Picasso's War, page 30
“MAKE ART…GERMAN AGAIN”
Two months after her own hurried departure, Alfred joined Marga in Europe, where they intended to spend the remainder of his yearlong recovery. In the early thirties, the sanatorium movement was at its height, and for a connoisseur of modernism with obscure health problems, the Continent offered any number of new treatments, often delivered in elegant, spa-like institutions. A year earlier, the white-painted, light-filled Zonnestraal Sanatorium, built in the Dutch town of Hilversum, set a new standard for high-modernist healthcare, while Alvar Aalto, the Finnish architect, was just completing his own elegant contribution to the genre in his campus for tubercular patients in southwestern Finland.
Indeed, many modern artists, writers, and their patrons had spent time in restorative clinics. T. S. Eliot composed much of The Waste Land while recovering from a nervous condition in Lausanne in 1921; members of the Bauhaus had gone to the mountains above Lake Maggiore. Franz Kafka had multiple stays in sanatoriums in Switzerland, Germany, and Austria, as he experimented with various open-air therapies. Paul Rosenberg, with his ulcer, was constantly seeking “cures” at Vittel and other French and Swiss retreats. Some Europeans, à la Hans Castorp, the young engineer of Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain, seemed never to leave these facilities. Among the benefits of these sojourns—along with up-to-date care, innovative diets, ample sunlight, and pristine outdoor settings—was the chance to escape the stresses and pressures of ordinary life, to go somewhere that was apart from the world.
For Alfred, however, very little of this medical culture was within reach. He and Marga were on an extremely tight budget, and sanatoriums were out of the question. So Marga was relieved to discover that a bottle of Sandoptal—Alfred’s sleeping pills—cost half as much in Switzerland as in New York. In an effort to economize, they decided to spend the fall in Rome, where they could live with Marga’s mother; perhaps later, they would seek treatment for Alfred in Austria or Germany. But quite apart from money, neither Italy nor the other countries they visited in the fall and winter of 1932–33 would offer much of a respite from world events. In a curious echo of Alfred’s trip to Soviet Russia five years earlier, he and Marga soon found themselves witnessing one of the most violent upheavals in art and politics of the twentieth century.
* * *
—
Landing in Naples in late September, Alfred’s immediate priority was not his health but seeing the second iteration of the huge Georges Petit show, which had just opened in Zurich. For Alfred, the experience was tinged with irony. Echoing what the Museum of Modern Art had done with Matisse, the Kunsthaus Zürich had taken the dealers’ Picasso extravaganza but made it substantially its own, with a new, coherent arrangement and enhanced choice of works. It also employed a sleek, modern installation, featuring works hung in a single row at eye level, on clean white walls. There was a strong treatment of Cubism, and the show provided a balanced, if at times bewildering, view of Picasso’s career.
It was not without flaws. As in Paris, crucial works such as the Portrait of Gertrude Stein and Les Demoiselles d’Avignon were missing and there were only four sculptures, all of them from the early years of his career. Moreover, as at the Georges Petit gallery, many of the works were for sale, and the commercial underpinnings of the show were apparent. In the show’s catalog, Alfred ruthlessly penciled in letter grades for many of the paintings, giving out numerous B minuses and even a few C’s and D’s, notably for some of the more conventional Blue period works. Out of the 221 oil paintings in the show, only 26, or less than 12 percent, merited A’s, a select group that included a nude from the Demoiselles period, several Cubist still lifes, the two versions of Three Musicians, and Girl before a Mirror. (In Alfred’s anguished state, even The Three Dancers, a crucial 1925 painting that he would come to regard as one of Picasso’s most important works, achieved only a B plus.) Nonetheless, he could see that by collaborating with Bignou and Rosenberg, the Zurich museum had come close to doing what he had long been aiming at in New York.[1]
It was hard not to feel that he had been twice defeated: by the dealers in Paris and by the museum in Zurich. Now he would have to come up with something quite new if he were to attempt Picasso again. When Goodyear wrote to him a few weeks later, suggesting that they try to revive the Picasso project in 1933, Barr rejected the idea. “Do not think I have my heart set on a Picasso show next year,” he wrote back. “It is quite probable that he is the most important living artist—but for that very reason both he and the Museum can afford to wait.”[2]
In another way, though, the Zurich show seemed to mark a turning point in the status of the modern avant-garde in German-speaking Europe. On the one hand, it was a triumphant demonstration of continued Central European leadership in modern art, with the show organized by a Swiss museum and drawing on loans from Reber and other Swiss and German collectors, as well as on the Paris dealers and Picasso himself. Attendance was record-breaking, and several other museums in Germany and Switzerland tried, unsuccessfully, to take over the show when it closed.
