The Reappearance of Arno Breker

Arno Breker, Rossebändiger (Horse Tamer), 1940


I had the opportunity this week on another business trip to visit an interesting cultural exhibition. This journey brought me to Schwerin, capital of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, formerly a province within the DDR, or what we knew as East Germany. Schwerin is quite a beautiful city, that is, it hasn’t been plagued by a lot of modern development, and many older buildings have been carefully restored. There were a lot of additional buildings there that were definitely in need of improvement, but money is probably tighter in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern than in any other German province: there, one in five persons of working age is currently unemployed. This high unemployment and its resulting maladies have driven voters away from the traditional political parties of old West Germany and into the hands of the far left and the far right. Actually, last Sunday, the day before my visit, saw the entry of the far right NPD party into the state parliament through an election. Lots of politicians and talking heads (should I say, sprechende Köpfe?) on German television were wringing hands and trying to place blame the evening before, as it became clear that what are labeled “Neo-Nazis” by the media had legitimately gotten into the fourth state parliament, all of which happened to be in the more economically depressed, former East Germany. The problem as I see it is that all these mainstream parties can offer against the populism of the NPD (and also of the far left, Left party, which used to be the PDS, an offshoot of the old East German communists) is chiding the voters who dared support “those people”. Criticizing the intelligence of these voters is probably a failed strategy, as I could well imagine that being told you are stupid by the media and mainstream parties doesn’t tend to make you want to support them, and none of the mainstream parties have seemed to come up with a way for the depressed, old East Germany to revive itself in the “global” economy. The far left and far right don’t offer up any real solutions either, but unlike the mainstream, both realize the dangers of participation in the wide, wide, wonderful world of economic globalism: good-paying, manufacturing jobs are lost to the Third World, where they work for little of nothing, to be replaced by low-paying service jobs, or, as is many the case here, no jobs at all.

Well, as the outrage flares up over Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and its increased support for “Neo-Nazis”, you can just about imagine the uproar earlier this summer at the opening of an art exhibition featuring “Hitler’s favorite sculptor”, Arno Breker. Breker, who died in Düsseldorf in 1991, was a German sculptor brought up in the tradition of the French artist, Auguste Rodin, in the 1920’s, and developed a classicism in his work which later appealed to Adolf Hitler, who wanted Breker’s supersized nude male and female figures providing appropriate adornment for his mega-neoclassical architecture such as Albert Speer’s Reich Chancellery in Berlin. The highlight of his sculpture career was having his own show at the Orangerie in Paris in 1942, which incidentally was the last time before the current exhibition that a comprehensive overview of the volume of his work has been shown. After the war, in which 90% of his work was destroyed, either through the latent destruction of warfare itself, or through desecration immediately afterward, Breker became anathema in the art world, although he continued to get commissions right up unto his death, doing later busts of such prominent personalities as his friends and fellow artists, Salvador Dali and Jean Cocteau, and politicians such as Anwar Sadat and Konrad Adenauer.

In my opinion, this trend after the Second World War away from classicism in sculpture, art and architecture was driven a lot by left-wing, modernist ideology in the art world. People could claim to link classicism and realism to fascism, as these styles were favored by Hitler, thus making them “bad” in the eyes of the modernists. This also led to the wiping away of traditional architecture after the war; in bomb-damaged areas of Europe, there was little restoration of what was previously there. Instead, city centers were often wiped pretty much clean and rebuilt using the theories of the modernists, i.e. with lots of glass, concrete and steel. These buildings don’t tend to age well like the old classical facades, and now in some city centers, there is a lot of modernist ugliness. Prince Charles of Wales was once quoted as saying that modern architects had destroyed London far more than the bombing damage of the Luftwaffe, which didn’t make him many friends, but I think he was right on target. In the worlds of painting and sculpture as well, there was an accelerated trend away from classicism and realism to the abstract world of “modern” art. In terms of modern art, I have somewhat more respect for people like Jackson Pollack and Alexander Calder than I do for Le Corbusier, probably because a modernist architect can screw up the lives of a lot more people than a painter or sculptor ever could, but why is it that the art world condemns realism in art so wholeheartedly? What are they so afraid of in portraying the human body and nature as it realistically? And what about the craftsmanship required to produce these great works. I shudder when I think that such masters as Michelangelo and Rembrandt aren’t really even being trained today. Are art students today being taught to cop-out and produce their own type of modernism, without at least trying to work as hard to learn the techniques of the old masters? It seems to me that they are being taught that art is 1/8 technique and 7/8 theory, and if you can invent a good bullshit story to “interpret” your work, then you are on your way to success in the world of modern art.

