depression following the collapse of the stock market in 1929 had an enormous impact on the American art world. The crisis became a prominent topic among American artists on the left. Some of them painted the social misery of workers and the unemployed, 68 

others used their work to speak out visually against capitalism and its devastating consequences. American artists got the opportunity to present their critical works to a broader public partly thanks to the New Deal, the package of support programs launched by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in order to moderate the consequences of the crisis. The Roosevelt Administration did not immediately envision that the visual arts would benefit from these programs. But in 1933, George Biddle, an artist and former classmate of Roosevelt’s, wrote the President a letter, advising him to support visual artists in the form of government commissions. Biddle, who had visited Rivera in Mexico, emphasized that the respective Mexican governments since Obregón had very effectively spread their ideas by means of mural paintings and suggested American artists could have a comparable role in the United States, spreading Roosevelt’s ideas and securing his legacy.94 The president responded appreciatively and in December 1933 the Public Works of Art Project was inaugurated, initiating a general support program for visual artists in financial need and a series of special commissions on the basis of a competition for sketch designs, including commissions for mural paintings in public buildings.95 Most artists who joined the program had no experience whatsoever with painting murals. For inspiration they looked to Mexico, especially the work of Rivera. In the 1930s, modern art only played a secondary role in the United States. During the 1910s and 1920s, Lyonel Feininger, Marsden Hartley, Stuart Davis and others were inspired by the European avant-garde movements, but until the late 1930s they were a small minority. In the early 1930s, many left-wing artists had watched the Soviet communist experiment with admiration and joined one of the new 

69

leftist art organizations that popped up like mushrooms. However, by the mid-1930s the atmosphere had changed. Roosevelt came under attack for his ‘socialist’ measures to fight the crisis. The Federal Art Project, which in 1935 succeeded the Public Works of Art Program, no longer allowed political statements in works commissioned by the government. It stipulated that artists first had to submit a design before they got permission to execute their work.96 Around the same time, rumors about show trials, gulags and the repression of free art and culture in the Soviet ­Union started to trickle in. These stories made it increasingly hard for left-leaning art organizations to stay loyal to the Soviet example. In this regard, the trial and expulsion of Leo Trotsky, Lenin’s brother-in-arms during the revolution, who was quite popular among American left-wing artists and intellectuals, had an enormous impact. In Partisan Review, a leftist albeit anti-Stalinist magazine in the United States, Trotsky had published an article rejecting Stalin’s cultural views, claiming that it is the artist’s responsibility to give form to his political engagement.97 The non-aggression pact between Hitler and Stalin of August 1939 (the so-called Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact) would alienate many left-wing Americans from the Soviet Union permanently. A number of artists now distanced themselves from their social realist style, which could easily be associated with Socialist Realism, and started searching for new forms of artistic expression. They found inspiration in contemporary European art forms, especially Surrealism and abstract art. * The influences on American modern art were manifold. Jackson Pollock was inspired, among other things, by 70 

the concept of ‘archetypes,’ universal primordial forms embedded in the collective unconscious, developed by the Austrian psychotherapist Carl Gustav Jung, and by Native American rituals. Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman mentioned a spiritual layer in their work, while Ad Reinhardt principally rejected all metaphysical and political interpretation of his paintings, although he was quite frank about his communist sympathies in everyday life.98 Some of the modern artists were influenced by the French Existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Albert Camus. From this philosophical movement they took the idea that an authentic person must make his own choices and an authentic artist must create his own visual language in a world of imposed structures, systems and meanings. Non-figurative art seemed a promising path in this respect. As mentioned in the Introduction, Barnett Newman conceived of his work as a radical rejection of both state capitalism and totalitarianism, that is to say, of both political systems defining the bipolar world order of the Cold War.99 American painters who in the second half of the 1940s turned to non-figurative art were later categorized as Abstract Expressionists, although this was by no means a closely-knit group with shared ideas. In the meantime, a completely new perspective was being developed in American public art debates after the Second World War. Art historian and critic Clement Greenberg, one of the most prominent advocates of modern art in post-war America, recognized in Abstract Expressionism nothing less than the ultimate realization of the aims of modern art history.100 According to him, art had since the middle of the nineteenth century followed a path towards absolute artistic purity, as exemplified by an increasingly explicit focus on the very essence of painting: form and color applied 

71

15. Consuelo Kanaga, Portrait of Mark Rothko, c. 1949, gelatin silver photograph, 10 x 8 inches (25 x 20 cm), Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn

to a flat surface. The modern artist had finally understood that painting is all about painting, and does not refer to any external reality. Painting presented its own reality. Although Greenberg had called himself a follower of Trotsky in the late 1930s, his ideas on art had very little in common with orthodox communism. Whereas socialist art always serves a political goal, for Greenberg art with a message, political or otherwise, is not art but kitsch or propaganda. His idea became politically meaningful when Greenberg asserted that after the war New York had succeeded Paris as global center of the art world. According 72 

16. Barnett Newman, Broken obelisk, 1963-67, bronze, University of Washington, Seattle

to Greenberg, the Abstract Expressionists were the living proof of this change.101 As a matter of fact, Greenberg’s ideas corresponded with a series of cultural initiatives by the State Department. Shortly after the war, there was no great government interest in using art and culture to support American foreign policy. Admittedly, an exhibition of American art was sent to Mexico and Europe in 1946, supported by the State Department, but under conservative political pressure this exhibition was revoked after it arrived in Prague. Critics disagreed with the selection of artists, which they considered too left-wing and too modern. When confronted with Yasuo Kuniyoshi’s work Circus Girl Resting, which was part of the exhibition, President Henry Truman, himself an amateur painter, reportedly spoke the memorable words: ‘If this is art, I am a Hottentot.’102 Minister of State George 

73

Marshall, responding to the public outcry, promised that American tax money would never again be used to support an exhibition of American art abroad.103 However, in the late 1940s the State Department became increasingly alarmed by the Soviet Union’s active and effective cultural diplomacy, such as the Waldorf Astoria conference in 1949. Moreover, it was recognized that many left-wing intellectuals in Europe disconcertingly associated the United States not so much with freedom and democracy as with imperialism, racism, base materialism and a serious lack of culture.104 With the help of the CIA, the State Department tried to counteract this negative view. In a covert operation, European left-liberal newspapers and magazines like Encounter in Great-Britain, Preuves in France and Der Monat in Germany were financially supported, in the hope that a focus on freedom of speech and expression would open the readers’ eyes to the totalitarian character of the Soviet regime. The American government, through the CIA, also secretly financed the Congress for Cultural Freedom, an organization of independent European artists and intellectuals in support of freedom of speech.105 Moreover, with support from the State Department, American orchestras, dance companies and opera productions went on international tours to convince the world of the highest standards of American culture.106 The State Department, supported by the United States Information Agency (USIA) beginning in 1953, also resumed traveling exhibitions of American art. These exhibitions typically showcased a variety of artistic styles, presenting artwork by modern artists and politically critical artists like Ben Shahn next to more traditional and conservative artwork.107 In the late 1950s, the Museum of Modern Art in New York organized two traveling exhibitions with support from the USIA that were exclusively dedicated to Abstract 74 

Expressionism, one of them a solo exhibition of the work of Jackson Pollock, who had died in a car crash in 1955.108 This politically inspired use of modern art in the cultural arena of the Cold War was extremely paradoxical. While some of the artists involved saw their work as an expression of personal integrity and creativity in times of suffocating political systems, it was now being used to celebrate cultural freedom and the values of modern liberal democracy in the United States. In 1952, Alfred Barr Jr., the first director of the Museum of Modern Art, expressed this thought in an article in the New York Times: ‘The modern artist’s nonconformity and love of freedom cannot be tolerated within a monolithic tyranny, and modern art is useless for the dictator’s propaganda.’109 He forgot to mention that evidently this art is not so useless for democratic propaganda. Barr published his article under the title ‘Is Modern Art Communistic?’, an indication that support for modern art was not unproblematic in the United States. On the one hand, the artists themselves might not have been too eager to use their work to fight the communist enemy; on the other, their work was not very popular among the American public at large. Indeed, some conservative politicians in the late 1940s and the 1950s viciously attacked modern art as a political danger. The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) tried to come clean in Hollywood with a campaign against communist directors, actors and scriptwriters, while Senator Joseph McCarthy launched his witch-hunt against real and alleged communists in American society.110 Progressive artists, writers and intellectuals who had dared to say something positive about socialism or something negative about American society in public, were scrutinized, incriminated and sometimes subpoenaed by official Committees of Inquiry. 

75

In regard to the visual arts, Congressman George Dondero (Rep., Michigan) was indefatigable in identifying modern trends as a communist threat. According to Dondero, the fact that modern art was ‘ugly’ was sufficient proof of its subversive communist content: ‘Modern art is communistic [sic] because it is distorted and ugly, because it does not glorify our beautiful country. Art which does not glorify our beautiful country in plain and simple terms that everyone can understand breeds dissatisfaction. It is therefore opposed to our government, and those who create and promote it are our enemies.’111 As a consequence, the State Department and the USIA, involved in traveling exhibitions including American modern art, had to be counted among the enemies of the United States. Sometimes Dondero was even more outspoken and compared modern art to vermin and contagious diseases, a vocabulary directly inspired by art criticism of the Third Reich.112 Remarkably, Dondero’s views on modern art closely resemble those of Zhdanov. Both of them identified modern art and culture as a subversive product of the ideological enemy. Extreme though Dondero was in his views and vocabulary, he was far from unique. One of his colleagues in Congress exposed Pollock’s drip paintings as a series of decoded maps of the United States in preparation of a Soviet missile attack.113 The FBI kept files on modern artists who, based on their (past) communist sympathies and on their modern painting style, were considered a national security threat. One of the larger files was dedicated to Pablo Picasso, in spite of the fact that the Spanish painter had never once visited the United States.114 Picasso’s role in the early years of the Cold War neatly summarizes the schizophrenia in the art worlds of both superpowers. In the Soviet Union Picasso was identified 76 

as a bourgeois decadent artist; at international festivals, on the other hand, he was honored with the Stalin Peace Prize and other tokens of recognition. In the United States Picasso was celebrated as one of the spiritual fathers of ‘free’ and ‘democratic’ modern art, but to conservative critics and the FBI he was a subversive communist. * Obviously, the American and Soviet art scenes of the early Cold War years were very different. Apart from the domination of one or another style, the United States had a measure of artistic freedom that was inconceivable in the Soviet Union. McCarthy, Dondero and the FBI fought their battles against modern and progressive tendencies in American society, but this hardly ever resulted in effective censorship, let alone in the imprisonment or execution of people because of their political, intellectual or artistic convictions. That being said, there are some surprising parallels as well. Internationally, both countries presented themselves as open-minded, tolerant and progressive, and used modern art to prove the point. But the decrees, speeches and interviews by Zhdanov and Dondero tell another story. They incriminate modern art as a product of enemy ideology and as a form of spiritual treason. There is yet another interesting paradox at play. The State Department and the USIA used modern art exactly because of its alleged non-political character to make a political statement. An elitist art form, during the 1950s understood and valued by a minority, was presented in Western Europe as the very symbol of American freedom and democracy. Dubious though that may sound, it seems to have been a clever move, because American modern 

77

art did in fact impress the predominantly anti-American progressive artists and intellectuals in Europe. The visual arts retained their relevance as ‘soft power tool’ during the Cold War, but during the 1960s their role became less prominent. This can be explained in part by the rise of film, television and other forms of mass culture that could reach a much broader public. Moreover, in international perspective, the focus on art and culture as benchmarks of political legitimacy gradually shifted towards science and technology, the space race, sports and mass consumption. The internal development of the art scene in the United States and in the Soviet Union undoubtedly contributed to the decreasing usability of art for cultural diplomacy as well. Jasper Johns’ painted American flags, Roy Lichtenstein’s blown-up comics and Andy Warhol’s Coca-Cola bottles, Brillo soap boxes and silkscreen portraits of Mao Zedong no longer supported the narrative of ‘pure art’ that made the Abstract Expressionists such an attractive export product in the eyes of the State Department. In the Soviet Union, the process of destalinization, inaugurated by Stalin’s successor Nikita Khrushchev, started a slow but unstoppable process of appropriation and subsequent erosion of Socialist Realism. The visual arts in the Soviet Union, though still severely repressed under Party Secretary Leonid Brezhnev, increasingly changed from ideological advertisement to self-willed artistic expression. No longer could the visual arts be viewed as a pure mirror of the competing ideologies of the Cold War.

78 

5.

From Maoism to Capitalist Communism The People’s Republic of China

The proclamation of the People’s Republic by Mao Zedong on October 1, 1949, at Tiananmen Square (Square of Heavenly Peace) in Beijing, did not just mean a watershed in terms of political and economic organization, but also introduced a completely new attitude towards culture and tradition in China. 115 In the course of millennia, the Chinese empire, in spite of many border changes, ethnically divergent dynasties and varying systems of government, always cherished its deeply rooted traditions. The teachings of Confucius (551-480 BCE), with their emphasis on respecting ancestors, social harmony, governmental hierarchy, loyalty towards state and family, and responsibility vis-à-vis the common good, at times in combination with Taoism or Buddhism, had been a defining factor in Chinese culture for many centuries. Communism changed all this by officially condemning the Confucian tradition as ‘feudal’ and ‘bourgeois.’ Maoism, the Chinese version of Marxism-Leninism, was future-oriented and grounded in social equality. This new ideology had immediate consequences for the Chinese art world. Guohua, a traditional Chinese art form based on the concept of harmony and inner spirituality (predominantly landscapes, animals or still-lives in ink or watercolor on paper or parchment), had to yield to socialist folk art. In the 1950s, China principally looked to the Soviet Union for artistic inspiration. During the Cultural Revolution 

79

(1966-76), the break with the past became absolute. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) rejected all traditional ideas and cultural forms, restricting the visual arts to petrified images of the Great Helmsman Mao. However, after his death in 1976, and especially from the political leadership of Deng Xiaoping in 1978, China witnessed a process of radical economic liberalization with strong and sometimes paradoxical consequences for the art world. Until this very day, China is a one-party state governed by the CCP, but Chinese art after Mao developed in a completely new direction, offering an intriguing inner perspective on the changing structures and relations throughout the country. How did Mao and the CCP try to redefine art in order to make it subservient to their political goals? What were the consequences of the Cultural Revolution for the Chinese art world, and what were the effects of Deng’s economic reforms? How does the Chinese government nowadays relate to contemporary art, and how does it define what is tolerated and what is not? * The People’s Republic of China followed a period of civil war and foreign occupation. The Chinese empire was dissolved in 1911. Under the provisional government of rebel leader Sun Yat-Sen, a republic was founded in 1912. During the following years the country was governed by a series of contending war lords, but Sun Yat-Sen’s nationalist movement Guomindang gradually succeeded in unifying the country in collaboration with the CCP, which was founded in 1921. Sun Yat-Sen died in 1927 and was succeeded by Chiang Kai-Shek, a staunch nationalist who ended the collaboration with the CCP. In 1934, the communists, led 80 

by Mao Zedong, undertook a long march to the northern province of Shanxi to base their headquarters in the city of Yan’an. In 1937, China was occupied by Japanese troops. The Guomindang and the communists closed ranks again to fight the Japanese, but after the Japanese defeat in 1945 the civil war between the two groups immediately resumed. After four more years of embittered battles, the troops of the Guomindang were driven from the mainland to Taiwan, where they would control the government with Western support until the elections of the year 2000. The proclamation of the People’s Republic in 1949 sealed the end of the civil war. Mao immediately introduced radical economic reforms, signed a treaty of friendship with Stalin in 1950, and energetically started a campaign against bourgeois capitalist tendencies in politics and culture. Initially, Mao, who also wrote poetry,116 had expressed relatively liberal ideas on art and culture. Like Trotsky, he believed artists should be free to express themselves in accordance with their own convictions. But in a series of speeches held in Yan’an in 1942, his approach changed dramatically. From then on, he demanded from artists unconditional loyalty towards the communist party and complete subservience to the people.117 Until the mid-1950s, this approach would define China’s art world. Artists accused of shortcomings in terms of artistic style or content were forced to distance themselves from their former aberrations.118 However, in 1956, the very year that Nikita Khrushchev initiated a period of relative liberalization (the ‘Thaw’) in the Soviet Union, Chinese Prime Minister Zhou Enlai launched the campaign ‘Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom.’ The CCP publicly apologized for the overly harsh implementation of the new policies 