Yet critical reaction was far from uniform. One local newspaper criticized Picasso as “typically bourgeois and decadent” and faulted the city for subsidizing it.[3] Then, at the end of the show’s run, the renowned Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung wrote a lengthy attack on Picasso’s art in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, the city’s leading paper, in which he diagnosed the artist as suffering from a mental disorder. “Based on my experience,” Jung wrote, “I can assure the reader that Picasso’s psychic problems, so far as they find expression in his work, are strictly analogous to those of my patients.” In Jung’s turgid assessment, Picasso “follows not the accepted ideals of goodness and beauty, but the demoniacal attraction of ugliness and evil.” The artist, he concluded, was afflicted with schizophrenia, characterized by his “paradoxical, unfeeling, and grotesque unconcern for the beholder.” In such multiple-perspective works as Girl before a Mirror, Jung detected “lines of fracture” that apparently represented the diseased “conjunction of the light and dark anima.” More broadly, in the strong public response to these paintings Jung detected what he called the “deadly decay” pervading modern society: “Picasso and his exhibition are a sign of the times, just as much as the twenty-eight thousand people who came to look at his pictures.”[4]
Jung’s article was quickly ridiculed by Picasso’s supporters, and many pointed out his woeful ignorance of contemporary painting. Yet amid the psychoanalytical jargon, the attack drew on many of the familiar tropes of antimodernist critics: The new art was a dangerous symptom of deviance and social decline. And with Jung’s imprimatur, it carried unusual weight. “A heavy blow has been struck against modern artists in general,” one critic wrote. In fact Jung’s diatribe was a harbinger of a far more dramatic shift in German attitudes, one that, as Alfred and Marga would soon witness, was about to erupt furiously into the open.[5]
* * *
—
After several months in Rome, Alfred was making only halting progress and retreating often to a dark room they had fixed up for him. “He was always very tired. And high strung,” an old friend of Marga’s who visited them at Christmas recalled. “Daisy and I would go off on trips. Alfred didn’t go around much…he was very tired, very tired.”[6] They decided to leave Rome and spent several weeks in the Tyrolean Alps, where Marga valiantly introduced him to skiing, but they were concerned that his sleep wasn’t improving. Alfred considered continuing to Vienna for Freudian therapy. “European acquaintances feel that psychoanalysis is a natural step in curing insomnia if there is no apparent physiological cause,” he wrote to a somewhat horrified Abby Rockefeller in early February. But then, in Alfred’s beginner ski class, he met a German woman who recommended a prominent “analyst doctor” in Stuttgart. Known for his innovative treatments for unusual disorders, Dr. Otto Garthe had recently cured a prominent violinist of stage fright; the woman was certain he would be able to “de-exhaust” Alfred. In early February, they decided to take the train to Germany to see him.[7]
At first Dr. Garthe seemed like an ideal solution. A charming, worldly man who was married to a sculptor and knew many writers and artists, he was just the sort of enlightened expert one might have encountered in one of the advanced clinics in Switzerland. He was open to new techniques and had a perceptive understanding of underlying issues; his holistic approach encompassed sensitivity to one’s social and physical environment. Aware of their tight budget, he suggested they stay in a modest but well-run boardinghouse run by a woman he knew who happened to have a personal connection to Cézanne; his own house and medical studio was a modernist oasis, with prototype chairs, tables, and rugs by the German design pioneer Richard Herre.[8]
At the same time, Stuttgart offered an attractive setting in which to recuperate. A quiet and orderly provincial capital, the city was not particularly large. Yet it was a hotbed of modernism, filled with the advanced galleries and contemporary design that Alfred had encountered on earlier visits to Germany. In 1913, a local art gallery had put on one of the first shows of Picasso’s Cubist work in Europe, arranged by Kahnweiler. By the late twenties, the city had two civic museums devoted to modern painting and one to modern sculpture. It also boasted one of the most advanced hospitals in Europe as well as the renowned Weissenhof Estate, a pioneering housing development featuring the work of Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius, J.J.P. Oud, and many others. “In the history of post-war modern architecture,” Alfred argued, it was “the most important group of buildings in the world.”[9]
But there was one thing they hadn’t anticipated: the collapse of the fragile social democratic order that had held in Germany since the end of the war. By the start of 1933, after years of economic chaos, the Weimar Republic was in crisis. Along with the Communist left, the right-wing NSDAP, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, had grown rapidly. After weeks of uncertainty, at the end of January, the German president and former war hero, Paul von Hindenburg, had appointed the National Socialist leader, Adolf Hitler, to head a conservative coalition government in Berlin.
