Should a painting by a Nazi still hang in a prominent gallery?

In the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich’s sleek museum of modern art, hangs a painting that still sparks fierce controversy nearly a century after it was painted. One of Germany’s leading painters, Georg Baselitz (whose work also hangs here in the Pinakothek), called this picture “insulting to its surroundings”. So what is it about this triptych that inspires such outrage? The answer lies in its origins, during the dark days of the Third Reich.

Ostensibly, The Four Elements seems like an improbable focus for such opprobrium. It’s a figurative painting of four female nudes – a familiar topic throughout the ages. Viewed in isolation, it’s hard to see what the fuss is all about. Traditional and tasteful, there’s nothing overtly shocking about it. Indeed, the main thing that strikes you is that it’s rather stuffy and old-fashioned. Despite its nakedness, it’s not at all salacious. The painter has preserved these maidens’ modesty.

Yet when you take a closer look, you realise something’s not quite right. These women seem strangely sexless, more anatomical than sensual. There’s a coldness about this picture, an emptiness, a preoccupation with photographic realism. It’s devoid of emotion – it’s bereft of love.

And then you read the caption, and you learn that this painting was venerated by the Nazis – that it hung above the fireplace in Adolf Hitler’s residence, here in Munich, and that the man who painted it was a key figure in the Third Reich. This is the root of Baselitz’s passionate objection. “It is shocking that Nazi propaganda is possible in this grubby way in a Munich museum,” he declared.

Once you know these things it’s impossible to look at The Four Elements objectively. In the blink of an eye, it becomes transformed, from an accomplished (if rather static) depiction of the female form, into the emblem of a murderous tyranny. But is there really something evil about this painting, or is it all in the eye of the beholder?

The Third Reich may be dead and buried, a monstrous mutation of German history, but The Four Elements highlights some important questions which remain highly topical today. Can art ever be separated from the society that made it? Does it stand outside morality? Should the artworks of immoral regimes (or immoral artists) have pride of place in prestigious galleries? Should they be removed from public view, or even destroyed?

The Four Elements is currently being exhibited in “Mix & Match,” a bold new rehang of the Pinakothek der Moderne’s permanent collection, which marks the museum’s 20th birthday. I covered the opening of this gallery for The Independent. A modern art museum in a city that had always lacked a fitting forum for modernist art, at the time it felt like a resolution of Munich’s troubled relationship with modernism. However, the recent furore over The Four Elements shows such issues can never be resolved.

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Since the end of the Second World War, the German Bundesrepublik has been a bastion of modernist art, but in its palatial galleries, the regressive art of the Nazi era has been conspicuous by its absence. The inclusion of The Four Elements in this rehang is a brave attempt to address this awful chapter in German history. As the Pinakothek der Moderne stated, in its response to Georg Baselitz: “The ongoing hiding of problematic art never leads to critical discourse, but only to the continuation of the taboo.”

The Four Elements was painted by the German artist, Adolf Ziegler, in the mid-1930s. Its subject harks back to the classical concept of the four elements – earth, wind, fire and water – represented in Ziegler’s triptych by four female nudes. Superficially, the subject matter seems uncontentious – such classical themes have been prevalent throughout the history of Western art.

It’s only when you set it in its historical context that The Four Elements becomes malevolent. The “Aryan” women in Ziegler’s painting aren’t offensive on their own, but when you compare them with the savage anti-Semitic caricatures in Nazi propaganda posters, you realise what a pivotal role they came to play in Hitler’s demonisation of the Jews.

In his hysterical, hypnotic speeches, Hitler championed classical art, creating a cruel, pernicious contrast between the corrupting influence of modernist artists – whom he denounced as “Jewish” and “Bolshevik” – and the “purity” of Aryan Ancient Greek and Roman art. This false comparison was racist claptrap, but for many Germans, who felt alienated by modern art, such fake ideas were seductive. When Hitler came to power and his conspiracy theories became government policy, there was no shortage of opportunists like Adolf Ziegler, happy to kowtow to his reactive tastes.