81

since 1949, and announced a new period of relaxation and liberalization. Chinese intellectuals, workers and farmers were invited to criticize political abuses to help prepare reforms. Artists were now encouraged to experiment and to learn from various artistic traditions. To that end, exhibitions were organized with artwork from, for example, Europe, Mexico, Japan and Vietnam. In the same year that Moscow witnessed the first ever Picasso exhibition in the Soviet Union, a traveling exhibition with works by Picasso, Matisse and other modern French painters came to China.119 However, this period of relative liberalization would only last one year. Mao was not at all pleased with the massive criticism that followed the Hundred Flowers episode, and in 1957 he announced the ‘Anti-Rightist Campaign’ against bourgeois influences in Chinese society, partly aimed at exactly those intellectuals who had criticized the communist party the year before. This campaign also harshly affected the visual arts. Some artists were prohibited from exhibiting their work or even continuing their profession, others were exiled to the provinces or sent to one of the many re-education camps established throughout the country. Without a doubt, the most cynical aspect of the Anti-Rightist Campaign was the stipulation that all societal organizations – factories, collective farms, universities, art academies etc. – had to identify five percent of their members as counter-revolutionaries. The subsequent disciplinary measures affected hundreds of thousands of artists and intellectuals.120 In the meantime, one of the central debates in the Chinese art world focused on the question of what kind of art would represent the new republic. During the 1950s, Soviet-style Socialist Realism dominated. Painters from the Surikov and Repin art academies in Moscow and Leningrad were invited 82 

to teach art students in Beijing, Shanghai and other Chinese cities oil painting skills. Popular topics were the Long March of 1934, the fight against the Japanese occupation, the civil war between the communists and Guomindang, and of course Chairman Mao himself. Some Chinese artists had been influenced by European modern art during the 1920s and 1930s.121 These European influences were now rejected as ‘bourgeois,’ but there was another artistic tradition that could not be silenced so easily: the indigenous technique of guohua (literally meaning ‘native painting’), applying black or colored ink with brushes on paper, parchment or silk. Adversaries of guohua, such as Jiang Feng, president of the Beijing art academy since 1953, argued that there was no place for this bourgeois-feudal art form in communist China. Advocates of the tradition countered that guohua was a universally respected national art form, inherently superior to the Western technique of oil painting. According to the art historian Zheng Zhenduo, it was not the medium that was contaminated but its appropriation by the feudal elites of the Song dynasty (960-1279 CE), which had turned original folk art into decadent pictures of animals, landscapes and still-lives. Finally the time had come to restore the original folk tradition of guohua, supporting the needs of communist society.122 Artists educated in the guohua technique started to adapt their work to the demands of the hour. Traditional landscapes were now populated by socialist heroes or filled with factories and power pylons to illustrate communist progress. Another strategy was to add to traditional pictures of animals, landscapes and still-lives a few lines from a poem by Mao, or give them suggestive titles like Spring of our Communist Fatherland for a flowering peach tree, or Chairman Mao’s Native Soil for a landscape.123 Sometimes 

83

guohua painters received large official commissions. In 1959, Fu Baoshi and Guan Shanyue painted the monumental work Such is the Beauty of our Mountains and Rivers for the Great People’s Hall at Tiananmen Square, which opened that same year. It is a painted collage of idealized landscapes from different regions of the country. The title refers to a poem by Mao, the rising sun to the communist revolution.124 Another very successful work in guohua technique was Shi Lu’s Campaign in North Shanxi, a picture of Mao overlooking a landscape from a high rock, pondering his strategy.125 * The Republic’s second economic five-year plan from 1958, better known under the name the Great Leap Forward, outlined a radical collectivization of the farmland and a boost in the productivity of heavy industry, especially steel production, to transform China almost overnight into a modern, developed state. A combination of crop failures, the fusing of farming equipment to comply with the quota for steel production, and the export of farm products to the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc countries in exchange for their help with the industrialization process, resulted in an unprecedented famine, which, between 1959 and 1962, caused the loss of many millions of lives.126 Due to intimidation, whereby local administrators often did not dare to publish disappointing production data fearing reprisals, and to a propaganda campaign, including the visual arts, that sang the praise of the huge successes of the Great Leap against better judgment, the devastating consequences of this policy did not immediately become clear.127 The campaign’s failure affected Mao’s power base within the CCP. Now he had to tolerate competitors like Liu Shaoqi 84 

and Deng Xiaoping in influential positions next to him. A fierce power struggle between Liu and Mao followed. In 1963, Mao founded the Socialist Education Movement, renamed one year later as the Movement of the Four Purifications, to eradicate bourgeois ideas in politics and society. The movement harshly criticized Liu’s reform proposals, aimed at ameliorating the consequences of the Great Leap. In 1966, Mao launched the Cultural Revolution in order to regain full power and get rid of his rivals. Liu was arrested and died in prison three years later. The official aim of the Cultural Revolution was to smash the ‘four olds’ that allegedly poisoned Chinese society: old traditions, old culture, old habits and old ideas.128 During the first two years of the Revolution, Mao used Red Guards, armed gangs of revolutionary youth, to dismantle existing power structures and purge all social organizations and institutions, including universities and art academies.129 In their f ight against the ‘four olds’, the Red Guards destroyed old temples and buildings, books, musical instruments and artwork. Many previously respected artists and intellectuals were now publicly degraded, tortured or killed. Art studios were stormed in the quest for hidden counter-revolutionary art.130 At universities and art academies the Red Guards hunted down their former teachers and professors. After two years, in 1968, Mao dismantled the Red Guards. Gangs that did not comply were now deemed counter-revolutionary and disciplined accordingly.131 By that time, all art institutions that had existed before 1966 had been dismantled. Artists who were not put in jail or sent to re-education camps had to exchange their studios for the farmland or the factory in order to work amongst the working classes. Those who were killed or committed suicide between 1966 and 1968 were replaced 

85

by amateur artists. The few remaining professional artists had to correct the more representative amateur works and teach the working people how to make art.132 Under the supervision of Jiang Qing, Mao’s fourth wife since 1938, the arts had to focus exclusively on the glorification of the leader, who was now worshipped like a god. When normal people were painted next to Mao, they invariably beamed with joy and revolutionary fervor. This new painting style significantly became known under the name hong-guangliang: red-smooth-glowing.133 Between 1972 and 1975 the CCP organized annual exhibitions of national art, with artists from all parts of the country. Most works were by amateurs: workers, farmers and soldiers who liked to paint in their free time, sometimes corrected by professional artists. In the case of guohua, the professional correctors had to repaint the whole work because the technique requires the composition to be applied in one go. In 1973, as counterparts to the national art exhibitions, Jiang Qing organized a series of ‘black art exhibitions,’ showing horrifying examples of bourgeois art to the public.134 With these exhibitions of shame, the CCP imitated the art policy of the Third Reich. * Mao’s death in September 1976 was followed by a short power struggle between the more moderate new party leader Hua Guofeng and the so-called Gang of Four under J­ iang Qing, Mao’s widow, who wanted to expand the Cultural Revolution in radical style. This ended with the arrest of the Gang of Four in October 1976. Deng Xioaping, who in the years following the Cultural Revolution sidelined Hua to assume power, started a course of political reform. His famous quote 86 

‘it doesn’t matter whether the cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice,’ symbolizes his economic pragmatism. Pragmatism also entered cultural and artistic life. It is true that in 1978 Deng actually endorsed the persecution of counter-revolutionary artists and intellectuals under Mao, that he removed the article on freedom of thought, which had surprisingly survived the Cultural Revolution as a dead letter, from the constitution,135 and that during the 1980s artists were still frequently criticized and some art exhibitions were closed by the authorities. But there was no longer systematic repression and constant persecution in the art world. The artistic changes since 1978 are mirrored in Mao’s metamorphosis in visual culture. In the early 1970s, the Great Leader was depicted and worshipped as a living god. To the present day, Mao’s portrait decorating the Gate of Heavenly Peace on Tiananmen Square in Beijing is, with some two billion official copies, the most prolific image in world history.136 In his famous essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction from 1935, philosopher Walter Benjamin stated that reproductions deprive images of their ‘aura’; in reproduction, the artwork loses its magical power of authenticity. It seems that in China the reproductions of Mao’s image had the exact opposite effect: they actually contributed to his supernatural status. Therefore, any appropriation or subversion of this image could be seen as an act of sacrilege. However, after Mao’s death, appropriation and subversion of his omnipresent image is exactly what happened. Wang Keping, active as a Red Guard during the Cultural Revolution, was one of the first to break with orthodoxy by giving Mao the round cheeks of the Buddha in his sculpture Idol.137 Many other artists followed with their own interpretations 

87

17. Sui Jianguo, Mao suit, 2008, corroded steel, Times Square, Hong Kong

of Mao’s likeness. Li Shan reshaped the fatherly-authoritarian leader into an androgynous figure with colored lips and eyebrows, or a flower between his lips. Wang Guangyi put Mao behind a grid like that typically used by artists during the Cultural Revolution to enlarge photos to monumental paintings. But unlike his predecessors, Wang did not erase 88 

18. Tiananmen Square, Gate of Heavenly Peace with Mao portrait, Beijing

his grid but accentuated it with red and black paint, putting Mao visually behind bars. While this work might have been on the brink of acceptability, Gao Qiang crossed that border by painting Mao swimming in a red-colored Yangtze River. The association with blood led to the removal of his work from an exhibition in Beijing.138 With his sculpture series of empty Mao jackets, Sui Jianguo may have found a metaphor for a symbol becoming hollow.139 In terms of appropriation, Chinese artists might have been inspired by Andy Warhol’s silkscreen print series of Mao from 1973, made one year after President Richard Nixon’s famous state visit to China. There is yet another connection between Warhol and contemporary Chinese painting. In 1962, Warhol presented his first silkscreened Coca-Cola bottles. These works can be seen as a provocation to Clement Greenberg’s mysticism of artistic purity (see chapter 4), or as an authentic – or 

89

ironic – celebration of American consumer culture. Be that as it may, since Warhol, Coca-Cola has made headway in the art world in both the East and the West. In 1978 Czech artist Milan Kunc painted his Pravda Coca-Cola, using the aesthetics of political posters to depict an official socialist mass demonstration under the logo of the Soviet newspaper Pravda (Truth). But in this case, the demonstrators, judging from their banners, not only call for peace and for Lenin but also for Coca-Cola. Alexander Kosolapov, a Russian artist who emigrated to the United States in 1975, followed suit with his work Lenin Coca-Cola from 1980, a painted Lenin bust against a solid red background with the text ‘It’s the real thing’ and Lenin’s name by way of signature. Both artists seem to refer to the interchangeability of political and economic temptations, of communist and capitalist rhetoric.140 In the same vein, Coca-Cola became a popular motif in Chinese art from the 1990s. According to a survey from 1997, the Coca-Cola company was the most famous and mostly admired business in China at the time.141 As part of his Series of Great Criticism, Wang Guangyi painted Workers, Farmers, Soldiers and Coca-Cola (1992), a poster-like image with the typical representatives of the three traditional professions of communist society, combined with the logo of the soda producer.142 The inherent irony and political criticism might not differ much from Kosolapov’s Lenin Coca-Cola, but the conditions under which the two works were produced couldn’t be more different. Kosolapov had left the communist Soviet Union for the capitalist United States; Wang had experienced an economic and cultural landslide in his own country. The combination of Coca-Cola and Cultural Revolution, or of McDonalds and Cultural Revolution, as in the work Mao Burger Monument by the Luo brothers (Luo Weidong, 90 

Luo Weiguo and Luo Weibing) from 2006, reflects a seeming paradox of contemporary China: a communist one-party state with a capitalist economy.143 Under Mao there had been brutal repression, but also a sense of social equality. In present-day China a new middle class is quickly on the rise, the gap between rich and poor is steadily growing and the principle of market economy has led to massive unemployment, especially in many state-owned companies. It is precisely this paradox that has been translated into artistic irony in many Chinese artworks since the 1990s. Art historians debate the interpretation of these works and their makers. Are they critically commenting on social issues or are they cleverly prof iting from the new system?144 Conceptual artists have addressed the hybrid character of present-day China as well. Huang Yong Ping blended two art historical reference books in a washing machine: A History of Chinese Painting and A Concise History of Modern Painting, the first representing Chinese art, the second the history of European and American modern painting. The result of his attempt to symbolically integrate two art traditions was, not surprisingly, an unreadable paper mush. The versatile artist Xu Bing, whose work mainly deals with image, language and communication, exhibited his work Wild Zebras at the Gangzhou Triennial of 2003, consisting of two donkeys decorated with black and white stripes. The idea for this work came from a group of shrewd farmers who tried to attract tourists by painting their horses as zebras, but the deeper meaning of the work undoubtedly relates to the capitalist phase of Chinese communism in which nothing is what it seems to be.145 The official policy towards the visual arts in the 1980s seems to have been rather inconsistent. An alternative 

91

19. Xu Bing, Phoenix (detail), 2010, mixed technique, Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, New York City

art movement like The Stars, which organized its first, unofficial art exhibition in 1979 in Beijing with works by, among others, Wang Keping and Ai Weiwei, was sometimes tolerated, sometimes disciplined.146 But from the mid-1980s the number of underground and avant-garde art groups, exhibitions, lectures, conferences and performances started to grow considerably – a phenomenon known as The Movement of 1985. The culmination of this development was the famous and notorious exhibition China/Avant-Garde from February 1989, with a large number of radical artworks.147 Although the exhibition was temporarily closed twice – the first time when artist Xiao Lu fired two shots at her own mirror image in the installation Dialogue, the second time because of a bomb alert – it remained open for the rest of the time, to the surprise of many.148 Four months later, the student protests for democratic reforms on Tiananmen Square were violently suppressed by the Chinese army. Among the demonstrators were 92 

many students from the Beijing art academy, who carried around their own version of the Statue of Liberty.149 As a consequence, the art world was placed under strict control again. Art students at the academies were no longer allowed to execute work without asking permission first. At this point most artists carefully avoided political criticism in their works. Many avant-garde artists left the country or settled in old factories or half-deserted villages at the edge of the big c­ ities. New art collectives were born, such as Space 798 in the Beijing Dashanzi district, and in the Moganshan district in Shanghai. Gradually these art colonies developed during the 1990s into popular tourist attractions, complete with galleries, coffee shops, restaurants and design and fashion stores – a direct consequence of the fact that the international art market suddenly discovered Chinese avant-garde art during the late 1990s. The art market was booming to such a degree that Chinese real estate brokers started to offer exhibition spaces to attract investors.150 Interestingly, among the entrepreneurs who settled in Space 798 was Kong Dongmei, Mao’s granddaughter, who opened a bookshop to spread her grandfather’s ideas.151 Along with the growing international craze for contemporary Chinese art, global art fairs such as the Shanghai Biennial (since 1996), the Guangzhou Triennial (since 2002) and the Beijing Biennial (since 2003) were organized. In 2005, China for the first time had its own pavilion at the Venice Biennial, after the Chinese contribution of 2003 had to be withdrawn as a consequence of the SARS epidemic of that year. Between 2001 and 2008 prices for contemporary Chinese art skyrocketed by 780%; in 2008, 36 out of the 100 world’s most financially successful contemporary artists were Chinese.152 Although the government at times still interferes with the art world and closes down exhibitions 

93

that are deemed unwelcome, the degree of censorship has decreased considerably since the early 1990s. Even raw and confrontational art is mostly tolerated, as long as it does not express direct political criticism or show explicit sexual imagery.153 It seems that the Chinese government has learned to use art that it does not control. The international art market brings the country money and the modern image of Chinese art is cleverly used, just like the 2008 Olympic Games, as a means of cultural diplomacy.154 * However, the story of Ai Weiwei shows that there are still clear boundaries to artistic freedom in China. Weiwei is the son of the poet Ai Qing, who in 1957 was expelled to the countryside as a consequence of Mao’s Anti-Rightist Campaign of that year. He was pardoned in 1978 and allowed to return to Beijing with his family. In 1979 Weiwei joined the Stars Group and moved to New York two years later. He returned to China in 1993, where he illegally published his Black Cover Book (1994), White Cover Book (1995) and Gray Cover Book (1997) with reproductions and texts by Western artists, critics and art historians. At the 2000 Shanghai Biennial Weiwei, together with independent curator Feng Boyi, organized a parallel exhibition with provocative works under the no less provocative title Fuck Off. Many of Ai Weiwei’s artworks produced in China were considered shocking. Between 1995 and 2003 he made the series A Study in Perspective, including photos of the Reichs­ tag in Berlin, the Eiffel Tower in Paris, the White House in Washington and the Gate of Heavenly Peace in Beijing with his own raised middle finger in the foreground. He also made fun of the sudden respect for, and veneration of, 94 

cultural heritage after the period of large-scale destruction during the Cultural Revolution. He decorated Neolithic vases with a Coca-Cola logo and by way of performance let a Han dynasty urn (206 BCE-220 CE) drop from his hands and smash on the floor. He transformed salvaged Ming (1368-1644) and Qing dynasty (1644-1912) architectonic elements such as window frames, doors and furniture into new sculptural objects, such as the one exhibited at the Kassel documenta in 2007. His more than twenty-foot high Fountain of Light from 2007 implicitly references China as a low-income country connected to the world market. This ‘light fountain’ made of steel, polished crystal and light bulbs, flowing on the water, designed for Tate Liverpool, copied the shape of the Monument to the Third International by Vladimir Tatlin from 1919, one of the most famous constructions never actually built. Ai Weiwei’s contemporary copy might be interpreted as a metaphor of an evaporated utopia, connected to capitalism’s focus on appearance rather than substance, as exemplified by the shiny crystals and light bulbs, the production of which was outsourced to China. The floating light tower could reference the island as a typical location of utopian fantasies,155 or maybe quite literally a utopia adrift. Ai Weiwei seemed on his way to becoming one of the cultural symbols of the new China when he got involved in 2008 as artistic advisor to the Swiss architectural company Herzog & de Meuron for the design of the Bird’s Nest, the iconic Beijing Olympic stadium. That same year the city government of Shanghai invited the artist to build a grand new studio in the city. However, because of his consistently critical political stance, things took a radically different turn, especially when Ai Weiwei openly criticized the Chinese government for using the Olympic Games as 