At first it seemed unclear what this meant. While Alfred and Marga were vaguely aware of the NSDAP’s extremist rhetoric and reputation for violence, it still commanded only a minority of cabinet seats, and its focus seemed to be on rallying the public. Moreover, they encountered little enthusiasm for the Nazis in Stuttgart. Dr. Garthe and his friends were progressives; Frau Hedwig Haag, who ran their hostel, was a cultivated woman who was interested in modern art. None of their fellow guests seemed to support the party either. The leading local newspaper was staunchly centrist conservative, and the political slogans they encountered most often called for a “strong center.”
Gradually, though, the mood of the city began to shift. At the hostel, Frau Haag had just acquired a radio, and many of the guests spent evenings crowded around it, listening to Hitler’s speeches. This held no appeal for Alfred and Marga, but they quickly learned to recognize his characteristic, high-pitched staccato and dramatic pauses; they also noticed the effect his speeches had on the other guests. “They cannot get enough of him,” Marga observed a few weeks after they arrived.[10] At the end of February, when the Reichstag was burned down, most of the guests, following the Nazi line, assumed it was a Communist plot.
Then the unthinkable happened. Exploiting the atmosphere of terror surrounding the Reichstag fire, the Nazi-led government ruthlessly cracked down on the opposition and, in tightly controlled parliamentary elections six days later, acquired enough of a mandate—44 percent of the vote—to pave the way for a broader seizure of power. Though Hitler still lacked a majority, he was now firmly in control. On March 23, with the opposition largely silenced, he forced through the Enabling Act, allowing him to rule without parliament.
At first, much of the Nazi program remained vague. While the party was known for its virulent anti-Semitism, the Nuremberg Laws were still more than two years away and many German Jews, like other opponents of the regime, assumed that it would not stay in power. Nor had Hitler yet articulated the fully fledged militarism that came into the open in 1935. Yet the determination to destroy the Weimar Republic was unmistakable from the start. All over the country, communists and socialists were arrested and jailed; even before the Reichstag fire, The New York Times had reported on its front page, HITLER PROCLAIMS WAR ON DEMOCRACY.[11]
In Stuttgart, Alfred and Marga were astonished by how quickly the war was won. Immediately, they began to see brownshirts marching in the streets and swastikas hanging from balconies. As they walked back to their pension in the evening, they heard the Horst Wessel Song and the hoarse voices of Hitler and Goebbels blaring from many homes. Suddenly, every shopwindow seemed to have a postcard of the grim-faced Führer giving the Fascist salute. With chilling discipline and efficiency, the new political order was established. “Stuttgart took its revolution very calmly,” Alfred wrote.[12]
At least, they thought, they would be able to take refuge in the city’s flourishing modern art scene. Just after the Reichstag fire, the Barrs had gone to an important show of paintings by Oskar Schlemmer, Stuttgart’s most famous living artist, which had just opened at the Württemberg Art Society, one of the city’s main public galleries. Alfred had met Schlemmer at the Bauhaus in 1927 and was excited to see his new work. At the exhibition, he particularly admired a large painting called Bauhaus Stairway, an elegant, mysterious tribute to the school, showing balletic, almost ghostlike figures moving away from the viewer as they ascend the glass-fronted concrete staircase of Gropius’s Bauhaus building in Dessau. He and Marga liked the show very much, and since it was going to be up for several more weeks, they decided they would soon return.
