How the Nazis Regimented Art:

...In an important chapter, "Art Education in the Third Reich," the author shows how, under the leadership of Robert Boettcher, the little ones were prevented from freely expressing themselves on paper and, instead, were given ready-made formulas—until they were able to produce, with a certain competence, naturalistic pictures of life around them, but unable to indulge in those artistic dreams that gave us Franz Marc's Blue Horses, Paul Klee's wistful fantasies, or Ernst Barlach's expressionist sculpture...

...Up to the middle of the fifteenth century, the artist was subject to the strict code of a guild or, worse, the whims of a prince...

...The first consciously free artist, Delacroix, was born less than a hundred years before that would-be artist, Hitler, who did as much as he could to turn the clock back...

...Quite a few German artists submitted to this demand, but many others fled abroad or else became part of the "inner emigration" within Germany, the passive resisters...

...Editor, Little Art Book Series THE FREE ARTIST who paints or sculpts as he pleases, with no master but his own conscience, has been among us for little more than a hundred years...

...He must eliminate it...

...they must promise security-through identification with the community...

...Art Under a Dictatorship is an important and useful book...

...they must glorify the collective aims of society and propagate complete faith in the methods of the totalitarian leaders...

...He must demand art that creates the illusion of a secure, serene world, that hides the sinister motives and the terror...

...But this freedom came to an end in much of Europe with the Bolshevik Revolution, Mussolini's March on Rome, and the establishment of the Third Reich...

...In the France of the last Bourbon kings, the Academie Royale des Beaux-Arts dictated what kind of art its members should produce...

...Lehmann-Haupt mentions Carl Hofer, who was forbidden to paint—Gestapo agents visited him periodically to see whether his brushes were wet —and yet continued to work in secrecy, always in fear of denunciations...

...The French Revolution had its dictator of art, Citoyen Louis David, the great but intolerant painter...

...Even under Stalin, a critic now and then could voice his indignation against the excesses of "socialist realism...

...The dictator wants his artists to promote a feeling of belonging...

...In nineteenth-century Germany, the romantic poets and painters made Faust's buoyant "Gefuhl ist alles" (Feeling is all that counts) their motto...

...Since the war, I have talked to young German artists who were indoctrinated by drill sergeants like Boettcher, and learned what superhuman efforts they had to make to break through the barbed wire that caged their minds in their formative years...

...For about a hundred years, artists in the Western world were more or less unrestrained, able to defy rulers like Napoleon III or Wilhelm II who could not grasp the significance of modern art but did not dare to suppress, it...

...In its place he must put art that requires no visual effort, that is easily read by all, easy on the eye and on the mind, unproblematic...

...Delacroix had sounded the keynote for the free modern artist by insisting that mankind would have to find beauty "where the artist puts it...

...But, despite this, the book can be warmly recommended to all educators and historians in free America...

...The Hitlerites realized that their efforts would have to be concentrated on the children in order to produce artists whose works were devoted wholly to glorification of Nazism...

...Nor were the Renaissance artists free—not even Michelangelo, who had the courage to snub a Pope...

...There might have been more illustrative material, and an effort to explain Nazi art in esthetic as well as social and political terms...

...But in Nazi Germany, as we learn from this comprehensive study, the slight divergence in questions of art tolerated in the regime's first few years was definitely taboo by 1936, when all art criticism was officially abolished...

...Nowhere have I seen a more succinct and telling characterization of those two irreconcilables, art and dictatorship : "Art that is the expression of individual search, of experiment, of intuitive play, art that penetrates the surface of the visual world, that is prophetic, sensitive, apprehensive, art that challenges the individual, that demands concentration, effort, art that heightens perception, sharpens the eye, nourishes thought—that art cannot be tolerated by the dictator...

...Professor Lehmann-Haupt gives us a full description of the state of the arts in Hitler's Germany...

...For those who did not obey the rules, there were no prizes, no state purchases, no presentation at Court...

...He also gives us the core of the philosophy behind every authoritarian attempt to put art in a straitjacket...