95

propaganda, trampling the rights of the local inhabitants who had to make way for the new stadium, and called for a boycott of the Games on his personal blog. He also signed the manifesto Charta 08, drafted by human rights activist and later Nobel Prize winner Liu Xiaobo, which called for a new constitution and freedom of speech. One year later, in 2009, Liu was accused of inciting to overthrow the government and convicted to eleven years in prison. A hard confrontation between Ai Weiwei and the regime followed when the authorities, after the devastating earthquake in Sichuan Province in 2008, refused to publish the names of the school children who had died when their poorly constructed school buildings collapsed. Together with a team of helpers, Ai Weiwei started his own research project by interviewing parents and teachers in the affected area, putting together a list of more than five thousand names, which he published on his blog. Whereas the authorities failed to do so, he commemorated the school children in his work Snake Ceiling (2009), a garland of student backpacks, which after the earthquake were found around the remains of the crushed school buildings. For his 2009 solo exhibition in the Munich Haus der Kunst (which in 1937 had featured the First Great German Art Exhibition, see chapter 3) he decorated the façade of the building with nine thousand colored backpacks, forming the text ‘She lived happily on this earth for seven years’ in Chinese characters against a blue background. With this sentence, a mother had commemorated her perished daughter after the earthquake. To counter his subversive activities, the authorities cut off Ai Weiwei’s blog account, whereupon he started to spread his comments via Twitter. In January 2011, his Shanghai studio was demolished by order of the city government as 96 

20. Ai Weiwei, Remembering: She lived happily for seven years in this world, 2009, installation with 9,000 student backpacks at the exhibition ‘So Sorry’, Haus der Kunst, Munich

an illegal construction project. In April 2011 the artist disappeared in broad daylight, and was kept at a secret location for nearly three months, watched by two guards day and night, on charges of tax evasion.156 Only in July 2015 did Ai Weiwei regain his passport, but he still faces several lawsuits. However, the artist has never given up his fight for political transparency. In an interview with art historian Marta Gnyp he confided: ‘Art is a part of our total responsibility for the world. Otherwise I don’t see why we should make art.’157 * From 1949 onwards, Mao’s cultural policies by and large followed Stalin’s example. While the Soviet Union under Khrushchev started a course of careful liberalization after 

97

1956, which also affected the arts, the Chinese government, after the ill-fated campaign Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom, kept an iron grip on the art world. Artists had to follow the narrow and unpredictable path of artistic virtue at the risk of draconic disciplinary measures. During the Cultural Revolution artists virtually had to restrict themselves to quasi-religious images of Mao and his followers, glowing with utopian zest. Deviations from the guidelines supervised by Mao’s wife Jiang Qing were pilloried as ‘black art.’ Since the late 1970s, a phase of careful liberalization has followed this period of totalitarian control and repression, albeit with sudden bursts of censorship. After the suppression of the Tiananmen student protests in June 1989, many artists started to live and work outside or at the edges of the big cities. Due to rather sudden popularity in the international art market during the late 1990s, many of them became less dependent on state commissions. Gradually the Chinese government discovered modern art as a means of soft diplomacy, as witnessed in the modern Chinese pavilion at the 2005 Venice Biennial. However, the experiences of Ai Weiwei show that artistic freedom still has clear-cut boundaries in present-day China. The story of Chinese art since 1949 shows that it is highly misleading to speak about ‘communist art.’ The power of the CCP has been unbroken for 65 years, but the art world experienced no less than a revolutionary development. In part, this might be explained by China’s participation in the capitalist art market, but that is not to say that this development can be interpreted in terms of growing Western artistic influence. Rather, one might say that Chinese artists since the late 1970s have started to creatively, critically and sometimes humorously appropriate Chinese and international art history. 98 

6. The In-Between Space Kara Walker’s Shadow Murals Art is intimately connected to storytelling. Traditionally, artworks evoked stories, real or fictitious, or prompted viewers to construct their own narratives. In the nineteenth century, adherents of the idea of ‘art for art’s sake’ dismissed all narrative and ‘anecdotal’ elements in art in favor of a purely aesthetic and self-referential approach. In the middle of the twentieth century, this view was taken to its logical conclusion by critic and art historian Clement Greenberg, who saw non-figurative art as the ultimate goal of the history of painting (see chapter 4). With this view he created his own story: the ‘master narrative’ of art history as a story of progress toward abstraction. However, after Greenberg’s thesis lost its initial avantgarde sting and became ‘mainstream,’ it met with a lot of resistance. One obvious reason was that ‘the end of painting,’ the logical consequence of having reached art history’s final destination, did not leave much room for subsequent generations of visual artists; another objection was that non-referential art deprives the artist of the potential to be socially and politically meaningful. Since the late 1960s, more and more artists have started to address political issues in their work. Political life is impacted in a fundamental way by the stories we tell each other. Stories that become part of our collective memory help shape our concepts of morality and social desirability, and define our place in an ongoing narrative of community life. Evidently, they are ideologically informed projections that do not coincide with life itself, but 

99

the gap between story and reality is not always recognized. The ideological implications of this gap are artistically addressed by Kara Walker, an African American artist who, with her provocative works on the topicality of racism and the history of slavery, has caused a stir in the American art world and beyond. When do we agree or disagree about the stories we keep telling ourselves? What is Kara Walker’s take on history – how does she address the enduring relevance of the past? And why is it that Walker’s work has sent a shock wave through the American art world, provoking the most extreme and controversial responses? * Under dictatorships, it is not just artworks and their interpretation that are censored and controlled. The story of art, as narrated in art-historical reference books and exhibition catalogues, tends to be scrutinized as well. Democracies, on the other hand, guarantee freedom of thought within the limits of the constitution, which means that, at least in theory, there can be an unlimited number of competing stories of art. However, that is an oversimplification. Whereas even under dictatorships the story of art is never completely uncontested, art in democracies is never produced or interpreted within a power vacuum. All kinds of economic, political, social, and cultural pressures determine what it takes for an artist to become successful, even if these factors are often hard to grasp. Art critics, curators, and art historians might claim to judge and interpret art according to objective and universal criteria, but they are the ones who define these very criteria in their reviews, exhibitions, and publications. 100 

For Greenberg, only those modern works belonged to the category of ‘art’ that contributed to the necessary development of art history as he saw it: an increasing focus on artistic purity.158 Inspired by Andy Warhol’s Pop Art, which ironically subverted Greenberg’s ‘religion of purity’ by introducing ‘impure’ references to everyday life into the realm of art, philosopher Arthur Danto rejected Greenberg’s model only to replace it with another one, somewhat tautologically defining modern art in terms of its capacity to contribute to the definition of art.159 These historical and philosophical designs of an artistic one-way street have been severely criticized by postmodern critics, who stressed the inevitable subjectivity and the hidden power structures behind such universalist claims. Indeed, the history of modern art since the middle of the nineteenth century has very much been the history of avant-garde attempts to undermine the art-historical canon, as well as subsequent art-critical and scholarly attempts to incorporate some of these avant-gardes into a slightly adapted version of their story and forget about the rest. Critiques of the story of art are, and have always been, ubiquitous. Since the 1970s, many artists, critics, and art historians have attempted to make the art-historical canon more inclusive, for instance by incorporating a greater number of female, non-white, and countercultural artists. Others completely rejected the dominant story as a mirror of existing power structures and inequalities, and developed their own counter-narratives, shadow stories behind the screen of mainstream art, often based on class, gender, or race. Such counter-narratives are not necessarily less reductionist than their mainstream counterparts. A focus on ‘minority’ art can effectively stimulate the development of under-represented groups in art and life, but it risks the 

101

danger of idealization and stereotyping when it does not sufficiently account for fluent borders, internal differences and historical changes – in short: the dynamics, paradoxes and incongruities of everyday life. Attempts to integrate minority art into the art-historical canon can be hailed as cultural enrichment or criticized as selling out to the power structures in place. This dilemma seems hard to escape. According to art critic and curator Lucy Lippard, cultural-minority artists face two opposing pitfalls. When they comply with the demands of mainstream art and the international art market, they are expected to shake off their ‘cultural provincialism,’ but when they dismiss the universalist claims of the official art world, they tend to be pressured by their own community to conform to a static and normative sense of cultural identity and a sanctified version of collective history instead.160 It is a matter of personal conviction and political strategy where artists want to position themselves between these two theoretical extremes. * In 1982, thirteen-year-old Kara Walker moved from Stockton, California, to Stone Mountain, Georgia, where her father, the abstract painter Larry Walker, was appointed at Georgia State University. Because of her Californian accent, the local African American girls considered her too ‘white,’ whereas the Caucasian kids regarded her as too dark-skinned to become a playmate.161 This harsh confrontation with stereotyping seems to be an important key for understanding Walker’s artwork. Although Walker has worked in a variety of artistic media, including painting, sculpture, prints and film, she 102 

is best known for her monumental murals of silhouette f igures, mostly referencing the history of American slavery in the Southern states before and during the Civil War. These silhouettes, elegantly and cunningly cut and pasted, confront visitors with a disturbing world of violence and sexual degradation, engaging black and white men and women in constantly changing power relations. Although the elaborate titles of her murals, in the tradition of early-nineteenth-century novels, tracts and broadsides, sometimes directly refer to a specific historical source, such as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Margaret Mitchell’s novel Gone with the Wind from 1936 and the subsequent movie from 1940,162 Walker’s scenes cannot be read as mere illustrations. On the contrary, they seem to express what is left out of these historical narratives, a shadow of hidden or repressed images that continue to haunt the present. Walker’s Wikipedia page states that she depicts racial inequalities and the mistreatment of African Americans by their white counterparts, 163 but actually her works present a more confusing picture. Certainly, there are graphic scenes where black slave girls (and boys) are forced to serve or pleasure their white master, but there are other scenes where this power relation is radically reversed, for instance where a female slave devours her master or where a male slave gives birth. Walker seems to imply that in a world where human relations are defined in terms of ownership and entitlement, no one escapes the violating and dehumanizing consequences. She does not literally illustrate history but creates a parallel world in which masters and slaves are engaged in an ever-changing continuum of domination and submission, aggression and love, destruction and desire.164 

103

21. Kara Walker, Gone: An Historical Romance of a Civil War as it Occurred b’tween the Dusky Thighs of one Young Negress and her Heart, 1994, paper, 13 x 50 feet (3.96 x 15.24 m), Gift of The Speyer Family Foundation in honor of Marie-Josee Kravis. Acc. n.: 462.2007. © 2016. Museum of Modern Art, New York / Scala, Florence

Walker’s choice of the silhouette technique is in part historically inspired. As an art form, it started to flourish in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the time period of her antebellum slavery scenes, and later in the nineteenth century it became a favorite art form for African Americans. Moreover, the technique was employed by the Swiss pastor Johann Kaspar Lavater, who, in his Essays on Physiognomy, originally published in German in 1772, maintained that a person’s national and moral character is revealed in his facial features.165 The use of silhouettes to develop a theory of stereotyping must have appealed to Walker. Moreover, Walker’s chosen medium seems to be very suggestive in terms of content. In silhouette, all figures are black, implying that racial identification is only possible through clothing, posture, hairstyle, and facial contours, that is to say: through the history of stereotypical imagery. Kara Walker herself described the silhouette as a void or 104 

negative space, ready to be filled by the public’s projected ideas and fantasies. It is a nice ironical touch that she uses this black-and-white technique to address moral gray areas and racial ambiguities.166 Finally, Walker’s decision to refrain from the ‘modernist’ tradition of painting and use a ‘second-class art form’ like cut-paper silhouettes instead stems from her association of oil painting with what she considers the mainstream story of modernism.167 In her view, the story of modern art is part of the larger story of modernity, with its strict divisions between right and wrong, or civilized and primitive, in the name of a universal theory of progress – a story that, among other things, legitimized colonialism and slavery. Walker mentioned in an interview that she would be happy if people, after looking at her work, felt ashamed about ‘the project of modernism.’168 For her, oil painting is an integral part of this project and therefore contaminated by association. However, Walker did not simply replace the prevalent story of modernism with a counter-story of gradual emancipation from suppression and exploitation. According to sociologist Roderick Ferguson, the narrative of whitedominated progress has been radically criticized by a no less modernist counter-narrative that stresses the inherent flaws of an ideology of universal freedom and progress built on the ownership, forced labor, and degradation of others. In this counter-narrative, the idea of progress translates into a story of emancipation, civil rights, and Black Power; a story of the gradual reparation of historical wrongs.169 This emancipatory version of African American history, in turn, is harshly subverted by Walker, who rigorously confronts it both with the persistence of stereotypes and with the ambiguity of power relations. 

105

* Walker’s success in the museum world at an early age was crowned with a MacArthur ‘genius’ fellowship in 1997; she was one of the youngest recipients ever. Since 1994, she has had numerous national and international exhibitions. In 2001, she was appointed Professor of Visual Arts at Columbia University; one year later, she represented the United States at the São Paulo Biennal. In 2007, Time magazine elected her among the 100 Most Influential People in the World in the category Artists and Entertainers.170 Five years later, she became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. An impressive number of catalogues, books, and journal articles has been published on her work, and she is widely recognized as one of the most important artists of her generation. However, the praise for Walker in the art world is far from uncontested. In 2003, the art critic, poet and art historian Donald Kuspit called Walker’s work ‘an ideological failure and intellectually inadequate.’ Kuspit saw Walker’s art as filled with ‘black rage, resentment and bitterness,’ even though the social position of African Americans had considerably improved. As a result of the universal human tendency to def ine scapegoats, social integration will always remain an unfinished project, according to Kuspit, but this implies Asians, Jews, women, and gay people no less than black people, and nowadays perhaps most of all heterosexual white males, although ‘there’s no special pleading on their behalf.’ Kuspit concludes that Walker’s art is more interesting for what it tells us about her psyche than for its ideology, ‘filtered through intellectually correct irony.’171 He seems to completely miss the point that Walker leaves it to the public how to interpret 106 

her work, and unwittingly confirms her suggestion that it is the viewer who projects his own thoughts onto the ‘voids’ of her silhouettes. It is remarkable that Kuspit’s conservative, white, male perspective on Walker’s artwork more or less echoed the earlier responses of a number of progressive, black, mostly female artists and critics who vehemently opposed her work. In the summer of 1997, the artist Betye Saar, who herself reinterpreted racial stereotypes as a form of artistic empowerment, sent more than 200 letters to artists, writers, intellectuals, and politicians, urging them to keep Walker’s artwork out of American museums. Saar suggested that Walker, in her urge to become rich and famous, was selling out to the white art establishment without a sliver of personal integrity.172 Two years later, in the PBS documentary I’ll Make Me a World, Saar added that Walker’s art was revolting and negative, a form of betrayal to the slaves, particularly women and children, and that the whole idea of her work was to cater to the amusement and the investment of the white art establishment.173 At the Johannesburg Biennale in October 2007, fellow artist Howardena Pindell was even more outspoken, if that is possible. She claimed that Walker consciously mocked African Americans and Africans in both word and image, and contributed to bestial fantasies about blacks, created by white supremacy and racism. In her view, Walker’s work was a form of ‘visual terrorism,’ used as a weapon against the black community.174 Artist and art historian Michael D. Harris recognized in Walker’s artwork a typical case of Stockholm syndrome: the phenomenon that people who are taken hostage tend to emotionally identify with their kidnappers. He called Walker a traumatized victim who continually reenacts the subjection of African Americans 

107

under slavery. With such an artist, according to Harris, there is no need for a Ku Klux Klan.175 These and other outraged and outrageous comments were countered by a number of prominent African American artists, scholars, and critics. Henry Louis Gates Jr., a historian, literary scholar, journalist, and award-winning filmmaker, interceded on Walker’s behalf with the assertion that only the visually illiterate could mistake her postmodern critique for realistic portrayals.176 Gates argued that Walker uses stereotypes not to confirm them but to liberate the representation of black people in both high art and popular culture by appropriating the stereotypes in order to free ‘our people from [the] residual, debilitating effects that the proliferation of those images undoubtedly has had upon the collective unconscious of the African American people.’177 From these very different responses, it transpires that Walker has a point when she states that people project their own ideas, fantasies, wishes and expectations onto her artwork. At a superf icial level, the comments by Kuspit, on the one hand, and Saar, Pindell and Harris, on the other, seem to correspond, but they only do so in their reductionism. Whereas Kuspit accuses Walker of racial hatred and resentment against whites, the others accuse her of self-hatred and betrayal of her own race. The more positive reviews in the mainstream art world and in the African American community seem more complementary, although they have a somewhat different focus. Whereas Henry Louis Gates Jr. describes the liberating power of Walker’s art for African Americans, white commentators like Philippe Vergne, curator of a traveling solo exhibition of Kara Walker’s work in 2007, tend to emphasize the uneasy confrontation with the persistence of negative stereotypes of black people. 108 

22. Kara Walker, A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, 2014, polystyrene foam and sugar, Domino Sugar Factory, Williamsburg . The project was commissioned by Creative Time. Photography by Jason Wyche, Courtesy Creative Time. © Kara Walker, Courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York.

