What Good are the Arts? by John Carey

What Good are the Arts? by John Carey

Author:John Carey [John Carey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571265114
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2012-07-14T16:00:00+00:00


The most prominent instance of art-worship co-existing with disregard for the fate of humanity is, of course, Adolf Hitler. Art-lovers used to dismiss him as a mere dauber with kitsch tastes, but Frederic Spotts’s book Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics has made that gambit unplayable. Spotts shows beyond doubt that Hitler had a deep and serious interest in music, painting, sculpture and architecture. An heir of the Romantic tradition that regarded art-worship as man’s highest aspiration, he left home in 1907 to become an artist, and was shocked when the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts turned him down. With selfless dedication he eked out a livelihood painting and selling scenes of Vienna, which he would turn out at the rate of five or six a week, sometimes bartering a picture for a meal, and sleeping in cafés, cheap lodging houses and shelters for the homeless. Though entirely self-taught, he became a competent watercolourist, earning a modest income and receiving occasional commissions.

But it was as a patron of the arts that he excelled. He was convinced that the ultimate aim of political effort should be artistic achievement, and he dreamed of creating the greatest culture state since ancient times. ‘I became a politician against my will,’ he would say. By choice he would have been ‘an artist or philosopher’. His passionate concern for cultural matters, and relative lack of interest in warfare, was the despair of his generals. When Goebbels visited him at his military headquarters at Rastenberg in East Prussia, at the height of the Stalingrad campaign, Hitler began by talking of his pleasure in Bruckner’s symphonies, and concluded by comparing the philosophies of Kant, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. A feeling for the arts was crucial to earning his respect. Goebbels had written plays and a novel; Alfred Rosenberg had studied architecture; Goering was an art collector.

An intense admirer of Greek classical art, Hitler held views close to those of J. J. Winckelmann, the 18th-century art historian and founder of neo-classicism, The Greeks, he declared, had linked ‘physical beauty’ with ‘noblest soul’. His prize possession was the best surviving copy of Myron’s Discobolus – a 2nd-century Roman marble replica of a Greek bronze. His well-known dislike of modernist art was, Spotts points out, in line with most critics at the time and with the overwhelming weight of public opinion. Modernist art had engendered hatred everywhere, from London and New York to St Petersburg and Budapest. Hitler denounced it because he believed, correctly, that it was elitist, and had no meaning for the great mass of the public. His Degenerate Art exhibition in Munich in 1937 was visited by derisive crowds who treated the modern artworks on display as a freak show. One aim of his Strength through Joy organization was to bring culture to the masses. Music festivals, travelling art exhibitions and free concerts were part of his civilizing mission. His enormous generosity funded commissions, grants, awards, scholarships and tax abatements for artists, as well as studios and houses. ‘My artists should live like princes’, he declared, ‘and not have to inhabit attic rooms.



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