When they returned to the Württemberg Art Society a few days later, however, they found the gallery transformed. Despite the show’s scheduled run, the paintings had all been taken down and the rooms were empty. Finding the director, Alfred asked, “Where are the Schlemmers?” Silently, he led them to the end of the gallery, where he unlocked a door and led them into a pair of back rooms. There were the paintings, carefully stacked up; they could see Bauhaus Stairway leaning against a far wall. The director said he had had no choice. The show had been condemned by the National-Sozialistiches Kurier, a leading Nazi paper, in an article that made a barely veiled threat against the gallery. “There is a discussion—so we hear—as to whether the Schlemmer exhibition ought to be hung at all in these times of returning sanity,” the critic had written. “This exhibition is doubtless the last chance the public will have to see painted Kunstbolschewismus”—Bolshevik art—“at large.”[13]
Alfred was shaken. Here was one of Germany’s most prominent artists, a painter whose careful geometric works seemed utterly detached from events in Berlin. “It is very difficult to find anything of the slightest political significance in the subject matter of Schlemmer’s pictures,” Alfred wrote.[14] And yet Schlemmer was being smeared with the same charges used by American opponents of modern art, going back to the time of John Quinn’s post-Impressionist show at the Met in 1921. Moreover, unlike in the United States, the attack seemed to be backed by the state—and in a country that had up to now been a bastion of advanced modernism. Seemingly overnight, the National Socialists had taken over the regional government, and the museum director feared he would lose his job if he did not shut down the show.
As Alfred quickly discovered, the censoring of the Schlemmer show was no accident. Soon after Alfred learned about the cancellation of the Schlemmer show, he began hearing about similar actions all over Germany. In early April, the State Gallery of Art, Stuttgart’s main museum, was ordered to take down its modern art. “Paintings by five of the best known modernists in Germany have been removed from the walls,” he noted.[15] In Leipzig and Dresden, officials took down even larger groups of modern paintings; in Frankfurt, they simply locked the rooms devoted to modern art. Even more disturbing were the actions taken against artists themselves. Paul Klee and Otto Dix were kicked out of the academies where they taught; Schlemmer was put on indefinite leave. A similar fate awaited the museum directors who supported their work. The heads of museums in Frankfurt, Karlsruhe, Düsseldorf, Cologne, Hamburg, Chemnitz, and Ulm were either sacked or put on leave for supporting modern art.
Nor were these efforts confined to art. At his house one evening, a few weeks after the Nazis came to power, Dr. Garthe introduced Alfred and Marga to Richard Döcker, a young architect who had worked with Mies van der Rohe at the Weissenhof Estate. Döcker told them that the city building inspector had summoned him to his office about a private house he had designed. Though the project was already half finished, the inspector informed him that the Flachdach, or flat roof, would have to be replaced with a sloping Teutonic gable. The flat roof was one of the most characteristic elements of the new architecture—part of a style that had been pioneered in Germany as well as Holland and France—yet now it was effectively banned.[16]
Initially, Alfred was puzzled by these attacks. He had witnessed hostility to avant-garde painting from conservatives in the United States and Communists in Russia, but as he did with Schlemmer’s paintings, he regarded the modern movement as largely free of specific ideological content. In Fascist Italy, where he and Marga had spent the fall, the Mussolini regime didn’t just tolerate modern art and architecture; it embraced it. While she was attending the Georges Petit exhibition in Paris, Marga had run into one Fascist official who was trying to persuade Picasso to lend works to that summer’s Venice Biennale. And a group of Italian architects, supported by the Fascist government, were developing their own version of International Style modernism. Yet already, within days of coming to power, the Nazis had begun attacking modern art and architecture.