Walker’s own position in this debate is characterized by a strong nonconformism. In a conversation with Silke Boerma in 2002, she described the pressure she felt to either accept the logic of the white master narrative by acquiescence or resistance, or to restrict her artistic activities to her own community, running the risk of producing ‘outsider art.’178 In another interview she rhetorically asked: ‘Are we allowed to be individuals within this sea? Or do we have to be unified in this collective?’179 It seems that both her success and the harsh criticisms of her work stem in part from the fact that she found a convincing way to step outside both the ‘white’ master-narrative and the ‘black’ counter-narrative to create her own space and be an individual in the sea. *



109

The case of Kara Walker clearly illustrates the potential tensions between artistic intention and critical reception. Whereas Walker in various interviews puts a strong emphasis on the topicality and the open character of her work, critics and others have projected their own stories, fears, and fantasies on the black silhouettes, which seem to take in everything that comes their way. The impassioned and sometimes egregious character of these debates shows that Walker’s art hits a raw nerve. It indicates that the history of slavery and racism is still very much alive, and that behind the surface of an apparent humanist consensus there still lingers a deep precipice of unresolved emotions. The master narratives of history, be they universalist or particularistic, sketch out a process of human progress, emancipation, and liberation, culminating in a conflict-free ‘end of history.’ Kara Walker’s silhouettes deconstruct these narratives as projections by showing the shadows of the past. In doing so, she creates her own space between these narratives. Paradoxically, she circumvents stereotyping by using stereotypes as the main ingredients of her work. By evading a one-dimensional political statement, Walker has become one of the most political artists of our time.

110 

7.

A Heavy Heritage Monuments in the Former Soviet Bloc

Since the dismantling of the communist regimes of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, post-communist states, both old and new, have been looking for new symbols to create a sense of collective identity. Next to the footage of the storming of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, pulled-down, disassembled and blown-up Lenin monuments arguably make for the most impactful images of the political landslide of 1989/91. But what came in their place? Monuments are the public art form par excellence. Not only are they accessible to all passers-by, they also occupy strategic places in public space. Purely decorative sculptures are usually the result of the vision of the artist, but when monuments serve a political purpose, the authorities in place tend to define the message. Such monuments aim to create a sense of belonging, for instance by constructing a canon of collective memory. By way of presenting specific historical persons and events as exemplary and worthy of emulation, they project an idealized, romanticized and often mystified image of the past on to the present. In contrast to advertisements in public space, durability is of central importance for monuments. The collective ideal is presented as timeless and universal, and defies the change of regimes and generations. Because of their ‘timeless’ presence, in the long run monuments go unnoticed; they become a silent part of the everyday public environment, devoid of meaning. According to the Austrian writer Robert Musil, nothing is as invisible as a public monument.180 However, after a 

111

radical regime change, the meaning of monuments can all of a sudden fundamentally change, resulting in their renewed visibility. The French Revolution went hand in hand with the destruction of old monuments and the creation of new symbols for the republic; a few months after the Russian Revolution, Lenin signed a decree calling for the installment of new monuments throughout the country in correspondence with the ideals and feelings of the Russian working class.181 A regime change questions the universality of existing monuments. The political landslide of 1989/91, although in most cases without violence, was hardly less radical than those of 1789 and 1917. How was the change of government and of political culture in the post-communist states reflected in their handling of communist monuments? What was the role of the authorities and the local population? Which monuments replaced Marx and Lenin in public space, and what does that tell us about the construction of new collective identities in the formerly communist societies since the 1990s? * Eradicating unwelcome events and persons from public memory seems to be as old as human history. In the years after 1989 many communist monuments in the former Eastern bloc and the Soviet Union were removed from public view. But the ways in which this was done, and the stories behind these removals, differ from country to country, as well as from case to case. In 1970, Lenin Square in East Berlin (present-day United Nations Square) received a more than 60-foot high sculpture of Lenin, designed by the Russian sculptor Nikolai Tomsky, 112 

Rector of the Moscow Surikov Academy. In 1991, the borough council of Friedrichshain, the district of the Lenin statue, voted in favor of its removal. After the Berlin City Council had expunged the statue from the list of protected cultural heritage, effectively solving any legal objections to its removal, the disassembling of the monument started in November 1991. Due to its seize and its rock-hard granite, it took more than three months to erase the monument from public space. Cut into 129 pieces, it was neither completely destroyed nor safely stored, but buried in a sand grove in the district of Müggelheim in Berlin. Removing the Lenin monument seems a logical consequence of German reunification. The spiritual father of the very political system that had repressed the East German population for four decades could no longer serve as a symbol of collective identification. Nevertheless, the demolition process met with fierce protests from parts of the local population, not so much because they considered Lenin their political hero, but because they desired a public debate on the appropriate handling of East German heri­ tage. Many East Germans, including former opponents of the GDR regime, resented the fact that they were insuff iciently or not at all involved in the public process of coming to terms with the East German past. With playful actions, for instance attaching a sign with the text ‘Are you even afraid of a Lenin made of stone?’ to the scaffolding that surrounded the monument during its deconstruction, they emphasized that public space in a reunited Germany belonged to the people.182 In July 2009, plans were developed to put up a permanent exhibition of Berlin monuments and historical sculptures in the former citadel of the district of Spandau. For this exhibition, which would open in September 2015, the organizers 

113

requested permission to exhibit the monumental head of Tomsky’s Lenin sculpture. But the Council refused to comply. Separating Lenin’s head from the rest of his body, it was argued, would violate heritage interests. An interesting argument indeed, in light of the fact that the monument was already dismembered and permanently hidden from public view. To make things worse, in September 2014 the City Council stated that it did not know where the monument was buried, a bizarre claim, if only because in 1994 American documentary filmmaker Rick Minnich had already filmed the precise location, where on windy days parts of Lenin’s head and shoulder stuck out of the ground.183 In April 2015, a new chapter was added to this soap opera as the unearthing of Lenin’s head was now deemed impossible because sand lizards, protected by European wildlife regulations, were spotted in the direct neighborhood. In July 2015, after the end of their hibernation period, the lizards were finally removed to another safe spot, and Lenin’s head became available for the Spandau exhibition after all.184 The strangely tense response of the Berlin city authorities over a period of years shows how the monument still weighs on people’s minds. After 25 years, the City Council still seemed afraid of this Lenin made of stone. A completely different strategy in dealing with communism’s visual heritage is to appropriate it according to one’s own needs and wishes. The collection of The Wende Museum of the Cold War in Culver City (Greater Los Angeles) contains a Lenin bust that reportedly was spray-painted in pink and turquoise during a demonstration in the East German city of Leipzig in October 1989, a few weeks before the fall of the Berlin Wall (see the cover of this book). The demonstrators could have easily smashed the bust to make their point. Instead, by means of a simple intervention, they gave the 114 

23. Red Army Monument, 1954, spray-painted in 2011, Sofia, Bulgaria

founding father of Soviet communism a new meaning as the hopeful symbol of a more creative and joyful society. Creative appropriation also characterizes the recent history of the Red Army Monument from 1954 in the Bulgarian capital of Sofia. The monument features a Soviet soldier flanked by a Bulgarian man and woman on top of a base which contains a relief depicting Soviet soldiers, officers and weaponry, referencing the liberation of Fascist Bulgaria by the Soviet army in September 1944. While opponents and advocates of the monument were publicly arguing over the question of whether the Soviet invasion was in fact a liberation or an occupation, in a period of four years the relief experienced four makeovers. In 2011, the Russian soldiers and officers were transformed by spray-paint into American comic figures, superheroes and mascots such as Superman and Ronald McDonald. 

115

One year later, in August 2012, the Russian soldiers received spray-painted colored masks, as used by the members of Russian female punk-rock group Pussy Riot. Two of the members of this group had just been arrested and sentenced to a disciplinary camp after they had climbed the altar of the Christ the Savior Cathedral in Moscow, performing a cynical song against President Putin and the Russian Orthodox Church. Once again, in August 2013, the relief was painted pink in commemoration of the 45th anniversary of the Prague Spring, the short-lived reform movement under Czechoslovak party leader Alexander Dubček, who in 1968 had advocated ‘communism with a human face.’ A spray-painted text read ‘Bulgaria apologizes,’ referring to the participation of Bulgarian troops in the repression of Dubček’s reform politics. In February 2014, just when Ukraine’s pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych had fled the capital city of Kiev, where thousands of people demonstrated against his policy on central Maidan Square, the relief’s officer was painted yellow and blue, the colors of the Ukrainian flag. After this last color intervention, the Russian State Department demanded an explanation from the Bulgarian government, and fiercely criticized the European news agency Euronews for using a photo of the spray-painted monument on its Facebook page.185 Of course it is unclear just how far the interventions of this ‘Bulgarian Banksy’ reflected the views of the Bulgarian population at large.186 But the enormous national and international publicity yielded by these actions, as well as the political responses, suggest how the monument is still conceived as a significant carrier of collective values. Depending on circumstances and local discussions, communist monuments in the former Eastern bloc were left undisturbed, removed, destroyed or even buried, as we 116 

have seen. Budapest, Hungary’s capital city, came up with a more creative solution. Separated from their bases, the city’s communist sculptures and monuments were transported outside the city to Szobor Park Múseum (Sculpture Park Museum, also Memento Park), which opened in June 1993.187 Ákos Eleöd, the architect who won the competition for the park’s design, wanted it to be a place where visitors could follow their own thoughts and memories, whether nostalgic, tragic or angry.188 This seems to be an elegant solution. The monuments no longer serve to inspire – or intimidate – the people, but remain accessible as historical remnants of the past. Eleöd called it a democratic solution, because only in a democracy are people free to form their own thoughts. But what is democratic? A 1992 survey revealed that most inhabitants of Budapest did not want their tax money to be spent on a graveyard for communist monuments. Part of the survey participants thought that the monuments should simply be destroyed, another (larger) part didn’t mind leaving them at their original spot.189 In fact, the sculpture park is mostly visited by tourists from Western Europe and the United States. Once the monuments were placed in public space ‘in the name of the people,’ now they are removed from public space ‘in the name of the people.’ But in both cases ‘the people’ were hardly involved.190 Moreover, the park, with its storage of monuments from politically very different periods of communist rule, its continuous streaming of marching music and its kitsch souvenirs, actually suggests an undifferentiated settlement of scores with a bizarre and totalitarian past and thus does not leave much space for the visitor’s own interpretation.191 * 

117

24. Lenin, bronze, Szobor Park Múseum, Budapest, Hungary

According to ethnologist Viktoriya Hryaban, monuments are the single most important material representation of collective identity in the new states that emerged after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.192 But who has taken the place of yesterday’s communist heroes? A brief roundtrip to four capital cities of post-communist states – Macedonia, 118 

25. Warrior on horseback, 2011, Skopje, FYROM

Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Turkmenistan – offers fascinating insights into the strategies of new regimes and states to provide their countries with an updated, shining past. 

119

In 1983, British historians Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger introduced the term invention of tradition. They discussed symbols and rituals from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that were presented – and experienced – as venerable traditions, although they were in fact brand new.193 In a somewhat broader definition, the term can also be applied to attempts to erase historical contingencies, discontinuities and ruptures from collective memory in order to replace them with a story of unbroken national continuity and progress. In nineteenth-century France, the first king of the Francs, Clovis I (466-511), was presented as ancestor of the modern French; in nineteenth-century Germany a comparable role was ascribed to Germanic tribal leader Hermann (or Arminius, as he was called by Roman historian Tacitus; c. 18 BCE-19 CE), although in both cases it is utterly misleading to suggest a national or ethnic continuity bridging the centuries. Such an invention of historical continuity characterizes many of the new monuments beyond the former Iron Curtain. In Macedonia, one of the republics that declared their independence from Yugoslavia in 1991, the quest for a national symbol resulted in an international dispute. In September 2011, a 66-foot high column with a gilded sculpture of Alexander the Great on horseback was inaugurated in the capital city Skopje. The illustrious king of Ancient Macedonia seemed the ideal founding figure for the new state, which could now claim a national history going back almost 2,350 years. But Alexander’s appropriation led to a bitter fight with neighboring Greece, which has its own province of Macedonia and therefore does not recognize the name of its northern neighbor.194 Moreover, the Greeks did not want to share their Alexander with the ‘Slavic’ Macedonians. The fact is of course that neither the 120 

26. Timur Lenk, 1993, Tashkent, Uzbekistan

Greeks nor the Slavs can be traced directly to Alexander. Even within Macedonia, the Alexander sculpture is far from uncontested. In the small country, which suffers from poverty and high unemployment rates, many people see the monument as a waste of money and as nationalist kitsch, a populist trick to impose a collective identity from above.195 In any case, the dispute with Greece seems to be largely settled now that Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski at official occasions refers to the monument as ‘the warrior on horseback,’ carefully avoiding mentioning the name Alexander.196 Since the early 1990s the Central Asian republic of Uzbekistan has embraced Timur (also known as Tamerlane) as its national symbol. In the capital city Tashkent he sits on horseback at the very spot where in Soviet times a bronze head of Karl Marx had overlooked the square.197 In 1996 a 

121

27. Manas the Noble, 2011, Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan

national museum was dedicated to Timur, and that same year an international conference supported by UNESCO discussed his role in world history.198 Timur is an ambivalent forefather at best. Being of mixed Chinese-Turkish decent, he is in no way related to the historic Uzbeks, a nomadic people that only in the sixteenth century, two hundred years 122 

after Timur, entered the territory of present-day Uzbekistan. Moreover, he is primarily known for the cruel and sadistic way he dealt with his enemies. On the other hand, he is the only appealing historical figure in the region who could be used by President Islam Karimov, uninterruptedly in power since December 1991, to legitimize his own dictatorial regime. In countless speeches Karimov referred to Timur as founding father of a powerful empire and a thriving international commercial network, as a strong leader who took excellent care of his people, and as a generous funder of the arts and sciences.199 His own centralist rule rests on the historical successes of his ‘predecessor.’ Incidentally, Timur means ‘man of iron,’ an appropriate alternative to the other historical dictator named Stalin (‘man of steel’). Uzbekistan’s eastern neighbor, Kyrgyzstan, did not select a historical hero of mythical proportions but a mythical hero of historical proportions, who is honored with a centrally located monument in the capital city Bishkek. To celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the independence of this former Soviet republic, a monument of Manas the Magnanimous was inaugurated in 2011. Manas is the hero of an epic poem situated around the ninth century CE. It is a work of impressive size, twenty times longer than The Iliad and The Odyssey combined, that was orally transmitted by local bards from generation to generation. Manas, possessing supernatural powers, was successful in uniting the forty tribes of Kyrgyzstan against the common enemy, the Uyghurs. When the region of present-day Kyrgyzstan became Islamic in the twelfth century, the story incorporated elements of Islamic culture. In contemporary versions even the fall of the Soviet Union is absorbed in the story of Manas. On the occasion of the alleged one-thousandth birthday of the epic in 1995, the Kyrgyz government spent eight million dollars 

123

on public festivities.200 UNESCO recognized the poem as world heritage and co-financed a great theater version.201 In contrast to Uzbekistan, there is not one single ruler who identifies with Manas. As the national symbol since 1991 he has already survived five different presidents, and his interpretation seems very flexible, again unlike Timur’s. This can be explained in part by the fact that the poem has always been orally transmitted and adapted to the circumstances and needs of the time, and that seems still to be the case. In the mid-1990s Manas was celebrated as a pre-Islamic hero, whereas he is now characterized as an exemplary religious man. In the northern parts of Kyrgyzstan, where the capital city is located, Manas seems to be significantly more popular than in the south.202 The new symbol of national unity has so far not been very successful in uniting the different ethnicities and religious groups within the country. However, the most remarkable change of national symbols took place in Ashgabat, capital city of Turkmenistan. Saparmurat Niyazov, President of Turkmenistan from 1991 until his death in 2006, decided that he didn’t need any historical predecessors to outshine Marx and Lenin. The gilded monumental sculpture Niyazov had made of himself, which during the day moved along with the sun, was part of a bizarre personality cult. The very first resolution that was accepted by the Majlis, the Turkmen parliament, in 1992, promoted the unlimited production of state portraits of the new president. These portraits were literally omnipresent: in public sculptures, reliefs and monuments, on posters inside and outside public buildings, on paper money and coins, but also on watches and vodka bottles.203 The visual aspects of this personality cult were inspired by two sources: the Stalin cult in the Soviet Union (until 1953) and the personality cult of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (‘Father of the Turks’) in 124 

28. Saparmurat Niyazov, 1998, Ashgabat, Turkmenistan (removed in 2010)

Turkey. In emulation of the latter, Niyazov called himself Türkmenbaşi, Father of the Turkmens.204 In 2001 the deification of the president reached new heights with the publication of the Ruhnama (literally ‘book of the soul’), a curious mixture of (made-up) history, Niyazov’s personal memories, moral directives and political 

