About the Exhibition: Themes
The 1930s: The Making of “The New Man” is an exhibition organized thematically. Unlike a retrospective, which approaches its subject chronologically, The 1930s takes a new approach to these decisive years in modern history, one that respects the period’s enormous stylistic diversity (no particular movement really dominates) and the complexity of its socio-political situation. This is reflected in the works of the artists who dealt with its dramatic upheavals according to their personal convictions, fears, hopes or disappointments. The exhibition unfolds like a story in nine episodes, where the works are grouped around key themes that shed new light on the era.
- Genesis
- Convulsive Beauty
- The “Will to Power”
- The Making of “The New Man”
- Mother Earth
- The Appeal of Classicism
- “Faces of Our Time”
- “Crowds and Power”
- The Charnel House
Genesis
Questions of biology occupy a central place in the ideologies of the 1930s. Painters, sculptors, photographers and filmmakers took an interest in elemental life forms. Artistic creation attempted to mimic nature itself, and became fixed on the concept of “genesis.” Images of the egg, the primal cell, proliferate in the era’s artistic production. Artists like Arp, Kandinsky and Ernst, photographers such as Carl Struwe and Laure Albin-Michel and filmmakers like Painlevé demonstrate their fascination with cellular form.
Convulsive Beauty
Surrealism saw itself as an actor in a future chaotic world. Hallucination and desire, projected onto people and things, were agents of metamorphosis. The human body is distorted, bent, taken apart like a mannequin and disconcertingly reassembled bearing witness to a peculiar erotic universe. The works of Dalí, Bellmer, Giacometti and Masson are an affirmation of the individual whose roots are deep in the unconscious, and present images of bodies that are disturbing by their obsessional nature.
The “Will to Power”
Writings by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, published after his death under the title The Will to Power, contained iconoclastic ideas in the form of slogans like “the will to power,” “birth of the superman,” the coming of a race of “lords of the earth.” Taken out of context they were easily exploited, not only by the Nazis but also by most of the fascist and totalitarian ideologies, particularly in Italy.
Nietzsche’s thought was actually much more complex and pessimistic. Nevertheless the will to power as it was represented by the era’s dictators, whether Hitler or Stalin, Mussolini or Franco, glossed over Nietzche’s semantic subtleties and universally presented the same brutal and threatening face, sometimes in the crudest classical disguise (Gerasimov), sometimes in a surprisingly avant-garde style (Thayaht).
The Making of “The New Man”
The very idea of man being called upon to regenerate himself, to become ”new,” is found in both Christian theology and Eastern philosophy, as well as in the ideas of the Enlightenment in the 18th Century, and in revolutionary messianism.
In their boast of forging a “New Man,” the ideologues of the ‘30’s were to turn “fabrication” into a far more mechanical and often lethal process. The figure of a being who had killed the “old man” within and who, invested with all the correct qualities, stood at the threshold of the future became common to Fascist, Nazi and Communist theories alike, though based on opposing ideological premises.
To this end a whole gamut of provisions were swiftly put in place by the totalitarian regimes: the control of each individual by inclusion as par of the mass; the deification of the leader, (Duce, Führer or Father of the People); the cult of a perfect model of the New Man, the exaltation of sports and military heroes, and so on.
It was a natural step from hygienics to eugenics—the strong and healthy body contrasted with the weak and imperfect bodies of the ill and inferior types..
Mother Earth
The allegorical figure of Mother Earth is prevalent in artworks of the 1930s. In Europe, the rise of dictators was reflected, in the art world by a return to order and a need to restore the eternal values of classicism and traditions. A renewal of realistic representation can be found in paintings, along with a number of allegorical themes confirming the social and educational roles in a totalitarian regime.
In Nazi Germany, the theme of Mother Earth serves the political agenda and defends a nationalist ideology based on racial purity. Images of rural families are used as a propaganda tool, and become a symbol of the sense of belonging to one’s land. The regeneration of the German people, and the birth of the “New Man,” is to be achieved by this return to traditional values.
The Appeal of Classicism
Classical art of the Greco-Roman period was highly esteemed in Western art for its formal proportion and harmony, and served, throughout history, as a standard against which art movements measured their own achievements, or against which they rebelled. The return to classicism inspired a wide spectrum of art forms in Western Europe in the 1930s. Evidence of this can be found even in the constructivist’s reduction of the human form to a robotic figure composed of cylinders and triangles.
In addition, the totalitarian regimes of Germany, Italy and Russia referred to Classicism’s valued and idealized form as a tool of political propaganda, and it quickly became the artistic language of power. Eager to ally themselves with the great epochs of the past, the ideologues found within classical art a justification for their warped ideological views regarding the perfection of the human body.
“Faces of Our Time”
In 1929, in an attempt to create a typology of his nation, photographer August Sander published a series of 60 portraits of fellow Germans, under the title Faces of Our Time. These photographs went counter to the ideology of the National Socialists, who wished to ignore reality and create a generic model of the perfect New Man and New Woman.
Their view also conflicted with the work of Expressionist artists, such as Otto Dix, for whom the portrait should attempt to penetrate outward appearance and reveal personal character. Totalitarian regimes, both Nazi and Fascist, rejected this idea of individualized portraits for obvious political reasons of control and dominance.
“Crowds and Power”
The expression was coined by Austrian writer Elias Canetti in his 1960 book, but was conceived in the 1930s with the rise of totalitarian regimes and their manipulation of the masses. Organized crowds began to emerge, in which the individual, envisioned as a cell, melded into the social tissue.
Many works promoting totalitarian ideologies featured scenes of the masses where a single person appears to have been endlessly cloned. The dictatorships’ new men gave up their sense of individuality to morph into an integral work of art—the totalitarian state. Nevertheless, a few artists, as in the works seen here by Stanley Spencer in England or Richard Oelze in Germany, continued to endow the individual, even one caught in a crowd, with uniqueness, vulnerability and the ability to say no.
The Charnel House
The outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in July 1936 left no doubt of totalitarian regimes’ desire for global domination. Public opinion, deeply disturbed, unanimously condemned the massacre of civilians. Writers, philosophers, and artists openly denounced the atrocity. Indeed, it was almost impossible not to see this tragedy as a precursor to a larger conflict, in light of the peril that the Nazi and fascist ideologies now represented.
The tension sparked by the rise of Facism is visible in most images of the period. Artworks bearing negative political connotations began to surface. Metaphors and allegories multiplied to evoke the menace looming over Europe. For some artists, including Picasso and Dalí, these images were a reflection of the pain they felt about the civilian massacres. For others, like Ernst and Schlichter, irrational monsters surfaced as hideous or blind giants.
Among the survivors of the Nazi programmed extermination were artists who had the strength to bear witness to this sinister enterprise, and who succeeded in hiding their drawings during their last captive months, despite the threat to their lives. Also included are accounts from external witnesses, including Canadian Alex Colville, who were dispatched to record the horrors.