European Document / Picture This Exhibition
Todd, Olivier
PICTURE THIS EXHIBITION by Olivier Todd After "Berlin-Paris," "Paris-New York," "Paris-Moscow"-which granted some concessions to Soviet officials and art negotiators-the Beaubourg Center is...
...He's not a bad sort...
...In Hall 8 ("The Occupation"), between tracts and posters, between Dubuffet and Laurens, the organizers plan to set up works by Arno Breker, notably "The Wounded Warrior...
...Breker refuses...
...Conformist or opportunist...
...It epitomizes this sculptor's stereotyped, propagandizing, and conformist style...
...No connection...
...PICTURE THIS EXHIBITION by Olivier Todd After "Berlin-Paris," "Paris-New York," "Paris-Moscow"-which granted some concessions to Soviet officials and art negotiators-the Beaubourg Center is presenting in May, under a title suitable for a musical or even a cancan chorus line, "Paris-Paris," another retrospective on artistic production in France from 1937 to 1957...
...This event goes beyond a simple case of monumental mediocrity...
...Abstract art, "degenerate art,'' was crushed in both the USSR and Germany...
...Peace, perspective, objectivity...
...He's been un-banned...
...It wasn't Breker who was a Hitlerite, Hitler was a Brekerite...
...The result was huge orders which blinded the sculptor then and now...
...Furthermore, after the war, Stalin made overtures to him, before Franco and Peron...
...It represents the little that Nazism has left in sculpture...
...As Soulages, one of the moderates who signed the petition, or rather the anti-Breker resolution, points out, '' by dint of striving to find artistic roots merely by sociological criteria, one loses sight of the essential: emotional reaction to a work of art.'' Officials, organizers, please don't give us the same thing in Hall 8 (Breker) and Hall 6 ("German prisoners," Wols, Bellmer, Ernst...
...Let's be against any form of censorship...
...Others, such as Alechinsky and Pol Bury, protest: They don't see that type of cultural evidence as completely neutral...
...It helped Nazism to define itself culturally...
...Monographs on Breker are being revised...
...The last intoxicating review, "The Realisms," confirmed this frenetic transformation of exhibitions into archival collections...
...Objectively speaking, Breker is now more than 80 years old...
...It illustrates the drifting of Beaubourg these days...
...He works meticulously at busts of Adenauer, Senghor, Sadat, and-as he has done over the past 60 years or so -Aryan Apollos...
...Crushed and replaced by a Breker who is convinced that "under a national socialist regime, an artist has no worries at all...
...We find works of great power alongside those of no interest: Breker with Hartnung . . . How can the public sort through this...
...And, at the very least, don't let the school children confuse Picasso and Breker...
...The Torch Bearer'' and "The Sword Bearer" would have done as well-under their original titles: "The Party" (Nazi) and "The Wehrmacht...
...Street gangs are showing off their swastikas...
...Alain de Benoist adores this pagan and his glossy muscles...
...What are you looking for...
...Mere chance...
...Some artists, such as Brayer and Folon, find Breker's presence normal: it's documentation, cultural evidence, History, indiscriminate and amorphous eternity...
...The Phidias of the Third Reich was, and still is, its universal and official artist...
...He still does not understand that if the regime served his sculpture, it was because his sculpture likewise served the regime...
...An accident...
...Researchers are overcome with awe for Breker...
...Too many exhibitions are now conceived with a confusing and commonplace History as their only justification...
...He even saved a few Jews...
...At Beaubourg, we'll see if didacticism is pushed far enough or if Breker is presented to us as a pure artist...
...Nazism and Socialist Realism, the same battle, really...
...But what about his work...
...A History that accomo-dates all fascism, red or white...
...Unfortunate...
...Since you're out to equalize aesthetics and level off sensitivity, at least distinguish between political systems...
...And what if it were a link in the mended chain of a nostalgia...
...If Breker appears all of a sudden in Hall 8, let's hope that this is not seen as innocence dis-incarn-ate...
...They are published separately...
...In one of them Bernard Noel states that the only real tie between Breker and Hitlerism was the Fuhrer's taste for his sculpture...
...People ask for prefaces...
...Much like Lieutenant Heller...
...Germain Viatte, in charge of the exhibition, views the work of Breker as symbolic of the period...
Vol. 14 • June 1981 • No. 6