Two months after her own hurried departure, Alfred joined Marga in Europe, where they intended to spend the remainder of his yearlong recovery. In the early thirties, the sanatorium movement was at its height, and for a connoisseur of modernism with obscure health problems, the Continent offered any number of new treatments, often delivered in elegant, spa-like institutions. A year earlier, the white-painted, light-filled Zonnestraal Sanatorium, built in the Dutch town of Hilversum, set a new standard for high-modernist healthcare, while Alvar Aalto, the Finnish architect, was just completing his own elegant contribution to the genre in his campus for tubercular patients in southwestern Finland.
Indeed, many modern artists, writers, and their patrons had spent time in restorative clinics. T. S. Eliot composed much of The Waste Land while recovering from a nervous condition in Lausanne in 1921; members of the Bauhaus had gone to the mountains above Lake Maggiore. Franz Kafka had multiple stays in sanatoriums in Switzerland, Germany, and Austria, as he experimented with various open-air therapies. Paul Rosenberg, with his ulcer, was constantly seeking “cures” at Vittel and other French and Swiss retreats. Some Europeans, à la Hans Castorp, the young engineer of Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain, seemed never to leave these facilities. Among the benefits of these sojourns—along with up-to-date care, innovative diets, ample sunlight, and pristine outdoor settings—was the chance to escape the stresses and pressures of ordinary life, to go somewhere that was apart from the world.
For Alfred, however, very little of this medical culture was within reach. He and Marga were on an extremely tight budget, and sanatoriums were out of the question. So Marga was relieved to discover that a bottle of Sandoptal—Alfred’s sleeping pills—cost half as much in Switzerland as in New York. In an effort to economize, they decided to spend the fall in Rome, where they could live with Marga’s mother; perhaps later, they would seek treatment for Alfred in Austria or Germany. But quite apart from money, neither Italy nor the other countries they visited in the fall and winter of 1932–33 would offer much of a respite from world events. In a curious echo of Alfred’s trip to Soviet Russia five years earlier, he and Marga soon found themselves witnessing one of the most violent upheavals in art and politics of the twentieth century.
* * *
—
Landing in Naples in late September, Alfred’s immediate priority was not his health but seeing the second iteration of the huge Georges Petit show, which had just opened in Zurich. For Alfred, the experience was tinged with irony. Echoing what the Museum of Modern Art had done with Matisse, the Kunsthaus Zürich had taken the dealers’ Picasso extravaganza but made it substantially its own, with a new, coherent arrangement and enhanced choice of works. It also employed a sleek, modern installation, featuring works hung in a single row at eye level, on clean white walls. There was a strong treatment of Cubism, and the show provided a balanced, if at times bewildering, view of Picasso’s career.
It was not without flaws. As in Paris, crucial works such as the Portrait of Gertrude Stein and Les Demoiselles d’Avignon were missing and there were only four sculptures, all of them from the early years of his career. Moreover, as at the Georges Petit gallery, many of the works were for sale, and the commercial underpinnings of the show were apparent. In the show’s catalog, Alfred ruthlessly penciled in letter grades for many of the paintings, giving out numerous B minuses and even a few C’s and D’s, notably for some of the more conventional Blue period works. Out of the 221 oil paintings in the show, only 26, or less than 12 percent, merited A’s, a select group that included a nude from the Demoiselles period, several Cubist still lifes, the two versions of Three Musicians, and Girl before a Mirror. (In Alfred’s anguished state, even The Three Dancers, a crucial 1925 painting that he would come to regard as one of Picasso’s most important works, achieved only a B plus.) Nonetheless, he could see that by collaborating with Bignou and Rosenberg, the Zurich museum had come close to doing what he had long been aiming at in New York.[1]
It was hard not to feel that he had been twice defeated: by the dealers in Paris and by the museum in Zurich. Now he would have to come up with something quite new if he were to attempt Picasso again. When Goodyear wrote to him a few weeks later, suggesting that they try to revive the Picasso project in 1933, Barr rejected the idea. “Do not think I have my heart set on a Picasso show next year,” he wrote back. “It is quite probable that he is the most important living artist—but for that very reason both he and the Museum can afford to wait.”[2]
In another way, though, the Zurich show seemed to mark a turning point in the status of the modern avant-garde in German-speaking Europe. On the one hand, it was a triumphant demonstration of continued Central European leadership in modern art, with the show organized by a Swiss museum and drawing on loans from Reber and other Swiss and German collectors, as well as on the Paris dealers and Picasso himself. Attendance was record-breaking, and several other museums in Germany and Switzerland tried, unsuccessfully, to take over the show when it closed.
