Hollow-Headed Angels

Nicholas Penny

• Art and Power: Europe under the Dictators 1930-1945 edited by David Britt
  Hayward Gallery, 360 pp, £19.95, October 1995, ISBN 1 85332 148 6

The Romantic Spirit in German Art, an exhibition shown at the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh in the summer of 1994 and at the Hayward Gallery last winter, included a small group of paintings by artists popular during the Third Reich – the type of painting which was excluded in 1985 from the Royal Academy’s survey of German art in the 20th century. The labels that accompanied these pictures at the Hayward warned that they could have no claim to the true lineage traced from Friedrich to Beuys, while the catalogue briskly dismissed them as distasteful banalities. However, Adolf Wissels’s puzzled and frightened farming family from Kalenberg, which was shown at the exhibition, are self-reliant, plain-living, God-fearing folk of a kind especially popular in North American art and literature. Looking at pictures such as this, we should ask ourselves whether, or rather to what extent, the character of the painting was determined by the regime which approved of it.