The art of the Nazis, Fascists, and communists (of various stripes) generally gets little to no play in this history. Nazi art will usually be reduced to kitsch propaganda (which much of it was) and perhaps contrasted with the “degenerate” Modernism it opposed, most emblematically in the Degenerate Art exhibition they held in Munich. It likely will not be mentioned that most of the works of the major totalitarian regimes that survived the Second World War were destroyed, censored, banned, or put into inaccessible storage by the regimes that followed them in a hypocritical and extreme variation of the cursing of “degenerate” art.
Within the international art world, and with the nostalgia for socially-involved art, a revival of interest in the forms of art embraced by totalitarian states coincided with the turn against radical, abstract art in “the West” during the 1970s. By the 1980s, it was not uncommon in art criticism to notice how much the new art being promoted (often described, either positively or negatively, with the vague term “postmodernism”) shared with that of totalitarian states in the decades previous. In the debates on the new art, in the marketing of “identity” that became central to much of it, and in the new financial relationship art (or, more typically, “culture”) had with the state, the spectre of totalitarianism was present, at least for those old enough to recall the Second World War. There is more than a mild resemblance between the administered art of the Canadian state (Contemporary Art) and the art of totalitarian regimes. I am making this point neutrally, not polemically. The reasons for this are not reducible to politics so much as the fact that both developed from aspects of the same loose intellectual tradition, stretching back to the early nineteenth century with the birth of historicism and culturalism as romantic and sentimental reactions against rationalism.
Totalitarian ideologies asserted that art had an almost superhuman power and function, and acted as though this was the norm of all art. Anything “degenerate” was a threat to the progress of art and the liberation of the human spirit. The state’s support for the arts was generally regarded as a means to liberate art from the market and the taste of capitalists. The Nazis referred to “degeneracy” as “Bolshevist” until they made a pact with the Soviets. The Soviets referred to identical phenomena as “Fascist” until they made the pact. More often, they both blamed degeneracy on liberalism or “the West.” Among the Reich’s official cultural bureaucrats, it was recognized that Nazism, Fascism, and communism had different Weltanshauung but were united in being opposed to the capitalist “West.” All of these things were terms for what would be more generically termed Modernism (a term that totalitarians also commonly employed as an epithet).
Nothing is more alien to totalitarianism than the idea of art’s autonomy. Modernism, originating in the 1880s, was attacked by both Nazi and Soviet art historians and critics as being anti-humanist, demeaning to the purported centrality of human agency in history. Both saw Modernism/formalism as “reactionary” and bourgeois, while they advanced “proletarian” or “Aryan” culture against what they regarded as oppressive capitalist decadence. Modernism was usually associated, by both powers, with rootless cosmopolitanism, emblemized by Jews and Wall Street and their hostility to ethnocentric traditions. However, even if totalitarian art theory was hostile to formalism, it was simultaneously deeply formulaic. It was form that was treated as the reflection of the Weltanshauung of a culture/regime, not intention or political affiliation.
It is ahistorical to treat the various totalitarian arts as reactionary or backward. By their own estimation, they were forms of radical progressive humanism. They were only traditional or conservative to the limited degree that they appealed to forms of nineteenth century progressivism. For socialists, true progressivism could be summed up only in the diversity of what fell under the banner of Socialist Realism. Any art that could not be understood directly and without the tutelage of specialists was deemed degenerate.
In totalitarian logic, the “healthy” and democratic aspects (proletariat/Aryans) were the rightful heirs of human culture and its only rightful judges, not elites or the bourgeoisie. It was a battle between two cultures — of good against evil, of progressives versus reactionaries — as they fought to achieve the ideal type of culture. The art of the present was, in turn, conceived of as a heritage for the future. The appeals to the past as an ideal were part of establishing this line of heritage. Christianity was regarded as a degenerate moment in history, the art of which had value almost by accident.