Yet critical reaction was far from uniform. One local newspaper criticized Picasso as “typically bourgeois and decadent” and faulted the city for subsidizing it.[3] Then, at the end of the show’s run, the renowned Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung wrote a lengthy attack on Picasso’s art in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, the city’s leading paper, in which he diagnosed the artist as suffering from a mental disorder. “Based on my experience,” Jung wrote, “I can assure the reader that Picasso’s psychic problems, so far as they find expression in his work, are strictly analogous to those of my patients.” In Jung’s turgid assessment, Picasso “follows not the accepted ideals of goodness and beauty, but the demoniacal attraction of ugliness and evil.” The artist, he concluded, was afflicted with schizophrenia, characterized by his “paradoxical, unfeeling, and grotesque unconcern for the beholder.” In such multiple-perspective works as Girl before a Mirror, Jung detected “lines of fracture” that apparently represented the diseased “conjunction of the light and dark anima.” More broadly, in the strong public response to these paintings Jung detected what he called the “deadly decay” pervading modern society: “Picasso and his exhibition are a sign of the times, just as much as the twenty-eight thousand people who came to look at his pictures.”[4]
Jung’s article was quickly ridiculed by Picasso’s supporters, and many pointed out his woeful ignorance of contemporary painting. Yet amid the psychoanalytical jargon, the attack drew on many of the familiar tropes of antimodernist critics: The new art was a dangerous symptom of deviance and social decline. And with Jung’s imprimatur, it carried unusual weight. “A heavy blow has been struck against modern artists in general,” one critic wrote. In fact Jung’s diatribe was a harbinger of a far more dramatic shift in German attitudes, one that, as Alfred and Marga would soon witness, was about to erupt furiously into the open.[5]
* * *
—
After several months in Rome, Alfred was making only halting progress and retreating often to a dark room they had fixed up for him. “He was always very tired. And high strung,” an old friend of Marga’s who visited them at Christmas recalled. “Daisy and I would go off on trips. Alfred didn’t go around much…he was very tired, very tired.”[6] They decided to leave Rome and spent several weeks in the Tyrolean Alps, where Marga valiantly introduced him to skiing, but they were concerned that his sleep wasn’t improving. Alfred considered continuing to Vienna for Freudian therapy. “European acquaintances feel that psychoanalysis is a natural step in curing insomnia if there is no apparent physiological cause,” he wrote to a somewhat horrified Abby Rockefeller in early February. But then, in Alfred’s beginner ski class, he met a German woman who recommended a prominent “analyst doctor” in Stuttgart. Known for his innovative treatments for unusual disorders, Dr. Otto Garthe had recently cured a prominent violinist of stage fright; the woman was certain he would be able to “de-exhaust” Alfred. In early February, they decided to take the train to Germany to see him.[7]
At first Dr. Garthe seemed like an ideal solution. A charming, worldly man who was married to a sculptor and knew many writers and artists, he was just the sort of enlightened expert one might have encountered in one of the advanced clinics in Switzerland. He was open to new techniques and had a perceptive understanding of underlying issues; his holistic approach encompassed sensitivity to one’s social and physical environment. Aware of their tight budget, he suggested they stay in a modest but well-run boardinghouse run by a woman he knew who happened to have a personal connection to Cézanne; his own house and medical studio was a modernist oasis, with prototype chairs, tables, and rugs by the German design pioneer Richard Herre.[8]
At the same time, Stuttgart offered an attractive setting in which to recuperate. A quiet and orderly provincial capital, the city was not particularly large. Yet it was a hotbed of modernism, filled with the advanced galleries and contemporary design that Alfred had encountered on earlier visits to Germany. In 1913, a local art gallery had put on one of the first shows of Picasso’s Cubist work in Europe, arranged by Kahnweiler. By the late twenties, the city had two civic museums devoted to modern painting and one to modern sculpture. It also boasted one of the most advanced hospitals in Europe as well as the renowned Weissenhof Estate, a pioneering housing development featuring the work of Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius, J.J.P. Oud, and many others. “In the history of post-war modern architecture,” Alfred argued, it was “the most important group of buildings in the world.”[9]
But there was one thing they hadn’t anticipated: the collapse of the fragile social democratic order that had held in Germany since the end of the war. By the start of 1933, after years of economic chaos, the Weimar Republic was in crisis. Along with the Communist left, the right-wing NSDAP, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, had grown rapidly. After weeks of uncertainty, at the end of January, the German president and former war hero, Paul von Hindenburg, had appointed the National Socialist leader, Adolf Hitler, to head a conservative coalition government in Berlin.
