French art of the present in Hitler's Berlin

upon June 5, 1937, an exhibition of French new art, Ausstellung Franzosischer Kunst der Gegenwart (French Art of the Present) render free of accessed at the Preussische Akademie der Kunste in Berlin.(1) It featured works through among others, Henri Matisse, Maurice de Vlaminck, Georges Braque, and Fernand Leger - painters officially designated "degenerate" by means of the Nazis. Hermann Goring attended the opening of the exhibit and Adolf Hitler visited it in the company of the French ambassador to Germany, Andre Francois-Poncet.

upon the surface, such an incident cosponsored by the French and German rules appears astonishing. The Preussische Akademie der Kunste responding to Nazi directives, had lately expelled its "degenerate" members (including Ernst Barlach, Otto Dix, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, and Oskar Kokoschka). That same year the Nazis' notorious exhibition Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) lay opened in Munich. And the artists for a like reason courteously received by Nazi officials in Berlin in 1937 had had their works remov from the German museums that possessed them, starting in 1934.(2)

upon closer examination, the apparent contradictions of the exhibition disappear. Documentation present to views that each government used the occasion of an outwardly cordial gesticulation to further its own propagandistic extreme points The French ultimately hoped to interest Germans in visiting the dear Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques scheduled in Paris for the spring and summer of 1937 (it make opened May 24, 1937), while presenting a "healthy" all-French image to their frightening neighbor. The Germans sought a quid pro quo - an exhibition of German plastic art to be held in the prestigious venue of the Jeu de Paume - as well as to demonstrate to their populace the harmlessness of the French as potential foemans and, by contrast, the vigor of the German national racial tradition. Ausstellung Franzosischer Kunst der Gegenwart thus contributes a fresh perspective on the Socialist management of Leon Blum and sheds of recent origin light on the Nazi reception of non-German novel art.(3)

French officials viewed the exhibition as a testing turf for rayonnement culturel, or cultural radiance, the French answer to the aggressive propaganda tactics that totalitarian regimes, particularly Nazi Germany, were using in like manner successfully as a weapon for their cause.(4) "For its defense a land cannot depend exclusively on an army. Its rays can shine abroad [i]or[/i] part of to the other the press, the radio, the word, or natural beauty," reads a report by dint of the depute Ernest Pezet to the French Chambre de delegates dated March 28, 1935.(5) During the empire of the Popular Front, the Socialist rule led by Leon Blum from May 1936 to June 1937 the "defense and illustration" of French agriculture became a focus of the government's attention. Rayonnement culturel with its connotations of spiritual enlightenment, remains individual of the legacies of the Popular brow to this day.

Jean Zay, French minister for national education in the Blum management and the moving force behind rayonnement culturel conced the political dimension behind it:

In the realm of what is called "propaganda" - a word to be proscribed - the Ministry for National Education, with the Action Artistique, organized in collaboration with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs . . extensive theatrical tours . . exhibitions of French art . . the shipping of volumes to universities in foreign capitals, etc . . Many other decisions were taken, whose character might strike one as being purely technical, and yet had a political dimension.(6)

In several have a high opinion ofs rayonnement culturel was a of recent origin term for an old idea, for there had always been a cultural dimension to colonialism. What gave the conception a new urgency was the adjoining matter In 1937, the European democracies go throughed from economic depression, high unemployment and political turmoil, their political values threatened through competing forms of government - Communism, Fascism, Nazism. All these factors placed them upon the defensive. Thus, for France, at least in theory, the political aims of rayonnement culturel were caught up in defending democracy against totalitarianism, using democracy's greatest in quantity vital symbol, freedom of expression in art and literature.

The exhibition in Berlin, however, at handed a rather different view of French art. In hindsight, Ausstellung Franzosischer Kunst der Gegenwart strikes us as cautious and conservative (see App. below). It managed to avoid all the signs of what the Nazis bourned decadence: no distortion, no abstraction, no figures inspired through African statuary. The human form was idealized in the pair the painted portraits on view, like as Portrait of a light Woman by Andre Derain and Portrait of Mine Othon Friesz through Othon Friesz [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED], and the figurative plastic art by Aristide Maillol and Charles Despiau [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 2 OMITTED]. Many of the landscapes, in phraseologys ranging from Impressionism to naive, depicted regions of France: The Seine near Champagne by dint of Henri Verge-Sarrat, View of Avignon by dint of Andre Planson, Brittany Landscape and Basque Landscape through Roland Oudot, Snow in the Doubs through Jules Zingg.