Modernist art appealed to almost no one. To the extent it was recognized, it was largely as something negative: an ugly sham that made the rich richer while everyone else suffered under extreme inflation. It was no great task to push this indifference or contempt into regarding Modernism as something basically hostile to life that needed to be overcome. It was also a contempt that existed within the art world, whether among more traditional or conservative artists working in standard genres, or among the progressive and socially committed realists. This was also reflected in the decades of widespread anti-Modernist discourse on both Left and Right that preceded the existence of Nazism.
The Nazis opposed degeneracy (frequently cast as Jewishness or Bolshevism), which generically implied formalism and various types of alienating avant-gardism (esp. Dada and Cubism). Some avant-garde movements were dealt with more ambivalently (Expressionism, Futurism), less because some members of these movements were also party members than because it was unclear if the aesthetic claims that they made were incompatible with what the party understood to be pure Germanic art. There was a period early in the party’s reign, for instance, when Goebbels was sympathetic to Expressionism, and it had strong apologists within the party. Emil Nolde, a leading Expressionist, was both a devoted Nazi and had his works confiscated as degenerate. Goebbels’ more nuanced position was largely displaced by the negative interpretation of Modernism offered in works like Alfred Rosenberg’s Myth of the Twentieth Century.
When the Nazis came to power, they gave the art world four years (1933-37) to fall in line with what they expected the culture industry to do. This was enthusiastically embraced by a substantial proportion of the arts establishment and by many working artists and artisans, most of whom were as hostile to the avant-garde as the party was, whether for aesthetic or professional reasons. Acting with little compunction, most of the art community aided the state in driving Modernism from Germany. Once that was accomplished, what they took to be the positive task of art could begin again. Art could return to being an affirmation of the romantic humanism that capitalism was accused of degrading.
The revolution in art was the re-creation of the artist as a functionary or bureaucrat. The Nazis did not only oppose avant-gardism, they also opposed certain forms of traditionalist art, regardless of its volkish claims, because it was also deemed as being socially unproductive (and so degenerate).
Mass art was central to totalitarian aesthetics. Theoreticians appealed to the avant-garde’s hyperbolic stylization and grotesquerie as at one with traditions of peasant art. Mass art was linked to a sort of “social engineering” (the term coined by Aleksei Gastev, a major figure in Prolekult). It was art that would be pedagogical and concerned with the reconstruction of the psyche using the latest scientific methods. The whole of affective life was assumed to be re-organizable as part of class struggle. The artist was an engineer of souls who would create mass man through their “factory of optimism.” The model for the reorganization of all culture by the state was imagined by Lenin. Other dictators borrowed it. It tended to be spoken of in metaphors about the body. It was not a specific part of the body, but what circulated through it, like blood or spirit. It was simultaneously organic and mechanical.
Both the Nazis and Communists stressed that art could not be apolitical; it was necessarily tendentious and rejected objectivity. The renaissance of art would come thanks to this subjectivism (whether ethnological or proletarian). It was not merely about building a new society, but of creating a new kind of builder who would be able to translate fictions into lived realities. The artist was a functionary or servant in this. They made the “cement” that helped to solidify the social. Culture was spoken of by the Nazi’s as a form of “spiritual influence.” According to Goebbels, culture was for the soul what the arms industry was for security.
No democratic state elevated the value of culture as highly as totalitarian states did. Culture was central to governance and was written about extensively by heads of the parties and even lowly police chiefs. The Nazis did not destroy the existing cultural infrastructure, but restructured and directed it. As with the Soviets, special Commissars were appointed to oversee the culture industry infrastructure. The Soviets, by contrast, destroyed the existing infrastructure and modes of organization to rebuild them. The arts were primarily controlled by unions. In the USSR, the state was the primary commissioner and consumer of art. Its monopolization was maintained by controlling supply chains, largely through hiring practices for bureaucrats. Avant-garde art did not need to be banned; it simply was not financed, which effectively killed it. Art critics and historians were also unionized and forced to do most of their work writing from a Marxist perspective.