At first it seemed unclear what this meant. While Alfred and Marga were vaguely aware of the NSDAP’s extremist rhetoric and reputation for violence, it still commanded only a minority of cabinet seats, and its focus seemed to be on rallying the public. Moreover, they encountered little enthusiasm for the Nazis in Stuttgart. Dr. Garthe and his friends were progressives; Frau Hedwig Haag, who ran their hostel, was a cultivated woman who was interested in modern art. None of their fellow guests seemed to support the party either. The leading local newspaper was staunchly centrist conservative, and the political slogans they encountered most often called for a “strong center.”
Gradually, though, the mood of the city began to shift. At the hostel, Frau Haag had just acquired a radio, and many of the guests spent evenings crowded around it, listening to Hitler’s speeches. This held no appeal for Alfred and Marga, but they quickly learned to recognize his characteristic, high-pitched staccato and dramatic pauses; they also noticed the effect his speeches had on the other guests. “They cannot get enough of him,” Marga observed a few weeks after they arrived.[10] At the end of February, when the Reichstag was burned down, most of the guests, following the Nazi line, assumed it was a Communist plot.
Then the unthinkable happened. Exploiting the atmosphere of terror surrounding the Reichstag fire, the Nazi-led government ruthlessly cracked down on the opposition and, in tightly controlled parliamentary elections six days later, acquired enough of a mandate—44 percent of the vote—to pave the way for a broader seizure of power. Though Hitler still lacked a majority, he was now firmly in control. On March 23, with the opposition largely silenced, he forced through the Enabling Act, allowing him to rule without parliament.
At first, much of the Nazi program remained vague. While the party was known for its virulent anti-Semitism, the Nuremberg Laws were still more than two years away and many German Jews, like other opponents of the regime, assumed that it would not stay in power. Nor had Hitler yet articulated the fully fledged militarism that came into the open in 1935. Yet the determination to destroy the Weimar Republic was unmistakable from the start. All over the country, communists and socialists were arrested and jailed; even before the Reichstag fire, The New York Times had reported on its front page, HITLER PROCLAIMS WAR ON DEMOCRACY.[11]
In Stuttgart, Alfred and Marga were astonished by how quickly the war was won. Immediately, they began to see brownshirts marching in the streets and swastikas hanging from balconies. As they walked back to their pension in the evening, they heard the Horst Wessel Song and the hoarse voices of Hitler and Goebbels blaring from many homes. Suddenly, every shopwindow seemed to have a postcard of the grim-faced Führer giving the Fascist salute. With chilling discipline and efficiency, the new political order was established. “Stuttgart took its revolution very calmly,” Alfred wrote.[12]
At least, they thought, they would be able to take refuge in the city’s flourishing modern art scene. Just after the Reichstag fire, the Barrs had gone to an important show of paintings by Oskar Schlemmer, Stuttgart’s most famous living artist, which had just opened at the Württemberg Art Society, one of the city’s main public galleries. Alfred had met Schlemmer at the Bauhaus in 1927 and was excited to see his new work. At the exhibition, he particularly admired a large painting called Bauhaus Stairway, an elegant, mysterious tribute to the school, showing balletic, almost ghostlike figures moving away from the viewer as they ascend the glass-fronted concrete staircase of Gropius’s Bauhaus building in Dessau. He and Marga liked the show very much, and since it was going to be up for several more weeks, they decided they would soon return.