Ziegler was born in Bremen in 1892. His father was an architect. His training at Munich’s Academy of Fine Arts was interrupted by frontline service in the First World War. He joined the Nazi Party in 1929 and attracted the attention of Hitler, a frustrated artist with a lifelong grievance against the progressive art establishment who’d spurned his proficient but lifeless paintings.

Had Hitler not come to power, Ziegler might have remained unknown – just another journeyman scratching a living from his pedestrian, prosaic paintings (just as Hitler might have done, if only fate had worked out a different way). Hitler’s ascent transformed Ziegler’s fortunes, from jobbing hack to rising star. Ziegler’s archaic style was now in vogue (his traditionalist approach bore some resemblance to Hitler’s realistic, stilted landscapes) and the Nazis’ vicious persecution of Germany’s Expressionist painters – a brilliant generation who’d revolutionised modern art – left the field wide open for a conservative artist with an eye for the main chance.

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In 1934, Hitler hired Ziegler to paint a posthumous portrait of his half-niece, Geli Raubal, who’d taken her own life in 1931, aged just 23 (Hitler revealed, privately, that she was the only woman he’d ever loved). Whether Hitler’s relationship with her was sexual remains a matter of conjecture, but it was undoubtedly coercive. Rumours abounded that he’d somehow had a hand in her death, but the truth was probably more mundane: suicide was the only way she could escape from his obsessive clutches.

Ziegler’s portrait, painted from photographs, was superficial but competent: an accurate likeness – no more, no less. It showed no flair, no insight, but Hitler liked it, and for Ziegler that was enough. In 1934, he was appointed Professor of Drawing and Painting at Munich’s Academy of Fine Arts, his alma mater. In 1936, Hitler appointed him President of the Reich Chamber of Culture, making him the most powerful artist in Germany.

If Ziegler had merely stuck to painting Teutonic nudes, it might be possible to forgive him, but his role as President of the Reich Chamber of Culture also meant waging war against any German artist who dared to deviate from the Nazi ideal of Aryan art. His hounding of Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, one of Germany’s leading Expressionists, is just one example. Ziegler wrote to him forbidding him from pursuing any artistic activity whatsoever.

Numerous other artists (most of them far more talented than Ziegler) suffered the same fate. It became impossible for them to make a living: they were fired from their teaching posts; they were forbidden from showing or selling their work. Countless artworks were lost forever, countless careers were snuffed out. The effect on German culture was catastrophic: German galleries were stripped of modernist artworks; curators who’d shown any sympathy towards modernism were dismissed. Some artists, such as Max Beckmann, emigrated. Others, like Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, killed themselves.

Ziegler’s artistic career reached its peak in 1937, here in Munich, when he oversaw two exhibitions that defined the Nazis’ attitude to art. The idea was simple and horribly inspired. In the Haus der Deutschen Kunst (the House of German Art), a grand new neoclassical gallery designed by Hitler’s favourite architect, Paul Ludwig Troost, the “Great German Art” exhibition displayed artworks that the Nazis approved of. In a smaller, shabbier gallery across the road, the “Degenerate Art” exhibition displayed the art they’d banned.

Ziegler played a leading role in selecting the artworks for both shows. His Four Elements had pride of place in the “Great German Art” exhibition. The “Degenerate Art” exhibition displayed work by German Expressionists like Beckmann, Kirchner and Schmidt-Rottluff.

Visitors were encouraged to see both shows, and compare them, but their very different settings were designed to prompt only one conclusion: the exhibits in the “Great German Art” show were displayed in a reverential style, in a grandiose setting; the exhibits in the “Degenerate Art” show were crammed together, like cheap pictures in a junk shop, adorned with derogatory captions.

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“What you are seeing here are the crippled products of madness, impertinence and lack of talent,” announced Ziegler, at the opening of the “Degenerate Art” show. “I would need several freight trains to clear our galleries of this rubbish,” he added, to rapturous applause. Ziegler and his cronies seized over 20,000 “degenerate” artworks throughout Germany. More than a thousand were burned. The rest were sold abroad.