As part of the bid to control art, the Nazis also explicitly rejected art criticism, which was taken to be one of the primary forces in art’s degeneracy. Art critics were replaced by art editors, whose function was not to dissect and judge work but to celebrate it, revere artists’ creativity, and judge work according to the intentions of artists rather than formalist analysis. This went hand-in-hand with the Party’s loathing of understanding art in terms of style and form, stressing instead its function as ethno-cultural expression and organizing exhibitions and discussions around thematism. Part of an editor’s job was also to keep art from view if it might be deemed “problematic.”
Italy was exceptional because the state did not completely dominate the culture industry. Very little art, save that which was directly commissioned for public display by the government, bore much resemblance to Fascist ideals, and an economy for art persisted that supported non-political work. In Italy, artists did not have to swear allegiance to a dogma about art, only to be loyal to the state. They also did not have to be members of specific institutions and could show work privately. The Fascists did not destroy most institutions as the Communists did or monopolize them as the Nazis did.
Proponents of Modernism had shifted away from genre, stressing the importance of style and individual genius. This meant historical revisionism and the renewed appreciation for work that did not fit into established canons. A mythical narrative of art history was created in the process, one that severely downplayed and marginalized what the majority of art was for the sake of a handful of figures in a makeshift genealogy.
The new art, or what Hitler tended to term “contemporary art,” that the Nazis ushered in was mostly a continuation of a set of genres. This did not mean there was no innovation in terms of subject matter or technique, only that work was generally capable of falling into pre-established categories for its display and marketing. Genre painting was praised because it was thought to increase people’s appreciation of everyday life. Landscapes were highlighted because they taught people to love and cherish their environment. The same applied to depictions of animals (animalerie). Portraits celebrated the uniqueness of the people and romantic scenes from folklore celebrated ethnic culture. The revisionism of art history undertaken by the Nazis involved the severe relativization of Modernist mythology and, ironically enough, a more realistic understanding of art history as something that was not dominated by genius, but by mediocrity.
Genre painting was central to the art of the Third Reich. It stood for the positive evaluation of the banal and the lived experience of the people. It had an easy overlap with the idea of the volkish, even if its pictorial realism was not necessarily bound to any specific national culture. While genre painting was international, it was not internationalist, and this was exploited by Nazi theorists in order to (unrealistically) stress its volkish attributes. It was opposed to the bluster of History or religious painting. As Berthold Hinz put it, this implied that the more appropriate subject of art for totalitarians was not the Madonna but asparagus. It was art that supposedly transcended class distinctions in terms of taste and perception. In practice, all of these aspects -- pictorial verism, the inclusiveness of everything banal, the transcendence of class -- also make genre painting totally static. It is an art of the immanent and of those who make a home in the world created by specialists in the minute shadings of this homeliness (the shades are what provide the minimal means of market differentiation). This also meant that the artist as an individual never needed to progress; their work was always just an expression of them as a unified self, a self that was emblematic of a culture.
While genre painting was pictorially realistic, it was far from the varieties of “realism” (or Naturalism) that had emerged in the nineteenth century, as it largely relied on a series of ideal types. If it was filled with banal detail to give accent to these types, this was another means to highlight its ideal, as opposed to material, quality. If the body was praised, it was the body as a sign of health. The body to be celebrated was an eternal body. If the genre painting supported by the state relied on a language of the ephemeral, it did so to transform it into the substantial. Fascistoid and communist imagery tended to employ seemingly outmoded sentimental humanist imagery, re-contextualizing it to transform it into a mode of symbolizing primal forces and ideas. As an easy means to impose an ideological overcoding, titles played a significant role in this attempted translation, often indifferent to the content of images. Titles and textual supplements provided the mythology that was generally barely visually evident, if at all. The title conceptually transformed an image into an icon.
