Salvador Dali was a fascist, I made a whole
video about it and, aside from the comments of people sympathizing with his worldview, many
people commented that Dali’s opinions shouldn’t affect our perception of his art. It’s the whole
“can we separate the artist from his art” debate. I want to bring up another fascist artist, more specifically a Nazi one, not
because I want to discredit his art, but because I think we can learn a lot from
his experience, as a Nazi artist, with fascism. Let’s take a look at Emil Nolde’s Art
and how it was received in Nazi Germany. Emil Nolde was quite a successful
and accomplished artist when the Nazis took power. He was a member
of the notorious Die Brucke group, he was one of the pioneers of expressionism,
often bringing religious motifs into modern art. But Nolde was also a Nazi, as in he was a member
of the nazi party. He would even denounce his rival artists, such as Max Rechstein,
as jews, despite them not being jewish. In 1933, the same year Hitler took power,
the 65 year-old Nolde attended a dinner party with no other than the dictator
himself. He would write to his wife: “the celebration was deeply moving. We saw and
heard the Führer for the first time ... The Führer is high-minded and noble in his goals,
an inspired man of action. Only a swarm of dark spectres are responsible for clouding him
in an artificially created cultural fog. But it appears that soon the sun will
break through, dispersing the fog.” See, Nolde agreed a lot with Hitler, including
on the jewish question which Nolde, along with his wife, tried to answer by proposing a plan to
forcefully deport all jews from Germany. However, Nolde disagreed with Hitler on one
thing, the future of German Art. To talk about the debate surrounding the
future of German Art in Nazi Germany, we need to learn about the concept of Degenerate Art.
Degenerate art is the nazi term for modern art, an art which, to them, is un-German, Jewish,
Communist. Nazis hated modern art and linked it to “cultural bolshevism”, the idea that
art (or culture broadly) was controlled by a leftist jewish cabal seeking to destroy the white
race. Nowadays, they call it “cultural marxism”. So this degenerate art, one of
the deranged mind, one of the jew, was ultimately seen as a threat to Germany’s
purity. So Hitler went to war with it. This war mostly consisted of an exhibition
seeking to discredit modern artists called the “Entartete Kunst” exhibition. As I said
in the video I made about that exhibition, the objective was to kill degenerate artists,
not by executing them, but by taking away their status of artist, by convincing the
public that what they did wasn’t art. The Nazis confiscated over 16,000 works of art. Otto Dix, Edvard Munch, Picasso, Van
Gogh, Matisse, Kirchner… and Nolde. Out of all degenerate artists, Nolde was
the one most targeted by the Nazis despite being a nazi. Himself. Over 1000
of his works were confiscated and, at the Degenerate Art exhibition, the one
aimed at delegitimizing and humiliating artists, the artist having the most
artworks on display was Emil Nolde. Despite Nolde being a nazi, he was still
betrayed by the leaders and the values he looked up to. Despite being a patriot, despite
his unconditional love for his country, despite his hatred for jews,
the nazis still persecuted him. This persecution wouldn’t end at the
Degenerate Art Exhibition. In 1941, Nolde was prohibited from buying art
supplies and from exhibiting his artworks. This is where his unpainted pictures come in and, as it turns out, these were just a way for Nolde
to rehabilitate himself after the Nazis lost. “I occasionally worked furtively in a
small, partly hidden room. I had been stripped of the right to obtain materials and
it was almost only my small, special ideas, which I was able to paint and capture on tiny
sheets, my ‘unpainted pictures’, which were to become large, real pictures when they and I were
allowed to. Our beautiful picture room ... had, through the ban, become the prison of
my pictures, lonely and locked away.” Nolde wasn’t banned from painting and had
been practicing these small watercolour paintings before his persecution.
This story, pushed by Nolde himself, was a way to make himself a martyr and
rehabilitate himself in postwar Germany. Here’s an artist who, despite being banned from
painting by the nazis, bravely expressed himself in a small hidden studio until the end of the war
where he could paint again freely. Until recently, the story didn’t mention that this brave artist
was a nazi, even through his supposed ban. For more on this, I invite
you to read To The Bitter End by Adam Tooze from The London Review of Books. Fascism is undeniably on the rise, more
concerningly in the United States, so what can we learn from the fascist artist who got suppressed
by fascists, but remained a fascist nonetheless? I think there are two lessons
we can learn from Nolde’s story (and if you can think of any other,
please share them in the comments). First, it’s that fascism is an illness, an illness
which is really difficult to cure. Nolde was an extremely successful and popular artist and,
through the authoritarian government he supported, his art was censored, hidden and only revealed to
the public in order to make a mockery out of it. Nolde was mocked, ridiculed and humiliated by the
nazis, but, nonetheless, Nolde remained a nazi. This submissiveness of the authoritarian
mind is almost pathological and should be prevented because curing
it is extremely difficult. Second, if there are any fascists
who got this far in this video, in your ideal fascist state, you are not safe.
Nolde thought he would be, and he wasn’t. Authoritarianism is dangerous whether
you’re on the side of the oppressor or not. However, it’s hard for a fascist to recognize
these dangers because, very often, the fascist doesn’t know he’s a fascist. The fabricated
external threat irrationally justifies his positions, whether it be jews, communists,
black people, gay people or trans people. Emil Nolde was so caught up in these
fabricated threats, these conspiracy theories, that even when the nazis repressed him and
his art, made a mockery out of him, he still considered himself a nazi. When Hitler called
Nolde a swine, Nolde still supported Hitler. These fabricated threats are dangerous, not
only for the people labelled as threats, but for the people who believe these
threats. Nolde was a great example of that. thank you so much for watching thank you for
liking and subscribing if you have already and I'd like to thank as always Roman brandle Mike
wax and every other Patron for supporting the channel if you also want to support the channel
check out patreon.com forward slash the canvas