125

ideas. The Ruhnama replaced the Quran as the nation’s holy book. It became the cornerstone of national history teaching and once a year, civil servants had to take a test on their knowledge of the book. Those who read it three times from cover to cover were said to go straight to heaven when they died. A city, an airport and countless streets throughout the country were named after Niyazov, just like a comet and the month January.205 After his death in 2006 the cult around Türkmenbaşi quickly disintegrated. His many images, and those of his father and mother, who used to be worshipped as half-gods, disappeared like frost under the morning sun. In exceptional cases (Lenin, Atatürk, even Mao), a personality cult remains meaningful after someone’s death because the ideas and values associated with this person remain politically relevant in one way or another. But usually the cult melts away as soon as the cult’s protagonist expires, either because his ideas are no longer accepted, as was the case with Stalin, or because there are simply no ideas behind the façade of personal adoration. The latter, a painful lack of content, seems to apply to Türkmenbaşi.206 * In most cases, East European and Soviet monuments commemorating World War II survived the political changes of 1989/91, but Marx and Lenin usually had to bow out from public space. Sometimes their images were creatively reinterpreted, but more often they left an empty space, to be filled with other symbols of collective identity. It is remarkable that the new regimes succeeding the communist states after 1989 preferred the type of monuments typically decorating nineteenth-century squares and thoroughfares 126 

of so many American and European capitals, which to a large degree had lost their appeal after World War II, when representative monuments gradually fell out of fashion.207 Present-day monuments of grandiose proportions in the West often critically reflect national history, such as the Holocaust Monument in Berlin’s city center or the National Monument to the History of Slavery in Amsterdam. On the other hand, most American and West-European cities still have their nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century monuments because they didn’t experience radical regime changes. The fact that ‘Western’ Greece fiercely protests a Macedonian monument dedicated to Alexander the Great illustrates how the symbolic significance of such sculptures is still very much alive in the Western world as well. It is striking how strongly the new monuments in former communist countries resemble each other.208 Many are made from (gilded) bronze and positioned on top of a high marble or granite base or column. Even in the poorest postsocialist countries these monuments hardly ever suffer from budget cuts. Their presence and festive inauguration are part of their political function: legitimizing a new political system or even a new nation, as well as the creation of a new sense of national bonding. In most cases the proclaimed unity is symbolized by a mythical or historical figure; it does not seem to matter very much. Timur as founding father of the Uzbeks is no less mythical than Manas the Magnanimous as progenitor of the Kyrgyz. That is not to say that these monuments are indicative of a widespread nationalism by the inhabitants of the postcommunist states. The Internet is full of protests against the blatant monstrosities that impose a sense of unity with which the writers do not identify in the least. Instead of a strong connection between state and people, they may even 

127

symbolize the gap between the two. But they also show that the end of communism is not the end of ideology as such. Precisely in their monuments, new democracies and dictatorships in the former Soviet bloc prove that the end of the Cold War is not necessarily the end of history.

128 

Conclusion The seven essays in this book not only discuss various aspects of the interaction between art and politics since the First World War, they also offer proof for the thesis that the traditional distinction between artistic purity and propaganda is illusory to a large degree. What is more, the idea that there is a strict distinction between purity and propaganda is politically motivated, and this motivation still informs the way we tend to think about art and its history. An analysis in terms of this strict distinction will always lead to paradoxes and incongruities. I will first try to show why that is necessarily true before substantiating it with reference to the case studies in this book. Art is a form of visual communication. Like other forms of communication, artworks are embedded in cultural, social and political conventions and traditions. The moment we interpret an artwork, or any other form of visual culture, we compare the image with the pictorial conventions and traditions familiar to us. That is not to say that images cannot have a very strong and direct impact that transcends political and cultural borders. However, as soon as we start to relate them to things outside the realm of the purely visual, for instance when we think about their social or political meaning, we use a language that is embedded in, and derived from, our interpretation of the world. Our language and communication are certainly not completely determined by the political, social and cultural status quo, but this very status quo, which is always an object of discussion, contestation and change, does form our point of reference. If that is the case, the concept of pure and autonomous art can only be a theoretical illusion. 

129

Moreover, the idea that modern art rejects all content in its quest for artistic purity is largely based on historical mystification. Many nineteenth- and twentieth-century avant-garde artists used their ‘autonomous’ artistic means for causes outside the realm of art, such as political ­ideals, utopian fantasies or spiritual experiences. The Italian Futurists and Russian Constructivists, who in the 1910s associated themselves with Italian Fascism or the October Revolution, are not embarrassing exceptions within an otherwise ‘immaculate’ avant-garde.209 During the past decades, art historians have become more interested in, and aware of, the manifold political and spiritual motivations behind modern art, but strangely enough this insight has not yet inspired a more inclusive approach that critically reassesses the formal distinction between modern and non-modern art. This is yet another paradox: in the era of postmodernism we are well aware that ideology is a matter of perspective, but we forget to draw the conclusion. The harsh and largely undifferentiated discussions about the cultural heritage of the GDR in reunified Germany, for instance, show that the end of the Cold War did by no means end the paradigm of ideological bipolarity. The often-quoted remark by German artist Georg Baselitz, who fled from East to West Germany in 1957, that the GDR had no artists but only arseholes who with their work had supported a criminal system, says more about the ideological bias of the artist than about the East-German art world.210 It becomes increasingly clear that a strict distinction between official and unofficial (or dissident) art in the former Eastern bloc countries is highly artificial and does not allow for deeper insight into the complex relations between art and politics. Moreover, only in an abstract and theoretical sense can purity be viewed as an artistic quality, because the 130 

meaning of an artwork depends on many different layers of interpretations. In the course of these essays it has become clear that art can become political as a consequence of the way in which it is interpreted by critics, historicized by (art) historians and embraced or challenged by politicians, governments and secret services. The political meaning of art is a matter of constant discussion and reinterpretation, even though the relative contribution of artists, critics, (art) historians and politicians in this process might differ for each period, region and political system. How does all this translate to the case studies in this book? In the history of (Western) art, style has long been associated with local, religious or political identities. But it was only during the First World War that art was viewed as a yardstick to measure national identity. This idea implied a well-def ined distinction between (national) self and other, which, as we have seen, quickly resulted in ultimate confusion. The suggestion of national unity, proclaimed at the start of the war in both France and Germany, scattered as soon as the criteria for this unity became explicit. The glorification of national traditions in art and art history implied a break with these very traditions, because neither modern art nor European art history had been defined in strictly national terms before 1914. Most strikingly, precisely in their frenetic attempts to redefine art and history in national terms, the French and German art worlds started to bear an uncanny resemblance to each other. Modern artists in both countries used their ‘purified’ art to achieve a political goal: a glorious national victory. Purity and propaganda played a decisive role in Diego Rivera’s artistic career in a completely different way. To him there was no distinction between artistic and political integrity. He wanted to convey a message to a wide 

131

audience through artistic means. That does not mean that his work can be easily dismissed as propaganda, if only because his message was too layered. Rivera integrated his communist views in images that had to please his non-communist clients: the (moderately) conservative governments in Mexico and two of the most powerful captains of American industry. In Mexico City’s National Palace, Rivera somehow combined the mutually exclusive ideologies of communism and nationalism; in Detroit and New York, he combined communist and capitalist elements within one single future ideal. Only in the last case, by adding a portrait of Lenin, did he overstep the limits of what his client was ready to accept. Characteristic of the paradoxical situation in which Rivera found himself is that he not only had conservative and communist supporters, but also conservative and communist opponents. Rivera’s case is remarkable in yet another way. During the 1910s he was inspired by Picasso and other modern artists working in Paris, but he went on to dismiss modern art as an ineffective means to change society. His work shows that any art historical narrative based on a gradual process of modernization and purification of art in the twentieth century is one-sided and reductionist at best. It seems that the most radical and politically charged distinction between pure and political art can be found in the Third Reich. But on a second view, this distinction does not adequately describe the situation. Modern art was not challenged by the Nazis because it was insufficiently politically inspired (as for instance in the Soviet Union), but because it was inaccessible and therefore attested to a degenerate mind. German art, according to the ideologues of National Socialism, should not be propagandistic but express the essence of the people in the most direct and 132 

pure way. According to Hitler, true art would always appeal to the people; art that does not appeal to the people is by definition alien and degenerate. However, this rhetorical watershed proved problematic in daily praxis, and not just because high party officials like Joseph Goebbels had originally embraced modern art, and a number of modern artists accepted or advocated the Third Reich in its early, sometimes even in its later years. Nor is the most striking paradox that the fight against Jewish and Bolshevist influences in modern art followed strictly stylistic criteria, and that almost none of the modern artists featured in the exhibition ‘Degenerate Art’ were actually Jewish or communist. The most remarkable aspect is that the groundbreaking social and cultural purification Hitler and his followers wanted to accomplish had more in common with the radical agenda of the artistic avant-garde from the beginning of the twentieth century than with the more traditional, decorative artists that were successful during the Third Reich – as long as they didn’t express political criticism and they were not Jewish. In terms of artistic conviction, Hitler was a traditional artist; as a politician with an apocalyptic utopian message he was arguably more of an avant-gardist.211 In artistic terms, the Cold War rivalry between East and West expressed itself in the opposition between autonomous, pure art in the democratic world and the visual kitsch and propaganda of the totalitarian Soviet bloc. Or, from the opposite perspective, between a future-oriented artistic engagement in the communist world and the meaningless formalism and bourgeois decadence of capitalism. But once again, historical reality does not nicely mirror these ideological projections. Western modern art celebrated its first political successes in revolutionary Russia. Decadent bourgeois artist Picasso received a Stalin Prize for his 

133

communist engagement and his commitment to world peace. The American Abstract Expressionists, presented in Europe as asymbol of freedom and openness, were attacked in their own country as cultural terrorists and traitors. Another paradox is that this ‘democratic’ art was not very popular among the majority of American people, and that it was its alleged pure and non-political character that made this art a useful tool for cultural propaganda. Clement Greenberg’s thesis that pure art was the end goal of modern art history effectively caters to the interests of Cold War cultural propagandists, but does not at all accurately describe the history of modern art. The developments in the art worlds from both the West and the Eastern bloc countries since the 1960s clearly falsify Greenberg’s thesis, which nevertheless experienced an amazing renaissance after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Although art in communist China under Mao Zedong was strictly subservient to political goals, there was no consensus about what kind of art should serve the good cause. The propagandistic tradition of Socialist Realism along the lines of Stalin’s Soviet Union experienced strong competition from the unpolitical tradition of guohua, which for the occasion was redefined in political terms. The transition under Deng Xiaoping to a mixed economic system ultimately had far-reaching consequences for the visual arts, even though the political power base of the CCP remained uncontested. This does not mean that political art in China was succeeded by pure and autonomous art according to Western standards. On the contrary, by adjusting and appropriating elements of the Maoist tradition, Chinese artists created a space for agency, a personal vision. They used irony to express visually the incongruities of a society where communist and capitalist values are no 134 

longer mutually exclusive but form a common ideological front. In the meantime, the political role of the arts in China seems to have evolved from direct state propaganda to soft diplomacy with the help of ‘autonomous’ art. But when this art critically mingles with political issues, it experiences the razor sharp limits of political tolerance, as shown by the story of Ai Weiwei. It is a remarkable paradox of history that precisely his political art in the Western world is now being hailed as free art. The emphasis on universal criteria for the assessment of (modern) art, as developed by Greenberg and others, had a particularly stifling consequence for minority artists. When they opted to become part of the ‘mainstream’ art world, they were no longer recognizable as minority artists and had to deal with an art community largely dominated by a white, male, upper-class elite. On the other hand, when they chose to express visually aspects of their racial, social, or gender identity, their work ran the risk of being judged as kitsch or propaganda. A particularly interesting case of an artist who creatively calls this predicament into question is Kara Walker, who, with her ambiguous references to the history of American slavery, subverted both the mainstream position and the ingrained African-American counter-narrative on minority art, opening up a playing field for the creative individual. Interestingly, Walker was both celebrated and viciously attacked by representatives of the art establishment and by African-American colleagues and critics. The open character of her artwork, inviting viewers to project their own ideas and feelings onto her tableaux, offers an intriguing insight into the politics of race in the contemporary American art world. The post-communist monuments in the final chapter fall somewhat outside the scope of the other case studies, 

135

but complement the thesis of this book in an interesting way. They show unambiguously that the fall of the Berlin Wall is not to be confused with the ‘end of history.’212 On the contrary, the end of the Cold War as we know it gave birth to a historical constellation in which parts of the former Soviet bloc witnessed the rise of a new kind of nationalism. The democracies and dictatorships that succeeded the Soviet empire often follow the same strategy to create a sense of national identity and political legitimacy, and in doing so equal or surpass the nowadays decayed, vandalized, pulledover, destroyed or buried Lenins, Stalins and other heroes of communism. Fukuyama’s end of history is as illusory as the idea of a pure art that would crown the victorious culture of the West. The history of politics and the history of art seldom follow the ideological traffic signs which artists, critics, (art) historians and politicians put along the road. What I see as the most important conclusion of this book, however, is not the inability of theoreticians to interpret daily life or the political bias of their projections. Rather, it is the power of art to call these projections into question. The Pink Lenin on the cover of this book immediately shows that the power of politicians to reduce art to propaganda is effectively countered by the power of the creative individual to make propaganda into art again.

136 

Notes 1.

2. 3.

4.

5. 6.



Quoted from Jonathan Harris, “Modernism and Culture in the USA, 1930-1960,” in Paul Wood et al., eds., Modernism in Dispute: Art Since the Forties (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993), 3-76, here 65. Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961). Klaus von Beyme discusses the political history of art since the late Middle Ages to arrive at a categorization of different types of interaction. Murray Edelman defends the thesis that political views are fundamentally shaped by artistic ideas, and that artists are specifically well-equipped to rethink conventional political paradigms. In his essays, Boris Groys uses various viewpoints to comment on the relation between art and politics; Igor Golomstock restricts himself to a comparative analysis of artistic ideologies under totalitarian regimes. See Klaus von Beyme, Die Kunst der Macht und die Gegenmacht der Kunst: Studien zum Spannungsverhältnis von Kunst und Politik (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1998); Murray Edelman, From Art to Politics: How Artistic Creations Shape Political Conceptions (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Boris Groys, Art Power (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2008); Igor Golomstock, Totalitarian Art in the Soviet Union, the Third Reich, Fascist Italy and the People’s Republic of China (New York: Icon Editions, 1990). Richard Cork, A Bitter Truth: Avant-Garde Art and the Great War (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994); Rainer Rother, ed., Die letzten Tage der Menschheit: Bilder des Ersten Weltkrieges (Berlin: Deutsches Historisches Museum and Ars Nicolai, 1994); Uwe M. Schneede, ed., 1914: The AvantGardes at War (Cologne: Snoeck, 2013). The following chapter is partly based on my essay “War Storm and Regeneration: Art Debates in Germany and France, 1914-1918,” in Schneede, 1914, 294-99. Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 137

1989); Kenneth E. Silver, Esprit de Corps: The Art of the Parisian Avant-Garde and the First World War, 1914-1925 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989); Joes Segal, Krieg als Erlösung: Die deutschen Kunstdebatten 1910-1918 (Munich: Scaneg, 1997). Most of the primary sources in this chapter can be found in the last two titles. 7. Hermann Bahr, Kriegssegen (Munich: Delphin, 1915) 7. 8. Franz Marc, “Das geheime Europa,” Das Forum 1 no. 12 (191415): 632-38, quoted from Klaus Lankheit, ed., Franz Marc – Schriften (Cologne: DuMont, 1978) 164. 9. Quoted in “De l’art français et des influences qu’il ne pas doit subir,” La Renaissance 5 no. 19 (1917): 17. 10. Julius Meier-Graefe in Kriegszeit no. 1 (August 31, 1914); idem, “Drei Gewinne,” Berliner Tageblatt (September 1, 1914), morning edition. 11. Nicola Lambourne, “Production versus Destruction: Art, World War I and Art History,” Art History 22 no. 3 (1999): 34763, here 359. 12. Émile Mâle, “Études sur l’art allemand,” Revue de Paris (July 15, 1916): 225-48, here 225. 13. Cornelius Gurlitt, “Deutsche und französische Kunst,” Deutscher Wille 30 no. 19 (1916-17): 10-15. 14. Kurt Engelbrecht, Krieg, Kunst und Leben: Betrachtungen (Leipzig: Xenien, 1916), 19. Already in 1905, Ludwig Woltmann had argued in his book Die Germanen und die Renaissance in Italien that Dante and Michelangelo did not descend from the Romans but from the ‘Germanic’ Goths and Longobards. See George L. Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich (New York: Schocken Books, 1981 [1964]), 102. 15. Silver, Esprit de Corps, 8-12. 16. Momme Nissen, Der Krieg und die deutsche Kunst (Freiburg i.B.: Herder Verlag, 1914), quoted from Die Werkstatt der Kunst 14 no. 12 (1914-15): 134-38, here 136, 138. 17. Karl Storck, “Kunst der Kriegszeit,” Der Türmer 17 no. 2 (191415): 121-23, here 123; idem, Kampf hinter der Front: Kriegsaufsätze für Deutschtum in Leben und Kunst (Stuttgart: Muth, 1915) 5-6. 138 

18. 19. 20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.