So here we have Arno Breker, ostracized for his ties to the Third Reich and his evident classicism, now on display for all those who come to the Schleswig-Holstein Haus museum in Schwerin until the 22^nd of October to see. How does his work really stack up, and is all the hype from the “modern” artists of the leftist art establishment really justified in saying that his work is not worthy of exhibition?

The current exhibition takes the viewer through all stages of Breker’s career, and what I saw in it was that Breker, like most artists who have to make their living from what they produce, was a kind of whore to the public by creating what they wanted. In the 1920’s in Paris, he produced in the rough classicism of Rodin. In the 1930’s and 1940’s, seeing where the money was coming from, he produced the smooth, muscular, Aryan figures that Adolf Hitler so enjoyed. After the war, he toyed a bit with abstract forms, as was the style of the day, and, of course, he found rich patrons wanting to immortalize themselves in bronze. Of all these eras, however, where his own style really developed was in the Third Reich, as his buildings were part of the stage settings for Nazi happenings, and he was involved in the huge projects for rebuilding Berlin, Nürnberg and other large cities, which were to have been completed in 1950. This style is reworked classicism, reminiscent of Greek and Roman sculpture, but usually showing men in stately or aggressive poses, and women in graceful ones. This, of course, fits in well with Nazi ideology, but can you really dismiss its value as art in terms of creating a mood using the idealized form of the human body?

I think you can’t. This type of realistic sculpture was produced long before Hiter came on the scene, and just because he enjoyed it, doesn’t mean that it has to be forever condemned. I am a proponent of art for art’s sake: let’s strip the ideology away from the art and enjoy it without its historical connections and explanations. Breker’s work shows the form and feelings, strength and weakness of the human body at rest and in action, and anyone who thinks that this is dangerous and shouldn’t be shown presumes that just looking at it will make you a Nazi. “Hide it, destroy it, just don’t show it to anyone, as it will magically make them evil!” Come on, give the public and me a break. We are old enough to make up our own minds as to the validity of Breker’s work, and we certainly don’t need some “expert” to decide what we can and cannot see. How long will it take for Germany to finally break free of the grasp of Hitler and let people truly have free speech? You still can’t buy Mein Kampf in the stores here, more than sixty years after the end of the Second World War; it is forbidden. Do they think that everyone will buy it, read it and suddenly decide to invade Russia? It isn’t a tome of black magic. I’ve read it, and it is pretty tedious, but remarkable for one fact: in it, Hitler pretty much sums up what he attempted to do twenty years later. Perhaps if more Germans in his day and age had really managed to read it, they would not have been so supportive. A demagogue who can work a crowd into a frenzy can seem very, very different when you read his vitriol on paper. Hitler’s book is a work about race and space: the race of the Aryan versus the race of the Jew, and the conquest of space, or Lebensraum, in the vastness of Soviet Russia. If a modern German would read it, I think they are mature enough to realize that it is history, and also that its writer was a rabid racist bent on European domination. I don’t think it would turn them into Nazis, but instead let them know just how the most influential personality of the twentieth century thought. To me, that seems an appropriate historical education.

And, if you go see Breker’s work, you can understand two things. One, just because you produce art for a bad person doesn’t necessarily make you a bad artist, and two, if you take Breker out of his historical context and view him solely as an artist, you find his craftsmanship and feel for the proportions of the human body superb. They don’t make artists like him anymore, and that is a shame, but to reach his level of excellence in stone and bronze sculpture takes years of hard work, and it seems to me that artist’s today are often looking for the easy way. Their work is tragically too often valued more for whatever theoretical explanation some “expert” or the artist himself gives regarding the work rather than the inherent quality and craftsmanship of the work itself. I applaud the directors of the Schwerin museum to have the courage to show the world Breker’s work and let the public decide if it is worthy of viewing or not. And from the comments I read in the visitor’s book in the museum’s foyer, most of them felt the same way I do.