One of the ironies of the history of totalitarian art is that it demonstrates that the actual “content” of visual art, even the most seemingly propagandistic of art, had extraordinarily little significance. The political significance was a matter of official stylistic norms, but even more of enframing (through titles and textual/curatorial supplements), bureaucracy, and a critical/PR matrix built around the art world. Even then, a great deal of it cannot be comfortably reduced to messaging. One problem with Hinz’s attempts to analyze Nazi art in terms of its function is that he continually runs into the fact that a great deal of it really had no such function. Just as the vast majority of visual art had little convincing iconographic content or meaning, much of the architecture was both inutilitarian and wasted vast amounts of money in ways that made no sense from a capitalist or even cynically political perspective.
To state the obvious: art is always apolitical but politicisable (as are most things). An artist may have political intentions, and art may be put to instrumental political uses that correspond (or not) to those intentions. But given the intrinsic polysemy of art’s reception and its equally intrinsic asignifying qualities, it can never be reduced to intention, meaning, use, or enframing. It is always more and less than these things. While meaning is parasitic on art, the reverse is not the case. Art does not require meaning, but it may enable or disable it.
Art historians have tended to dismiss the art of totalitarian regimes as bad. Most of it was (then again, most art is bad). They were systems of art that applauded and celebrated the mediocre as the moral expression of the human spirit. But totalitarians did not do this significantly less than non-totalitarian systems, and, in general, the quality (craft or conceptual) of what circulates in Contemporary Art is not significantly better (much of it is much worse) than anything that was circulating under the Fascists in Italy. The Contemporary Art of Canada will likely never approach the greatness of art under the Niyazov regime in Turkmenistan. It is not true, after all, that “free societies” make better art. No art historian could make such an assertion with a straight face unless they ignore almost the entirety of human history (and prehistory). It is no surprise that the average curator in Canada has effectively the same understanding of art as a Nazi or Soviet art commissar. On average, the conception of art in each instance is essentially kitsch. If anything, what you are likely to see at MACM, MBAM, or coming out of UQAM is even more kitsch than what you would have seen in Moscow at the height of the Cold War. The more substantive difference is that the enframing that was common to Nazis and communists had a more plausible theoretical and historical justification than you will commonly find in Contemporary Art.
Canada is interesting primarily because no other non-totalitarian country in history seems to have been struck so deeply with the delusion of the existence and moral sanctity of culture as it has been. (Not even the French, but they get pretty close). This has been foundational to how it has governed its culture (and heritage) industry.
The most historically interesting thing about Canada is its extreme fakeness; the most disturbing thing about it is the earnest misinterpretation of this by its officially sanctioned moral taboos. Totalitarian art unwittingly foregrounded the extent to which conceptualizing the world in terms of socio-cultural identities was a fundamentally kitsch fantasy about the historical subject and amounts to little more than sanctimonious LARPing. Contemporary Art in Canada has significantly (and more hypocritically) continued this tradition, perhaps nowhere more so than in the promotion of sub-genres like the Indigenous. For example, the recent Skawennati and Nadia Myre exhibitions at the NGC, and pretty much any of the large and heavily subsidized exhibitions by Kent Monkman, fit the bill, providing concise illustrations of what authoritarian art looks like today. This is not only due to its basic look, but to the way it functions institutionally (from granting structures to enframing and staging), and the underlying ways in which it is conceptualized as pedagogy and expression. What differentiates contemporary authoritarianism from that of totalitarian art is its rhetoric of dissemblance and gaming.
Although authoritarianism was nascent in the extension and renovations done to the cultural industries and the massive expansion of the educational industry by federal and provincial governments in the 1960s, it became more clearly codified in the practical norms of the art world by the late 1980s and early 90s. These phenomena have been at least passively documented in historical accounts such as those of Durand and Robertson. All of this was, to make it slightly more specific, a codification in line with what some legal scholars have termed the rise of the Court Party, a set of activist client groups that exploit extra-democratic judicial supremacy to serve their interests. This has all been compatible with the moral fantasies, if not necessarily the rhetoric, of the Laurentian elite.
