Caught by Politics: Art of the 1930s and 1940s

January 19 - March 18, 2001

After Adolf Hitler seized power in Germany in January of 1933, the Reich Chamber of Culture was founded. This government organization immediately imposed legal restrictions on artistic practice. Over the next four years, the implementation of anti-modernist aesthetics within the visual arts constrained artists' careers, convincing many of them to leave Nazi Germany. Political and racial persecution also led to the forced flight of a great number of German artists and intellectuals, many of whom first sought refuge in such nearby European countries as France, Holland, and Czechoslovakia. However, the German annexation of Czechoslovakia in 1938-39, the outbreak of World War II in 1939, and the German occupation of northern France in June 1940 made the United States a desirable destination for those who felt compelled to flee Nazi-occupied Europe.

It was not only German artists such as George Grosz and Karl Zerbe who fled the political and racial persecution in Germany. Artists from other European countries who had pursued successful careers in Germany, such as the Hungarian Gyorgy Kepes, also emigrated to the United States. In addition, many artists of the French Surrealist movement, including Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Roberto Sebastián Antonio Matta Echaurren, and Yves Tanguy, also came to the United States. Others who had been part of the international and diverse Paris art world (Lithuanian Jewish artist Jacques Lipchitz and American Jewish artist Abraham Rattner, for example) were forced to leave France as well.

These artists, committed to diverse aesthetic practices, formed the American art world together with American artists of equally disparate interests. On the one hand, the later Abstract Expressionists (William Baziotes, Adolph Gottlieb, Theodoros Stamos, Robert Motherwell, and Mark Rothko, among others) voiced their interests in the human psyche and primitive forms of expression. On the other hand, Socialist Realists such as Ben Shahn and Philip Guston were pursuing agendas that positioned art more directly within the social and political worlds. In leftist and intellectual circles surrounding such magazines as The New Republic, a heated debate ensued over whether New York City would replace Paris as the new international center for modern art.

Rather than highlighting the exile experience of loss or the impact of European artists on the American art world, this exhibition intersperses European and American artworks to explore how cultural exchanges led, for a short time during the 1930s and 1940s, to an inter-cultural art scene. The many and often hybrid aesthetic agendas are complemented by the artists' different reactions to confronting the terror and inhumanity of World War II and the Holocaust.

Support for the exhibition is provided by the Hortense Lewin Art Fund of Washington University, the St. Louis Printmarket, the Regional Arts Commission, the Missouri Arts Council, the Arts and Education Council, and private donations.

For more information, please read the essay on Caught By Politics from the recent issue of the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum Bulletin.