Robert Delaunay, open letter in Vill I Nou (December 15, 1917), quoted in Robert Delaunay, Du Cubisme à l’art abstrait (Paris: S.E.V.P.E.N., 1957), 131. Max Liebermann, “Anschauung und Idee,” Kunst und Künstler 16 no. 2 (1917-18): 45-49, here 48; Adolf Behne, “Deutsche Expressionisten,” Der Sturm 5 no. 17/18 (1914-15): 114-15. Nilkas Maak, “Aus tiefem Tal zu Riefenstahl,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (April 8, 2013), see http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/kunst/de-l-allemagne-im-louvre-aus-tiefemtal-zu-riefenstahl-12141764.html, accessed September 6, 2015. Howard Handelman, Mexican Politics: The Dynamics of Change (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997) 33-35. Handelman, Mexican Politics, 35. Leonard Folgarait, Mural Painting and Social Revolution in Mexico, 1920-1940 (Cambridge, UK and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998) 16. Veerle Declercq, ed., De Mexicaanse Muralisten (Gent: Museum voor Schone Kunsten, 1993) 31. Folgarait, Mural Painting, 17. Diego Rivera, My Art, My Life: An Autobiography (New York: Citadel Press, 1960) 58, 68. Rivera, My Art, My Life, 78. Idem, 81. Compare Rivera, My Art, My Life, 81; and Folgarait, Mural Painting, 33, 38, 78. Linda Bank Downs, Diego Rivera: The Detroit Industry Murals (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999) 21. Anthony W. Lee, Painting on the Left: Diego Rivera, Radical Politics, and San Francisco’s Public Murals (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1999) 51-54. Leonard Folgarait, “Revolution as Ritual: Diego Rivera’s National Palace Mural,” Oxford Art Journal 14 no. 1 (1991): 18-33. Alicia Azuela, “Rivera and the Concept of Proletarian Art,” in Cynthia Newman Helms, ed., Diego Rivera: A Retrospective (New York: W.W. Norton, 1986), 125. Rivera’s Stalinist colleague Siqueiros claimed to have been involved in an earlier attempt on Trotsky’s life. Kahlo and Trotsky were engaged in a brief love affair. 139

35. Bank Downs, Diego Rivera, 21. 36. Lee, Painting on the Left, 56; Anna Indych-López, “Mural Gambits: Mexican Muralism in the United States and the ‘Portable’ Fresco,” Art Bulletin 89 no. 2 (2007): 287-305, here 291-92. 37. Azuela, “Rivera and the Concept of Proletarian Art,” 125, 129. 38. Rivera, My Art, My Life, 31-32. 39. Lee, Painting on the Left, 25, 42-43. 40. Laurance P. Hurlburt, The Mexican Muralists in the United States (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989) 4, speaks of a ‘Mexican craze’ during these years. 41. Bank Downs, Diego Rivera, passim. 42. Idem, 31. 43. Hurlburt, The Mexican Muralists in the United States, 125. 44. Newman Helms, Diego Rivera, 295. 45. Rivera, My Art, My Life, 127. 46. Handelman, Mexican Politics, 37-38. 47. Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich, Die Unfähigkeit zu trauern: Grundlagen kollektiven Verhaltens (Munich: Piper, 2004 [1967]). 48. Rudolf Augstein et al., Historikerstreit: Die Dokumentation der Kontroverse um die Einzigartigkeit der nationalsozialistischen Judenverfolgung (Munich: R. Piper, 1987). 49. Brandon Taylor and Wilfried van der Will, “Aesthetics and National Socialism,” in: Taylor and Van der Will, eds., The Nazification of Art: Art, Design, Music, Architecture, and Film in the Third Reich (Winchester: Winchester Press, 1991) 1-13. 50. Compare George L. Mosse, Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism (New York: H. Fertig, 1978). 51. Max Nordau, Entartung (Berlin: C. Duncker, 1893). See also Beat Wyss, Trauer der Vollendung: Von der Ästhetik des deutschen Idealismus zur Kulturkritik an der Moderne (Munich: Matthes and Seitz, 1985), 226-42. 52. Joan D. Clinefelter, Artists for the Reich: Culture and Race from Weimar to Nazi Germany (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2005), 25-45. 53. Hildegard Brenner, Die Kunstpolitik des Nationalsozialismus (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1963), 7-21. 140 

54. Henry Grosshans, Hitler and the Artists (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1983), 9. 55. Franz Schulze, Mies van der Rohe: A Critical Biography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012 [1985]), 140-75; Elaine S. Hochman, Architects of Fortune: Mies van der Rohe and the Third Reich (New York: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1989). 56. Stephen D. Helmer, Hitler’s Berlin: The Speer Plans for Reshaping the Central City (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1985); Joachim Fest, Speer: Eine Biographie (Berlin: Alexander Fest, 1999). 57. Compare Günther Haase, Kunstraub und Kunstschutz: Eine Dokumentation (Hildesheim: G. Olms, 1991), 410. See for the list of works selected for the Führermuseum: www.dhm.de/ datenbank/linzdb. 58. Stephanie Barron, ed., “Degenerate Art”: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany (New York: H.N. Abrams, 1991) 10. See also Joseph Wulf, Kultur im Dritten Reich – Die bildenden Künste (Frankfurt a.M. and Berlin: Ullstein, 1989) 108-11. 59. Igor Golomstock, Totalitarian Art in the Soviet Union, the Third Reich, Fascist Italy and the People’s Republic of China (New York: Icon Editions, 2011 [1990]) 78. 60. Peter Adam, The Art of the Third Reich (New York: H.N. Abrams, 1992) 25; Jonathan Petropoulos, Art as Politics in the Third Reich (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996) 24. In 1934, pressured by Hitler, Goebbels had to adjust his opinion about modern art. 61. Barron, “Degenerate Art,” 319. 62. Jutta Held, Kunst und Kunstpolitik 1945-1949: Kulturaufbau in Deutschland nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg (Berlin: Verlag für Ausbildung und Studium in der Elefanten Press, 1981) 18. 63. Barron, “Degenerate Art,” 328. 64. Barron, “Degenerate Art,” 319. See also Rose-Carol WashtonLong, ed., German Expressionism: Documents from the End of the Wilhelmine Empire to the Rise of National Socialism (New York etc.: G.K. Hall etc., 1993) 306. 65. Barron, “Degenerate Art,” 45. 66. Golomstock, Totalitarian Art, 104. 

141

67. Barron, “Degenerate Art,” 135-69, offers a complete list of works sold at the auction. 68. Petropoulos, Art as Politics in the Third Reich, 57; Barron, “Degenerate Art,” 92. 69. Barron, “Degenerate Art,” 18. 70. Adam, The Art of the Third Reich, 109. See also Mary-Margaret Goggin, “‘Decent’ versus ‘Degenerate’ Art: The National Socialist Case,” Art Journal 50 no. 4 (1991): 84-92, here 86. 71. Neil Levi, “‘Judge for Yourselves!’ The Degenerate Art Exhibition as Political Spectacle,” October 85 (1998) 41-64, here 58-64. 72. Bertold Hinz, Art in the Third Reich (New York: Pantheon Books, 1979) 40. 73. Barron, “Degenerate Art,” 319. 74. Barbara McCloskey, Artists of World War II (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2005) 65. 75. Compare Gladys Engel Lang and Kurt Lang, “Banishing the Past: The German Avant-Garde and Nazi Art,” Qualitative Sociology 19 no. 3 (1996): 323-43. 76. Matthew Cullerne Bown, Socialist Realist Painting (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998) 39-44. 77. See for instance Kasimir Malevich, “On New Systems in Art” (1919), in idem, Essays on Art 1915-1928 (Copenhagen: Borgens Forlag, 1968) 94. 78. Camilla Gray, The Russian Experiment in Art, 1863-1922 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1986 [1962]) 219-43. 79. Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2000) 42-51. 80. Alexander Revyakin, “Decadence of Modern Art,” Soviet Literature 11 (1959) 167-68. 81. Bown, Socialist Realist Painting, 114-19. 82. Idem, 134. 83. Idem, 140-41. 84. Idem, 90. 85. In 1947, the Ilya Repin Institute for Painting, Sculpture and Architecture was founded in Leningrad.

142 

86. Bown, Socialist Realist Painting, 224, 227. Compare Kees Boterbloem, The Life and Times of Andrei Zhdanov, 1896-1948 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2004) 253-335. 87. Compare Bown, Socialist Realist Painting, 232-34. 88. David Caute, The Dancer Defects: The Struggle for Cultural Supremacy during the Cold War (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003) 516. 89. See for instance Boris Ioganson, “The Roots of Evil,” Iskusstvo no. 2 (1948): 7, quoted from Bown, Socialist Realist Painting, 269. 90. Gertje R. Utley, Picasso: The Communist Years (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000), 147-52. Picasso was not the first artist to draw on Goya’s painting: in a series of works from 1868-69, Édouard Manet had illustrated the execution of Emperor Maximilian in Mexico (1867), using Goya’s compositional structure. 91. Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (London: Granta Books, 2000 [1999]) 45-56. 92. Caute, The Dancer Defects, 421. Shostakovich later claimed he was forced to participate. 93. Utley, Picasso, 46, 217. 94. Richard D. McKinzie, The New Deal for Artists (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973) 5-10. 95. Jonathan Harris, “Modernism and Culture in the USA, 19301960,” in: Paul Wood et al., Modernism in Dispute: Art Since the Forties (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993) 3-76, here 25-32. 96. Frances K. Pohl, Framing America: A Social History of American Art (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2002) 365-73. 97. Leon Trotsky, “Art and Politics in our Epoch,” Partisan Review 5 no. 3 (1938): 3-10. See also Nancy Jachec, The Philosophy and Politics of Abstract Expressionism, 1940-1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) 23-25. 98. David Craven, Abstract Expressionism as Cultural Critique: Dissent During the McCarthy Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) 71-72.



143

99. Interview with Dorothy Gees Seckler, quoted from Harris, “Modernism and Culture in the USA,” 65. 100. Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961). 101. Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1983) 165-94. 102. Caute, The Dancer Defects, 544. 103. Idem. 104. See for instance Craven, Abstract Expressionism as Cultural Critique, 108 on Jean-Paul Sartre’s and Simone de Beauvoir’s comments. 105. Giles Scott-Smith, The Politics of Apolitical Culture: The Congress for Cultural Freedom, the CIA, and Post-War American Hegemony (London and New York: Routledge, 2002). 106. Caute, The Dancer Defects, passim. 107. Jachec, The Philosophy and Politics of Abstract Expressionism; Sigrid Ruby, Have We an American Art? Präsentation und Rezeption amerikanischer Malerei in Westdeutschland und Westeuropa der Nachkriegszeit (Weimar: VDG, 1999); Michael Krenn, Fall-Out Shelters for the Human Spirit: American Art and the Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005). 108. Jachec, The Philosophy and Politics of Abstract Expressionism, 159, 162-63. 109. Alfred H. Barr Jr., “Is Modern Art Communistic?”, The New York Times (December 14, 1952): 22-30. 110. Caute, The Dancer Defects, 160-218; Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund, The Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics in the Film Community, 1930-1960 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003 [1979]); Tony Shaw, Hollywood’s Cold War (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007); Ellen Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1998). 111. Interview with Emily Genauer in Harper’s Magazine, quoted from Craven, Abstract Expressionism as Cultural Critique, 98. 112. ‘[…] who has led into our homeland this herd of germcarrying art vermin?’, quoted from Charles Harrison and 144 

113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121.

122. 123. 124. 125. 126. 127. 128. 129. 130. 131. 

Paul Wood, eds., Art in Theory, 1900-1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas (Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1999 [1992]) 657. Saunders, Who Paid the Piper?, 253. Craven, Abstract Expressionism as Cultural Critique, 81. Picasso’s file contains 187 pages, more than any of the files on American painters. In China, the family name always comes before the first name. This order has been respected throughout this chapter. See for instance Allen Wittenborn, Dragon in Ambush: The Art of War in the Poems of Mao Zedong (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2013). Julia F. Andrews, Painters and Politics in the People’s Republic of China, 1949-1979 (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1994) 19-22. Michael Sullivan, Art and Artists of Twentieth-Century China (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1996) 131. Idem, 143. Idem, 144. Julia F. Andrews & Kuiyi Shen, “The Modernist Generations, 1920-1950,” in Julia F. Andrews and Kuiyi Shen, eds., A Century in Crisis: Modernity and Tradition in the Art of Twentieth-Century China (New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 1998) 146-225. Sullivan, Art and Artists, 139. Idem, 139-140. Andrews, Painters and Politics, 229-36. Idem, 236-38. Death toll estimates vary from twenty to forty million people. Andrews, Painters and Politics, 224-27. Jonathan Spence, The Search for Modern China (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999) 575. Andrews, Painters and Politics, 332-42. Sullivan, Art and Artists, 154-55. Idem, 343. 145

132. 133. 134. 135. 136. 137. 138. 139. 140. 141. 142. 143. 144. 145. 146.

147. 148. 149. 150.

Idem, 359-62. Idem, 360. Idem, 368-76. Idem, 226. Francesca del Lago, “Personal Mao: Reshaping an Icon in Contemporary Chinese Art,” Art Journal 58 no. 2 (1999): 4659, here 48. Richard Vine, New China, New Art (Munich etc.: Prestel, 2008) 45. Vine, New China, New Art, 24-26. Idem, 45. Compare Boris Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism: AvantGarde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992) 12. Gao Minglu, “Toward a Transnational Modernity,” in idem, ed., Inside Out: New Chinese Art (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1998) 15-40, here 28. Xiaoping Lin, Children of Marx and Coca-Cola: Chinese Avant-Garde Art and Independent Cinema (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2010) 20. For the Luo brothers, see Vine, New China, New Art, 30. Xiaoping, Children of Marx and Coca-Cola, 15-17; Gao, “Toward a Transnational Modernity,” 29-31. For Xu Bing, see Vine, New China, New Art, 58-64. Vine, New China, New Art, 13. In 1983 the group dissolved itself and many of the artists involved went abroad. In 1989 (Hong Kong and Taipei) and 1999 (Tokyo) they organized exhibitions outside mainland China in honor of the tenth and twentieth anniversaries of the group’s foundation. Later, some of them returned to China, and in 2007, a large retrospective of the Stars Group was on show in Beijing. With 293 works by 186 artists. See Vine, New China, New Art, 14. Idem, 44, 80. Sullivan, Art and Artists, 276-78. Jaap Guldemond, “New Urban Reality,” in Nederlands Architectuurinstituut, Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, and Nederlands Fotomuseum, eds., China Contemporary: Archi-

146 

151. 152. 153. 154. 155.

156. 157. 158. 159. 160. 161. 162.

163. 164.



tecture, Art, Visual Culture (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2006) 52-69, here 58-61. Compare Vine, New China, New Art, 14. Xiaoping, Children of Marx and Coca-Cola, 216. Vine, New China, New Art, 195. Compare Mary Bittner Wiseman, “Subversive Strategies in Chinese Avant-Garde Art,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 65 no. 1 (2007): 109-19. Vine, New China, New Art, 14-15. Compare Douwe Fokkema, Perfect Worlds: Utopian Fiction in China and the West (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2011), especially the chapter ‘Interlude: The Island Syndrome from Atlantis to Lanzarote and Penglai,’ 83-93. Alison Klayman, Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry (DVD, 2011). Marta Gnyp, Made in Mind: Myths and Realities of the Contemporary Artist (Stockholm: Art and Theory, 2013), 35. Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961); see Introduction and Chapter 4. Arthur C. Danto, After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014). Lucy R. Lippard, Mixed Blessings: New Art in a Multicultural America (New York: Pantheon Books, 1990) 8. Lippard uses the term ‘artists of color.’ Gwendolyn Dubois Shaw, Seeing the Unspeakable: The Art of Kara Walker (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2004), 12. Gone: An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred b’tween the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart (1994); The End of Uncle Tom and the Grand Allegorical Tableau of Eva in Heaven (1995). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kara_Walker, accessed September 7, 2015. Compare Robert Hobbs in Michael Corris and Robert Hobbs, “Reading Black through White in the Work of Kara Walker,” Art History 26, no. 3 (2003): 422–41, here 439; Kymberly N. Pinder, “Exhibition Review: Missus Kara E. Walker: Emancipated, and On Tour,” The Art Bulletin 90, no. 4 (2008): 640–48, here 644; Simone C. Drake, “Craig Brewer and Kara 147

165.

166.

167. 168. 169. 170.

171. 172. 173. 174.