What was at stake with the Court Party (which traditional Marxists would term neoliberalism or red fascism) that evolved primarily through activist groups, coalitions of lawyers, and universities, was the codification of a set of empirically and theoretically absurd premises and legal fictions, fuelled by entrepreneurial moral panic and genuine idiocy. The implications of the post-Charter era are varied. For adherents of the party line (the bureaucratic class, including most of academia, NGOs, and the art world), it is an era of politicisation, a politics that transcends democratic processes. For their opponents, it is an era of depoliticization, in which democratic politics have been violated by authoritarian rule. The results of this have been objectively more tyrannical and corrupt than a police state, devolving the powers of governance from (theoretically) accountable elected officials to a myriad of decentralized and unaccountable organizations that largely exist thanks to state funding.
Critiques of the emergence of the Court Party echo from within one of the liberal traditions of the country (which has different inflections when taken up by more or less Tory, liberal, libertarian, or centre-left adherents), one which tends to regard the type of structure that has become nakedly present since the beginning of the 1980s as a betrayal of this tradition. For them, there is something distinctly American about this development. However, you might also argue that, while it is true that a nakedly authoritarian and deeply corrupt system of elite patronage has become the ruling compact (or if you like, “class”) of the country since the 80s after taking seed in the 60s, this was in many respects an echo of comparable corrupt patronage networks that have been dominant since well before Confederation even took place.
You could (perversely) argue for the remarkable structural continuity (even stasis) of the country as one that was only trivially democratic and rhetorically liberal but effectively remains far closer to feudalism than the US, Britain, or France have been since the seventeenth century. Added to which, the identity LARPing that has been institutionalized was already clearly present in the early nineteenth century, widely reflected in traveller accounts and memoirs of the time, albeit not nearly as delusionally.
The significant historical difference between the oligarchies of the nineteenth century and those currently in play is that they operate on a very different material basis. This is not simply the difference between High Toryism and whatever you want to call the current hegemonic ideological fantasy, but the institutional edifice it is plugged into. The old oligarchy lived in a parody without an actual society. The current oligarchy operates as a parody within a despotic state apparatus that is founded on levels of corruption, manipulation, and fraud that are historically unheard of. The petty tyrannies that almost brought Lower and Upper Canada to civil wars nearly two hundred years ago are nothing compared to those that now constitute daily life in the country when a quarter of the population is a direct employee of the state and (at least) another quarter is an indirect one.
While rarely acknowledged by historians, the transformation of this compact form should be interpreted as the largely unintended result of the postwar socialization project undertaken by the Liberal Party, which devolved the structures that had been created within the military and progressively totalized them on "society" at large, from welfare to multiculturalism. [See Deborah Cowen's Military Workfare: The Soldier and Social Citizenship in Canada (2008)] People tend to forget that in the aftermath of the Second World War, Canada was the most militarized country in the world and what occurred in subsequent decades was effectively to remodel it, shifting away from the military hierarchy to an equally artificial "social" and "cultural" one around what leading bureaucrats explicitly defined as the cultivation of competing entitlements, and predicated on a parasitic branch-plant economy internationally and a corrupt patronage network internally.
Beyond the contingent practicalities that faced each regime, the distinctions between the various communists, fascists, Nazis, and contemporary authoritarians only mark out conflicts between rival sub-genres of progressivism (which is how they all explicitly and legitimately defined themselves). They are each basically concerned with the heroics of caring for banality. If you are not part of this faith, the faith of sentimentalist humanism and social optimism, it all looks like the war in Gulliver’s Travels between those who wish to crack eggs from the bottom or from the top. To members of any of these sects, of course, their conflation by an infidel would be a matter to ridicule as philistinism or barbarity. The more substantive distinction to make between totalitarianism and its other is between what you could call empathetic humanism and anti- or ahumanism and between administered culture and art.
The problem posed by Contemporary Art is not the real or purported politics that tend to provide its framing, but that most of it is moronic kitsch. To the degree that it is interesting, it is usually by accident and due to the failures of intentions and framing.