When they returned to the Württemberg Art Society a few days later, however, they found the gallery transformed. Despite the show’s scheduled run, the paintings had all been taken down and the rooms were empty. Finding the director, Alfred asked, “Where are the Schlemmers?” Silently, he led them to the end of the gallery, where he unlocked a door and led them into a pair of back rooms. There were the paintings, carefully stacked up; they could see Bauhaus Stairway leaning against a far wall. The director said he had had no choice. The show had been condemned by the National-Sozialistiches Kurier, a leading Nazi paper, in an article that made a barely veiled threat against the gallery. “There is a discussion—so we hear—as to whether the Schlemmer exhibition ought to be hung at all in these times of returning sanity,” the critic had written. “This exhibition is doubtless the last chance the public will have to see painted Kunstbolschewismus”—Bolshevik art—“at large.”[13]
Alfred was shaken. Here was one of Germany’s most prominent artists, a painter whose careful geometric works seemed utterly detached from events in Berlin. “It is very difficult to find anything of the slightest political significance in the subject matter of Schlemmer’s pictures,” Alfred wrote.[14] And yet Schlemmer was being smeared with the same charges used by American opponents of modern art, going back to the time of John Quinn’s post-Impressionist show at the Met in 1921. Moreover, unlike in the United States, the attack seemed to be backed by the state—and in a country that had up to now been a bastion of advanced modernism. Seemingly overnight, the National Socialists had taken over the regional government, and the museum director feared he would lose his job if he did not shut down the show.
As Alfred quickly discovered, the censoring of the Schlemmer show was no accident. Soon after Alfred learned about the cancellation of the Schlemmer show, he began hearing about similar actions all over Germany. In early April, the State Gallery of Art, Stuttgart’s main museum, was ordered to take down its modern art. “Paintings by five of the best known modernists in Germany have been removed from the walls,” he noted.[15] In Leipzig and Dresden, officials took down even larger groups of modern paintings; in Frankfurt, they simply locked the rooms devoted to modern art. Even more disturbing were the actions taken against artists themselves. Paul Klee and Otto Dix were kicked out of the academies where they taught; Schlemmer was put on indefinite leave. A similar fate awaited the museum directors who supported their work. The heads of museums in Frankfurt, Karlsruhe, Düsseldorf, Cologne, Hamburg, Chemnitz, and Ulm were either sacked or put on leave for supporting modern art.
Nor were these efforts confined to art. At his house one evening, a few weeks after the Nazis came to power, Dr. Garthe introduced Alfred and Marga to Richard Döcker, a young architect who had worked with Mies van der Rohe at the Weissenhof Estate. Döcker told them that the city building inspector had summoned him to his office about a private house he had designed. Though the project was already half finished, the inspector informed him that the Flachdach, or flat roof, would have to be replaced with a sloping Teutonic gable. The flat roof was one of the most characteristic elements of the new architecture—part of a style that had been pioneered in Germany as well as Holland and France—yet now it was effectively banned.[16]
Initially, Alfred was puzzled by these attacks. He had witnessed hostility to avant-garde painting from conservatives in the United States and Communists in Russia, but as he did with Schlemmer’s paintings, he regarded the modern movement as largely free of specific ideological content. In Fascist Italy, where he and Marga had spent the fall, the Mussolini regime didn’t just tolerate modern art and architecture; it embraced it. While she was attending the Georges Petit exhibition in Paris, Marga had run into one Fascist official who was trying to persuade Picasso to lend works to that summer’s Venice Biennale. And a group of Italian architects, supported by the Fascist government, were developing their own version of International Style modernism. Yet already, within days of coming to power, the Nazis had begun attacking modern art and architecture.
