Tuesday 25 July 2006

Arno Breker "outrage"!

Arno Breker - You and I (1940) Salvador Dali, The Goddess Fortuna (1990)
I hasten to add that it's Hannah Cleaver of the Telegraph who's claiming outrage at the opening last Saturday of a major retrospective of work by the German sculptor Arno Breker at the Schleswig-Holstein-Haus in Schwerin, eastern Germany, not Coxsoft Art. What has shocked me is that, while researching this blog, I discovered a German National Socialist website still quoting Hitler's diatribes against the Jews! This is what makes the Becker exhibition such a sensitive issue. It was postponed last year to avoid clashing with those 60th anniversary celebrations which marked the end of WWII and is the first exhibition of Breker's work since the war. The problem is that Breker's career blossomed during the Third Reich, because Hitler used his chunky, neoclassical figurative statues to promote the notion of an Aryan "master race". If you can ignore Breker's Nazi connections and look at his art objectively, you must see him as the German Rodin. If you can't, consider this: Hitler's monstrous cleansing of his "master race" was based on Darwin's theory of evolution. Have we denigrated Darwin because of Hitler? Of course not. So why should we denigrate Breker's talent as an artist?

1 Comments:

At 25/7/06, Blogger Unknown said...

Thanks for the link. I'll check it out.

 

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