Walker: Sexing the Difference and Rebuilding the South,” in Dána-Ain Davis and Shaka McGlotten, eds., Black Genders and Sexualities (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) 29–47, here 40. For Lavater’s relevance to Walker’s work, see especially Dubois Shaw, Seeing the Unspeakable, 22–23, and Philip Vergne, “The Black Saint Is the Sinner Lady,” in Vergne, ed., Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2007) 7–25, here 8–10. See Mark Reinhardt, “The Art of Racial Profiling,” in Ian Berry et al., eds., Kara Walker: Narratives of a Negress (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2003) 108–29, here 113; Barry Schwabsky, “Love by a Thousand Cuts,” The Nation 285, no. 19 (2007): 42–47, here 42; and Roderick A. Ferguson, “A Special Place within the Order of Knowledge: The Art of Kara Walker and the Conventions of African American History,” American Quarterly 61, no. 1 (2009): 185–92, here 186, on the symbolic implications of Kara Walker’s silhouette technique. Quoted in Bill Powers, Interviews with Artists (New York: Gagosian Gallery, 2013), 103–09, here 104. Thomas McEvilley, “Primitivism in the Works of an Emancipated Negress,” in Vergne, Kara Walker, 53–61, here 60. Ferguson, “A Special Place within the Order of Knowledge,” 186–88. Barbara Kruger, “Kara Walker,” http://content. time.com/time/specials/2007/time100/article/0,28804,1595326_1595332_1616818,00.html, accessed September 7, 2015. Donald Kuspit, “Kara Walker’s Cakewalk,” Artnet, http:// www.artnet.com/magazine/features/kuspit/kuspit11-4-03. asp, accessed September 6, 2015. Hilton Als, “The Shadow Act,” New Yorker 83 no. 30 (2007): 70-79, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/10/08/ the-shadow-act, accessed September 6, 2015. Reinhardt, “The Art of Racial Profiling,” 119. Ibid., 119; Als, “The Shadow Act”; Pinder, “Exhibition Review,” 645.

148 

175. Amy Tang, “Postmodern Repetitions: Parody, Trauma, and the Case of Kara Walker,” Differences 21, no. 2 (2010): 142–73, here 150–51. 176. Als, “The Shadow Act.” 177. Tang, “Postmodern Repetitions,” 151. 178. Silke Boerma, “Interview with Kara Walker,” in Kunstverein Hannover, ed., Kara Walker (Freiburg, Breisgau: Modo-Verlag, 2002), 165–73, here 165–66. 179. Carolina A. Miranda, “Kara Walker on the Bit of Sugar Sphinx She Saved, Videos She Is Making,” Los Angeles Times (October 13, 2014), http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/ miranda/la-et-cam-kara-walker-on-her-sugar-sphinx-thepiece-she-saved-video-shes-making-20141013-column.html, accessed August 25, 2015. 180. Robert Musil, Nachlaβ zu Lebzeiten (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2004 [1936]), 62. 181. For the French Revolution, see Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1984) 87-119; Dario Gamboni, The Destruction of Art: Iconoclasm and Vandalism since the French Revolution (London: Reaktion Books, 1997) 31-36. For Lenin’s decree: John E. Bowlt, “Russian Sculpture and Lenin’s Plan of Monumental Propaganda,” in Henry A. Millon and Linda Nochlin, eds., Art and Architecture in the Service of Politics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1978) 182-93, here 185. 182. Gamboni, The Destruction of Art, 79-85. 183. http://www.berliner-zeitung.de/berlin/debatte-um-denkmaeler-ausstellung-wissenschaftler-fordern-lenin-kopf-zurueck,10809148,28136066.html, accessed August 18, 2014. 184. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/germany/11758356/Lenin-statues-head-dug-up-and-returned-toBerlin.html, accessed July 27, 2015. 185. “Russia Slams Euronews over Photo of Vandalized WWII Statue,” RIA Novosti (February 25, 2014), http://en.ria.ru/ russia/20140225/187874521/Russia-Slams-Euronews-OverPhoto-of-Vandalized-WWII-Statue.html, accessed September 14, 2014. 

149

186. Emily Allen, “Is it a Bird? Is it a Plane? No, it’s Superman and friends… Painted on Soviet War Statue by the Banksy of Bulgaria,” Daily Mail (June 17, 2011), http://www.dailymail.co.uk/ news/article-2004814/Is-bird-Is-plane-No-Superman-friendspainted-Soviet-statue-Banksy-Bulgaria.html, accessed September 8, 2014. 187. David Lowe and Tony Joel, Remembering the Cold War. Global Contest and National Stories (London and New York: Routledge, 2013) 102-11. It took until 2001 before there was sufficient funding to build the park according to the original design. 188. Maya Nadkarni, “The Death of Socialism and the Afterlife of its Monuments: Making and Marketing the Past in Budapest’s Statue Park Museum,” in Katharine Hodgkin and Susannah Radstone, eds., Contested Past: The Politics of Memory (London and New York: Routledge, 2003) 193-207, here 194. 189. Nadkarni, “The Death of Socialism,” 198-99. 190. Idem, 200. 191. Karen Virag, “Budapest’s Statue Park and House of Terror,” http://pi.library.yorku.ca/ojs/index.php/soi/article/ view/7997/7143, accessed August 18, 2014. 192. Viktoriya Hryaban, “Casting Post-Socialist Memory: Monuments and Memorials as Instruments of Identity Politics in the Ukraine,” Ethnologia Europaea 36 no. 1 (2006): 21-31, here 23. 193. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012 [1983]). 194. The United Nations baptized the country the ‘Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia’ (FYROM), the name that is also used in Greece, but 132 individual countries so far have recognized it as ‘Republic of Macedonia.’ 195. Compare Helena Smith, “Macedonia Statue: Alexander the Great or Warrior on a Horse?”, http://www.theguardian. com/world/2011/aug/14/alexander-great-macedonia-warriorhorse/print, accessed August 18, 2014. 196. Smith, “Macedonia Statue.”

150 

197. Beatrice Forbes Manz, “Tamerlane’s Career and Its Uses,” Journal of World History 13 no. 1 (2002): 1-25, here 22. 198. Idem. A parallel conference on ‘Amir Temür in World History’ was organized in Paris. 199. Laura L. Adams and Assel Rustemova, “Mass Spectacle and Styles of Governmentality in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan,” Europe-Asia Studies 61 no. 7 (2009): 1249-76, here 1270. 200. Asel Muzakulova and John Schoeberlein, “The Invention of Legitimacy: Struggles in Kyrgyzstan to Craft an Effective Nation-State Ideology,” Europe-Asia Studies 61 no. 7 (2009): 1229-48, here 1239. 201. Josh Wilson, “Manas: The Kyrgyz Odysseys, Moses, and Washington,” http://www.sras.org/manas_kyrgyz_hero, accessed August 18, 2014; Dina Tokbaeva, “Kyrgyz Folk Hero Replaces Freedom Monument,” http://iwpr.net/report-news/ kyrgyz-folk-hero-replaces-freedom-monument, accessed August 18, 2014. Compare Nienke van der Heide, Spirited Performance. The Manas Epic and Society in Kyrgyzstan (Amsterdam: Rozenberg, 2008). 202. Murzakulova and Schoeberlein, “The Invention of Legitimacy,” 1238, 1246. 203. Michael Denison, “The Art of the Impossible: Political Symbolism, and the Creation of National Identity and Collective Memory in Post-Soviet Turkmenistan,” Europe-Asia Studies 61 no. 7 (2009): 1167-87, here 1173. 204. Denison, “The Art of the Impossible,” 1175. 205. See also “Turkmenbashi’s Reign of Terror,” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNJS2-Zv-Tc, accessed August 18, 2014. 206. Nonetheless, his successor Gurbanguli Berdimuhamedov seems well on his way, albeit on a somewhat smaller scale, to developing his own personality cult with supporting monuments. See for instance Rayhan Demytrie, “Has Turkmenistan Changed at all?”,http://www.bbc.com/news/worldasia-16958817, accessed August 18, 2014; Denison, “The Art of the Impossible,” 1184. 207. Many German examples in Bill Niven and Chloe Paver, eds., Memorialization in Germany Since 1945 (London: Palgrave McMillan, 2010). 

151

208. This also applies to countless other examples that are not discussed in this chapter. 209. Eduard Beaucamp, Der verstrickte Künstler: Wider die Le­ gende von der unbefleckten Avantgarde (Cologne: DuMont 1998). 210. Axel Hecht and Alfred Welti, “Ein Meister, der Talent verschmäht: Interview mit Georg Baselitz,” Art 6 (1990) 66, 70. Compare Joes Segal, “Kulturelle Einbürgerung: Künstlerische Tradition und nationale Identität im wiedervereinigten Deutschland,” in Karl-Siegbert Rehberg and Paul Kaiser, eds., Bilderstreit und Gesellschaftsumbruch: Die Debatten um die Kunst der DDR im Prozess der deutschen Wiedervereinigung (Berlin: Siebenhaar Verlag, 2013) 63-71. 211. Compare Brandon Tayler and Wilfried van der Will, “Aesthetics and National Socialism,” in idem, eds., The Nazification of Art: Art, Design, Music, Architecture and Film in the Third Reich (Winchester: The Winchester Press, 1990) 1-13; and Peter Ulrich Hein, Die Brücke ins Geisterreich: Künstlerische Avantgarde zwischen Kulturkritik und Faschismus (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1992). 212. Compare Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York and Toronto: Free Press and Maxwell MacMillan, 1992).

152 

Bibliography General Ameline, Jean-Paul, ed., Face à l’histoire, 1933-1996: L’artiste moderne devant l’événement historique (Paris: Flammarion, 1996) Balfe, Judith H. and Wyszomirski, Margaret Jane, Art, Ideology, and Politics (New York: Praeger, 1985) Beaucamp, Eduard, Der verstrickte Künstler: Wider die Legende von der unbefleckten Avantgarde (Cologne: DuMont, 1998) Beyme, Klaus von, Die Kunst der Macht und die Gegenmacht der Kunst: Studien zum Spannungsverhältnis von Kunst und Politik (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1998) Buck-Morss, Susan, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002) Clair, Jean, La responsabilité de l’artiste (Paris: Gallimard, 1997) Edelman, Murray, From Art to Politics: How Artistic Creations Shape Political Conceptions (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995) Golomstock, Igor, Totalitarian Art in the Soviet Union, the Third Reich, Fascist Italy and the People’s Republic of China (New York: Icon Editions, 1990) Grasskamp, Walter, Die lange Marsch durch die Illusionen: Kunst und Politik (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1995) Groys, Boris, Art Power (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2008) Haskell, Francis, History and Its Images: Art and the Interpretation of the Past (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993) MacClancy, Jeremy, Contesting Art: Art, Politics, and Identity in the Modern World (Oxford and New York: Berg, 1997) Millon, Henry A. and Nochlin, Linda, eds., Art and Architecture in the Service of Politics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1978) Roberts, John, Postmodernism, Politics and Art (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1990) Tabor, Jan, Kunst und Diktatur: Architektur, Bildhauerei und Malerei in Österreich, Deutschland, Italien und der Sowjetunion, 1922-1956 (Vienna: Grasl, 1994)



153

First World War Cohen, Aaron J., Imagining the Unimaginable: World War, Modern Art, and the Politics of Public Culture in Russia, 1914-1917 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008) Cork, Richard, A Bitter Truth: Avant-Garde Art and the Great War (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994) Eberle, Matthias, World War I and the Weimar Artists: Dix, Grosz, Beckmann, Schlemmer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985) Eksteins, Modris, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1989) Fox, James, “Conflict and Consolation: British Art and the First World War, 1914-1919,” Art History 36 no. 4 (2013), 810-33 Gough, Paul, A Terrible Beauty: British Artists in the First World War (Bristol: Samson & Co., 2010) Lambourne, Nicola, “Production versus Destruction: Art, World War I and Art History,” Art History 22 no. 3 (1999), 347-63 Mommsen, Wolfgang J., Kultur und Krieg: Die Rolle der Intellektuellen, Künstler und Schriftsteller im Ersten Weltkrieg (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1996) Roshwald, Aviel and Stites, Richard, European Culture in the Great War: The Arts, Entertainment, and Propaganda, 1914-1918 (Cambridge etc.: Cambridge University Press, 2002) Rother, Rainer, ed., Die letzten Tage der Menschheit: Bilder des Ersten Weltkrieges (Berlin: Deutsches Historisches Museum and Ars Nicolai, 1994) Schneede, Uwe M., ed., 1914: The Avant-Gardes at War (Cologne: Snoeck, 2013) Schubert, Dietrich, Künstler im Trommelfeuer des Krieges, 1914-1918 (Heidelberg: Verlag Das Wunderhorn, 2013) Segal, Joes, Krieg als Erlösung: Die deutschen Kunstdebatten 1910-1918 (Munich: Scaneg, 1997) Silver, Kenneth E., Esprit de Corps: The Art of the Parisian Avant-Garde and the First World War, 1914-1925 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989) Tolson, Roger, Art from the First World War (London: Imperial War Museum, 2008) White, Michael, Generation Dada: The Berlin Avant-Garde and the First World War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013)

154 

Diego Rivera Anreus, Alejandro, Folgarait, Leonard; and Greeley, Robin Adèle, Mexican Muralism: A Critical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012) Carter, Warren, “The Public (Mis)Use of Art: Radical Artists, Reformist States, and the Politics of Mural Painting in 1930s and 1940s America and Mexico,” The Oxford Art Journal 23 no. 2 (2000), 165-71 Coffey, Mark K., How a Revolutionary Art Became Official Culture: Murals, Museums, and the Mexican State (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012) Declercq, Veerle, ed., De Mexicaanse Muralisten (Ghent: Museum voor Schone Kunsten, 1993) Downs, Linda Bank, Diego Rivera: The Detroit Industry Murals (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999) Folgarait, Leonard, Mural Painting and Social Revolution in Mexico, 19201940 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998) Handelman, Howard, Mexican Politics: The Dynamics of Change (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997) Helms, Cynthia Newman, ed., Diego Rivera: A Retrospective (New York: W.W. Norton, 1986) Hurlburt, Laurance P., The Mexican Muralists in the United States (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989) Indych-López, Anna, “Mural Gambits: Mexican Muralism in the United States and the ‘Portable’ Fresco,” Art Bulletin 89 no. 2 (2007), 287-305 Indych-López, Anna, Muralism without Walls: Rivera, Orozco, and Siqueiros in the United States, 1927-1940 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009) Lee, Anthony W., Painting on the Left: Diego Rivera, Radical Politics, and San Francisco’s Public Murals (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1999) Lucy-Smith, Edward, Latin American Art of the 20th Century (New York: Thames & Hudson, 1993) Rivera, Diego, My Art, My Life: An Autobiography (New York: Citadel Press, 1960) Third Reich Adam, Peter, The Art of the Third Reich (New York: H.N. Abrams, 1992) Barron, Stephanie, ed., “Degenerate Art”: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany (New York: H.N. Abrams, 1991)



155

Brenner, Hildegard, Die Kunstpolitik des Nationalsozialismus (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1963) Clinefelter, Joan D., Artists for the Reich: Culture and Race from Weimar to Nazi Germany (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2005) Goggin, Mary-Margaret, “‘Decent’ versus ‘Degenerate’ Art: The National Socialist Case,” Art Journal 50 no. 4 (1991), 84-92 Grosshans, Henry, Hitler and the Artists (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1983) Haase, Günther, Kunstraub und Kunstschutz: Eine Dokumentation (Hildesheim: G. Olms, 1991) Helmer, Stephen D., Hitler’s Berlin: The Speer Plans for Reshaping the Central City (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1985) Hinz, Bertold, Art in the Third Reich (New York: Pantheon Books, 1979) Hochman, Elaine S., Architects of Fortune: Mies van der Rohe and the Third Reich (New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1989) Lang, Gladys Engel and Lang, Kurt, “Banishing the Past: The German Avant-Garde and Nazi Art,” Qualitative Sociology 19 no. 3 (1996), 323-43 Levi, Neil, “‘Judge for Yourselves!’: The Degenerate Art Exhibition as Political Spectacle,” October 85 (1998), 41-64 McCloskey, Barbara, Artists of World War II (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2005) Petropoulos, Jonathan, Art as Politics in the Third Reich (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996) Taylor, Brandon and Van der Will, Wilfried, “Aesthetics and National Socialism,” in Taylor and Van der Will, eds., The Nazification of Art: Art, Design, Music, Architecture and Film in the Third Reich (Winchester: Winchester Press, 1991) Washton-Long, Rose-Carol, ed., German Expressionism: Documents from the End of the Wilhelmine Empire to the Rise of National Socialism (New York etc.: G.K. Hall etc., 1993) Wulf, Joseph, Kultur im Dritten Reich – Die bildenden Künste (Frankfurt a.M. and Berlin: Ullstein, 1989) Wyss, Beat, Trauer der Vollendung: Von der Ästhetik des deutschen Idealismus zur Kulturkritik an der Moderne (Munich: Matthes & Seitz, 1985) Cold War Bown, Matthew Cullerne and Taylor, Brandon, eds., Art of the Soviets: Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in a One-Party State, 1917-1992 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993)

