Art 'vexed to nightmare'? Traditionalism and modernism in the painting of Nazi Germany

Painting in the Third Reich is frequently dismissed as mere propaganda, as anti-modernist kitsch, or as a homogeneous body of realist or academic "genre painting" in the tradition of nineteenth-century Munich naturalism. However, there was no monolithic aesthetic in Nazi painting. Though Nazi painting was representational and while abstract expressionism was stricken from artistic life by gradations after 1933, the roots of Nazi painting are complex. I focus on the paintings displayed at each of the Grosse Deutsche Kunstausstellungen (GDK) or Great German Art Exhibitions, 1937--1944, held each year in the Haus der Kunst in Munich. My examination of Nazi painting reveals a multiplicity of sources, traditional and modernist, for artists of the period.;In my research, I attempt to overcome the implicit Manichean divide between (good) modernist art and (bad) anti-modernist art. When one recognizes that Nazi painting was not stylistically or structurally homogeneous, that it contained elements of archaism and modernism, that artists responded to the vaguely defined aesthetic demands of the regime in varying ways, that the accusation of "degeneracy" was not always a pest-ban but sometimes a negotiable roadblock, and that even more artistic experimentation was possible in the Third Reich outside the confines of the GDK, one is forced to acknowledge that Nazi art did not emerge ex nihilo in 1933. At the same time, it was not a mere revival of academic trends that were eclipsed or discredited years before the First World War.;This thesis is composed of three chapters, the first of which is focused on the origins and contours of Nazi painting. I examine the Kunstpolitik between the pragmatic or promodernist (Goebbels) and reactionary (Rosenberg) voices during the 1930s and conclude that, while Hitler's own tastes leaned closer to the latter, modernist art was publicly exhibited in Germany as late as 1937. After examining Die Kunst im Deutschen Reich , the regime's official magazine on contemporary art, and Kunst dem Volk, its widely-distributed art-history cousin, I argue that, as late as 1943, Nazi functionaries, ideologues, art critics, and, most importantly, artists themselves were unsure how to proceed in discussing or creating art for the new Reich.;In the second chapter, I focus on the question of Nazi artists' agency within the Third Reich's cultural apparatus. In other words, how did artists respond to the unclear artistic parameters provided by the regime? I examine the magazine Die Kunst, a monthly journal on contemporary art, art history, and home design published in Munich from 1884 through the fall of the Third Reich. After identifying a group of Nazi artists representative of the general artistic environment of the GDK (i.e., artists who were featured in numerous GDK exhibitions, artists often featured in contemporary-art publications, etc.), I turn my discussion to what they did before they were "Nazi artists." What becomes most clear from examining Die Kunst is the extent to which some artists in Germany during the Nazi era, paradoxically, were simultaneously autonomous and fettered---free to be stylistically inventive within the parameters outlined by Hitler's various pronouncements against modernism as well as the artistic program of the GDK.;The third chapter is divided into two sections. In the first, I examine the immediate connections between the art of the Weimar era, so often maligned in Nazi propaganda, and the art of the Third Reich. I argue that there is more in common between the representational art of the neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), which dominated Weimar culture during the mid-1920s, and the art of the Third Reich than one is generally led to believe by major histories of Weimar culture. I have found considerable evidence which suggests more immediate parallels between German art in the mid-1920s and in the GDK. The deeper connections between fascism and modernism as well as the linkages between the avant-garde and reactionary ideology further complicate the notion that totalitarian systems arise from the political and social upheavals of modernity and then sever all ties to modernism in favor of stultifying realism. In the second section, I argue that, while there are certainly similarities between the realisms employed by totalitarian regimes---as examples, Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia---I maintain that the two aesthetic programs are ultimately different. While the former is defined more by its looseness and variation, both stylistically and programmatically, the latter can be comprehensibly broken down into an iconographic program. (Abstract shortened by UMI.).