The two shows were supposed to provide a stark contrast, between Aryan beauty and Jewish depravity, but there were lots of individual anomalies: “degenerate” artist Emil Nolde was a member of the Nazi party; comically, Ziegler inadvertently included work by German sculptor Ernst Barlach in both shows. The “Great German Art” show attracted half a million visitors – the “Degenerate Art” show attracted two million people. Who knows how many came to mock, and how many came in secret admiration? Ironically, Ziegler had assembled the greatest modernist art exhibition of all time.

Unlike the pictures in the “Degenerate Art” show, the pictures in the “Great German Art” show were all for sale, and prices were deliberately kept within the reach of ordinary Germans. All the works were by living artists, but the Nazis’ quest to initiate a new school of painting was, by and large, stillborn.

Most of the pictures in the “Great German Art” exhibition were actually pretty tame – sentimental and nostalgic, rather than depictions of a new master race. A few were overtly Fascistic, but many more were simply conventional paintings of bucolic subjects: quaint rural landscapes; whimsical portraits of farming families. Most of these antiquated daubs wouldn’t have looked out of place above the mantelpiece of a petit bourgeois drawing room.

Even Hitler was disappointed. Various paintings in the “Great German Art” show were purchased by the party – including The Four Elements – but it’s telling that of the 5,000 paintings Hitler acquired for his personal art museum in Linz (thankfully never realised) only a handful were by contemporary artists. Most were by romantic painters he’d admired in his youth.

Once the war began, Ziegler’s star began to wane. Hitler became convinced that sculpture, not painting, was the new art form of National Socialism, and when he drew up his list of “immortal” artists who were to be spared from military service, Ziegler’s name was missing from the list.

In 1943 Ziegler was arrested for spreading defeatist sentiment and sent to Dachau concentration camp. Many Germans had been executed for less but Hitler merely fired him. “Ziegler is not only a bad painter but a bad politician,” Hitler said. Ziegler survived the war, but his attempts at artistic rehabilitation were thwarted by his past. He retired to a small village in West Germany, near Baden-Baden. He died in 1959, aged 66.

At the end of the war, The Four Elements was seized by the Americans. In 1953 they handed it over to the Free State of Bavaria, along with around 900 other artworks which had previously belonged to various high-ranking Nazis, including Hitler. For the last 10 years, the Bavarian State Painting Collections has been researching the provenance of these works. It’s a painstaking task.

Deciding what to do with The Four Elements is even more complex. Unlike many artworks, its provenance is not in doubt. It was bought in 1938 by the Nazi Party to furnish the Führerbau on Munich’s Königplatz. It therefore now belongs to the Bavarian Free State. The key question is not who it belongs to but what to do with it. For a long time, it was hidden away – but it’s been displayed several times in recent years, in New York (at the Neue Galerie and the Guggenheim) and six years ago, in Munich at the Pinakothek, in a thought-provoking exhibition of Nazi-era art.

“Ziegler destroyed art and artists,” wrote Baselitz. “He does not belong in the room of his victims.” Speaking as a German citizen, who grieves for all the art and artists Ziegler and his acolytes destroyed, I understand his point of view. Yet much as I loathe Ziegler, I believe The Four Elements should be on show, rather than concealed in some obscure basement. The Four Elements wasn’t just popular with the Nazi hierarchy, it was popular with the German people at that time, as postcard sales attest. It’s part of German history. It feels totalitarian to airbrush it away.

Free societies tend to produce better artwork than dictatorships, but it’s foolish to pretend that dictatorships produce no good art at all. Most of the art made during the Third Reich was bad or mediocre, but it’s too simplistic, an easy cop-out, to maintain that all of it was rubbish or kitsch.

I sympathise with Baselitz, an artist I admire. Seeing Ziegler’s art alongside the artists that he persecuted feels macabre. But I believe art is amoral, separate from the artists who made it. By hanging The Four Elements beside the modernist artworks that eventually triumphed over it, the Pinakothek der Moderne has shone a light on a crucial part of Germany’s past.

Mix & Match: Rediscovering the Collection is at the Pinakothek der Moderne (www.pinakothek-der-moderne.de) in Munich until 14 January 2024. For more information about art in Germany, visit http://www.germany.travel.

William Cook has won several awards for his journalism about Germany and Austria, including the Johann Strauss Gold Medal for his reporting from Vienna.