156 

Bown, Matthew Cullerne, Socialist Realist Painting (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998) Buck-Morss, Susan, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2000) Caute, David, The Dancer Defects: The Struggle for Cultural Supremacy during the Cold War (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003) Cox, Annette, Art as Politics: The Abstract Expressionist Avant-Garde and Society (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1982) Craven, David, Abstract Expressionism as Cultural Critique: Dissent During the McCarthy Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) De Hart Matthews, Jane, “Art and Politics in Cold War America,” American Historical Review 81 (1976) 762, 787 Frascina, Francis, Pollock and After: The Critical Debate (New York: Harper & Row, 1985) Greenberg, Clement, Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961) Groys, Boris, The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992) Guilbaut, Serge, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1983) György, Peter and Turai, Hedvig, Art and Society in the Age of Stalin (Budapest: Corvina Books, 1992) Harris, Jonathan, “Modernism and Culture in the USA, 1930-1960,” in Paul Wood et al., eds., Modernism in Dispute: Art Since the Forties (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993), 3-76 Jachec, Nancy, The Philosophy and Politics of Abstract Expressionism, 19401960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) Krenn, Michael, Fall-Out Shelters for the Human Spirit: American Art and the Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005) Lindey, Christine, Art in the Cold War: From Vladivostock to Kalamazoo, 1945-1962 (London: Herbert Press, 1990) Luke, Timothy W., Shows of Force: Power, Politics, and Ideology in Art Exhibitions (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995) McKinzie, Richard D., The New Deal for Artists (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973) Pohl, Frances K., Framing America: A Social History of American Art (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2002)



157

Romijn, Peter, Scott-Smith, Giles and Segal, Joes, eds., Divided Dreamworlds? The Cultural Cold War in East and West (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012) Rosenfeld, Alla and Dodge, Norton T., eds., Nonconformist Art: The Soviet Experience, 1956-1986 (London: Thames & Hudson, 1995) Ruby, Sigrid, Have We an American Art? Präsentation und Rezeption amerikanischer Malerei in Westdeutschland und Westeuropa der Nachkriegszeit (Weimar: VDG, 1999) Saunders, Frances Stonor, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (London: Granta Books, 2000 [1999]) Scott-Smith, Giles, The Politics of Apolitical Culture. The Congress for Cultural Freedom, the CIA and Post-War American Hegemony (London and New York: Routledge, 2002) Utley, Gertje R., Picasso: The Communist Years (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000) China Andrews, Julia F., Painters and Politics in the People’s Republic of China, 1949-1979 (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1994) Andrews, Julia F. and Shen, Kuiyi, eds., A Century in Crisis. Modernity and Tradition in the Art of Twentieth-Century China (New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 1998) Chang, Arnold, Painting in the People’s Republic of China: The Politics of Style (Boulder: Westview Press, 1980) Chiu, Melissa and Zheng, Sheng Tian, Art and China’s Revolution (New York and New Haven: Asia Society and Yale University Press, 2008) Galikowski, Maria, Art and Politics in China, 1949-1984 (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1998) Gao Minglu, ed., Inside Out: New Chinese Art (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1998) Holm, David, Art and Ideology in Revolutionary China (Oxford and New York: Clarendon Press and Oxford University Press, 1991) Kao Mayching, ed., Twentieth-Century Chinese Painting (Hong Kong and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988) Lago, Francesca del, “Personal Mao: Reshaping an Icon in Contemporary Chinese Art,” Art Journal 58 no. 2 (1999), 46-59 Laing, Ellen Johnston, The Winking Owl: Art in the People’s Republic of China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988)

158 

Lin Xiaoping, Children of Marx and Coca-Cola: Chinese Avant-Garde Art and Independent Cinema (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2010) Mao Zedong, Mao Zedong’s Talks at the Yan’an Conference on Literature and Art, translation by Bonnie S. McDougall (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1980) Nederlands Architectuurinstituut, Museum Boijmans van Beuningen and Nederlands Fotomuseum, eds., China Contemporary: Architecture, Art, Visual Culture (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2006) Noth, Jochen, Pöhlmann, Wolfger, and Reschke, Kai, China Avant-Garde: Counter-Currents in Art and Culture (Berlin and Hong Kong: Haus der Kulturen der Welt and Oxford University Press, 1994) Peng Lü and Doar, Bruce G., A History of Art in 20th-Century China (Milan: Charta, 2010) Spence, Jonathan, The Search for Modern China (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999) Sullivan, Michael, Art and Artists of Twentieth-Century China (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1996) Vine, Richard, New China, New Art (Munich etc.: Prestel, 2008) Wiseman, Mary Bittner, “Subversive Strategies in Chinese Avant-Garde Art,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 65 no. 1 (2007), 109-19 Kara Walker Als, Hilton, “Profiles – The Shadow Act – A Klara Walker Retrospective,” The New Yorker (August 10, 2007), 70-75 Cammarano, Cristina, “I Know, You Know, We Know: Recognition and Misrecognition as Possibilities for Education in the Example of Kara Walker’s Art,” Journal of Aesthetic Education 49 no. 2 (2015), 107-16 Corris, Michael and Hobbs, Robert, “Reading Black Through White in the Work of Kara Walker,” Art History 26 no. 3 (2003), 422-41 DuBois Shaw, Gwendolyn, “Kara Walker: Final Cut,” Parkett no. 59 (2000), 129-38 DuBois Shaw, Gwendolyn, Seeing the Unspeakable: The Art of Kara Walker (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004) Dunham, Carroll, “Film Noir: The Films of Kara Walker,” Artforum 45 no. 8 (2007), 238-43 Hill, William, The Post-Black Aesthetic and Meanings of Blackness Through the Collage Narratives of Kara Walker and Fred Wilson (Chicago: DePaul University, 2012)



159

Lange, Barbara, ed., Die Silhouette in der zeitgenössischen Kunst: Vergegenwärtigung und Bewältigung in Kara Walkers Slavery! Slavery! (Tübingen: Universität Tübingen, 2012) Peabody, Rebecca, “Kara Walker: On the End of Uncle Tom,” Word and Image 28 no. 2 (2012), 181-92 Peabody, Rebecca, “The Art of Storytelling in Kara Walker’s Film and Video,” Black Camera: An International Film Journal New Series 5 no. 1 (2013), 140-63 Pinder, Kymberly N., “Exhibition Review – Missus Kara E. Walker: Emancipated, and On Tour,” The Art Bulletin 90 no. 4 (2008), 640-48 Powers, Bill, Interviews with Artists (New York: Gagosian Gallery, 2013) Repetto, Sarah Finer, “These Images May Be in Your City Next:” Reception Issues in the Art of Kara Walker (Long Beach: California State University, 2014) Schwabsky, Barry, “Love by a Thousand Cuts,” The Nation 285 no. 19 (200708), 42-47 Silberman, Robert, “Exhibition Reviews – Kara Walker,” The Burlington Magazine 149 no. 1251 (2007), 437-38 Stillman, Steel, “In the Studio: Kara Walker with Steel Stillman,” Art in America 99 no. 5 (2011), 88-109 Tang, Amy, “Postmodern Repetitions: Parody, Trauma, and the Case of Kara Walker,” Differences 21 no. 2 (2010), 142-73 Vergne, Philippe et al., Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2007) Walker, Kara Elizabeth, Kara Walker: Pictures From Another Time (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Museum of Art, 2002) Walker, Kara Elizabeth et al., Kara Walker: Narratives of a Negress (Saratoga Springs: Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003 [New York: Rizzoli, 2007]) Walker, Kara Elizabeth et al., Kara Walker: Dust Jackets for the Niggerati (New York: Gregory R. Miller & Co., 2013) Post-Socialist Monuments Adams, Laura L. and Rustemova, Assel, “Mass Spectacle and Styles of Governmentality in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan,” Europe-Asia Studies 61 no. 7 (2009), 1249-76

160 

Denison, Michael, “The Art of the Impossible: Political Symbolism, and the Creation of National Identity and Collective Memory in Post-Soviet Turkmenistan,” Europe-Asia Studies 61 no. 7 (2009), 1167-87 Gamboni, Dario, The Destruction of Art: Iconoclasm and Vandalism since the French Revolution (London: Reaktion Books, 1997) Haagsma, Lotte et al., Claiming Visibility: The Politics of Public Art (Amsterdam: Mondriaan Fonds, 2012) Heinrich, Christoph, Strategien des Erinnerns: Der veränderte Denkmalbegriff in der Kunst der achtziger Jahre (Munich: S. Schreiber, 1993) Hobsbawm, Eric and Ranger, Terence, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012 [1983]) Hodgkin, Katharine and Radstone, Susannah, eds., Contested Past: The Politics of Memory (London and New York: Routledge, 2003) Hryaban, Viktoriya, “Casting Post-Socialist Memory: Monuments and Memorials as Instruments of Identity Politics in the Ukraine,” Ethnologia Europaea 36 no. 1 (2006), 21-31 Manz, Beatrice Forbes, “Tamerlane’s Career and Its Uses,” Journal of World History 13 no. 1 (2002) 1-25 Muzakulova, Asel and Schoeberlein, John, “The Invention of Legitimacy: Struggles in Kyrgyzstan to Craft an Effective Nation-State Ideology,” Europe-Asia Studies 61 no. 7 (2009), 1229-48 Niven, Bill and Paver, Chloe, eds., Memorialization in Germany Since 1945 (London: Palgrave McMillan, 2010)



161



Index of names

Ai Qing 94 Ai Weiwei 92, 94-97, 98, 135 Akhmatova, Anna 65 Alexander the Great 120, 127 Alighieri, Dante see Dante Atatürk, Mustafa Kemal 124, 126 Atl, Dr. see Gerardo Murillo Bahr, Hermann 20 Banksy 116 Barlach, Ernst 50, 51, 55 Barr Jr., Alfred 75 Baselitz, Georg 130 Baumeister, Willi 51 Beaucamp, Eduard 28 Beauvoir, Simone de 71, 144 (note 104) Beckmann, Max 17 Beecher Stowe, Harriet 103 Behne, Adolf 26 Belling, Rudolf 56 Benjamin, Walter 87 Berdimuhamedov, Gurbanguli 151 (note 206) Bernstein, Leonard 68 Biddle, George 69 Boerma, Silke 109 Braque, Georges 17, 24 Breker, Arno 55 Brezhnev, Leonid 78 Buonarroti, Michelangelo see Michelangelo Calles, Plutarco Elias 35, 36, 39, 42 Camus, Albert 71 Cárdenas, Lázaro 38, 42, 43 Carranza, Venustiano 32 Chiang Kai-Shek 80 Clovis I 120 Confucius 79 Copland, Aaron 68 Dante (Alighieri) 24, 138 (note 14) Danto, Arthur 101 Davis, Stuart 69 Deineka, Alexander 63 Delaunay, Robert 26 Deng Xiaoping 80, 85, 86-87, 134 Díaz, Porfirio 32, 37



Dix, Otto 17 Dondero, George 7, 76, 77 Dubček, Alexander 116 Dufy, Raoul 18 Eichmann, Adolf 45 Eisenstein, Sergei 66 Eleöd, Ákos 117 Engelbrecht, Kurt 24 Erler, Fritz 54 Feininger, Lyonel 69 Feistel-Rohmeder, Bettina 48, 50 Feng Boyi 94 Ferguson, Roderick 105 Ford, Edsel 31, 39, 40, 43 Ford, Henry 39 Freundlich, Otto 56, 57 Fu Baoshi 84 Fukuyama, Francis 136 Gao Qiang 89 Gates Jr., Henry Louis 108 Genauer, Emily 144 (note 111) Gnyp, Marta 97 Goebbels, Joseph 50, 53, 56, 133, 141 (note 60) Goncharova, Natalia 18 Gorki, Maxim 65 Goya, Francisco de 66, 143 (note 90) Greenberg, Clement 9, 71-73, 89, 99, 101, 134, 135 Grigoriev, Sergei Alexeevich 67 Gruevski, Nikola 121 Guan Shanyue 84 Gurlitt, Cornelius 22, 24 Guttuso, Renato 62 Habermas, Jürgen 46 Harris, Michael 107-108 Hartley, Marsden 69 Heartfield, John 56 Heckel, Erich 50, 51 Hermann der Cherusker (Arminius) 120 Herzog, Jacques 95 Hitler, Adolf 12, 46, 49, 50, 53, 56, 57, 58, 59, 70, 133, 141 (note 60) Hobsbawm, Eric 120

163

Hryaban, Viktoriya 118 Hua Guofeng 86 Huang Yong Ping 91 Ibsen, Henrik 47 Jiang Feng 83 Jiang Qing 86, 98 Johns, Jasper 78 Jung, Carl Gustav 71 Kahlo, Frida 38, 139 (note 34) Kanaga, Consuelo 72 Kandinsky, Wassily 20 Karimov, Islam 123 Kaulbach, Friedrich August von 19 Khrushchev, Nikita 78, 81, 97 Kirchner, Ernst Ludwig 51 Klee, Paul 17 Klutsis, Gustav 63 Kohl, Helmut 46 Kokoschka, Oskar 17 Kollwitz, Käthe 55 Kong Dongmei 93 Kosolapov, Alexander 90 Kunc, Milan 88 Kuniyoshi, Yasuo 73 Kuspit, Donald 106-107, 108 Lavater, Johann Kaspar 104 Léger, Fernand 17, 62 Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich 42, 43, 63, 64, 66, 70, 90, 111, 112-114, 118, 124, 126, 132, 136 Li Shan 88 Lichtenstein, Roy 78 Liebermann, Max 18, 25, 26 Lincoln, Abraham 42 Lippard, Lucy 102, 147 (note 160) Lissitzky, El 63 Liu Shaoqi 84-85 Liu Xiaobo 96 Lunacharsky, Anatoli 62, 63, 66 Luo, Weibing 91 Luo Weidong 91 Luo Weiguo 91 Macke, August 17, 50, 55 Mailer, Norman 68 Mâle, Émile 22, 24 Malevich, Kasimir 18, 63 Manas the Magnanimous 122-124, 127

Manet, Édouard 143 (note 90) Mao Zedong 14, 45, 78-91, 93, 94, 97-98, 126, 134 Marc, Franz 17, 20, 50, 55 Marshall, George 73-74 Marx, Karl 37, 43, 112, 121,124, 126 Matisse, Henri 17, 82 McCarthy, Joseph 75, 77 Meidner, Ludwig 56 Meier-Graefe, Julius 21 Meuron, Pierre de 95 Meyer, Hannes 63 Michelangelo (Buonarroti) 24, 138 (note 14) Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig 49, 51 Miller, Arthur 68 Minnich, Rick 114 Mitchell, Margaret 103 Morrow, Dwight 35-36, 39 Murillo, Gerardo (Dr. Atl) 33 Musil, Robert 111 Mussolini, Benito 29, 52 Newman, Barnett 7, 8, 10, 71, 73 Nietzsche, Friedrich 47 Nissen, Momme 25 Nixon, Richard 89 Niyazov, Saparmurat 124, 126 Nolde, Emil 50, 51, 52, 56-57, 59 Nolte, Ernst 46 Nordau, Max 47 Obregón, Alvaro 32, 33, 35, 69 Orozco, José Clemente 33 Pechstein, Max 51 Picasso, Pablo 17-18, 24, 31, 33, 62, 66, 68, 76-77, 82, 132, 133-134, 143 (note 90), 145 (note 114) Pindell, Howardena 107, 108 Poincaré, Raymond 20 Pollock, Jackson 70-71, 75, 76 Prokofiev, Sergei 66 Putin, Vladimir 116 Radziwill, Franz 52 Ranger, Terence 120 Refregier, Anton 68 Reinhardt, Ad 71 Repin, Ilya 65, 82, 142 (note 84) Rivera, Diego 13, 15, 31-44, 64, 69, 131-132 Rockefeller, Nelson 31, 39, 40, 41-42, 43

164 

Rodchenko, Alexander 63 Rodin, Auguste 21 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano 69, 70 Rosenberg, Alfred 48, 50 Rosenberg, Harald 7 Rothko, Mark 71, 72 Rouault, Georges 18 Rust, Bernhard 56 Saar, Betye 107, 108 Sartre, Jean-Paul 71, 144 (note 104) Schreiber, Otto 50 Schultze-Naumburg, Paul 48, 50 Shahn, Ben 74 Shi Lu 84 Shostakovich, Dmitri 66, 68, 143 (note 92) Siqueiros, David Alfaro 33, 34, 36, 139 (note 34) Speer, Albert 49 Spornikov, Boris 67 Stalin, Joseph 38, 45, 59, 64, 65, 66, 68, 70, 77, 78, 81, 97, 123, 126, 133, 134, 136 Storck, Karl 26 Stravinsky, Igor 68 Stuck, Franz von 30 Sui Jianguo 88, 89 Sun Yat-Sen 80 Tatlin, Vladimir 63, 95 Timur Lenk (Tamerlane) 121-124, 127, 151 (note 198)



Tolstoy, Leo 47 Tomsky, Nikolai 112-114 Trotsky, Leon 38-39, 70, 72, 81, 139 (note 34) Truman, Henry 73 Valentiner, William 40 Vallotton, Félix 27 Vasconcelos, José 32, 33, 34 Vergne, Philippe 108-109 Walker, Kara 13, 14, 99-110, 135 Walker, Larry 102 Wang Guangyi 88, 90 Wang Keping 87, 92 Warhol, Andy 78, 89, 90, 101 Weisgerber, Albert 17 William II 20, 24 Xiao Lu 92 Xu Bing 91, 92 Yanukovych, Viktor 116 Zetkin, Clara 63 Zhdanov, Andrei 65, 66, 68, 76, 77 Zheng Zhenduo 83 Zhou Enlai 81 Ziegler, Adolf 53, 55, 56, 58

165