Ranting Cassandras

There are​ , of course, the huddled masses, nameless, deprived of family, possessions, hope, dignity, wrapped in ragged blankets of despair, worn and punished for their very existence. And then there are the onymous wealthy or celebrated or connected, who have the means to act on their prognosis. Billy Wilder’s apothegm that ‘the optimists died in the gas chambers, the pessimists have pools in Beverly Hills’ is all the more bitter given that the optimists included three members of his immediate family who failed to get out.

That failure – the word is impertinent – was repeated many million times while the lucky few lived lives mostly unsullied by the typhus, tuberculosis, dysentery, barbed wire, starvation and murder recorded by the Neue Sachlichkeit painter Felix Nussbaum in the terrible last months of his life. ‘Lucky’ is relative: flight often ended in an unsympathetic bureaucratic cul de sac, in detention and possible deportation. German Jews were decanted into camps also populated by interned Nazis. The screws couldn’t distinguish one group from the other. And even when escape was successful, the place where the desperate alighted was hardly Cockaigne. It was more likely the Isle of Man, whose low-rent hotels and boarding houses fulfilled their drear destiny as improvised internment camps for the fortunate among the wretched.

One way to survive was through internal exile. Thirty years after the war, Christian Schad, so forgotten that he had no reputation to blemish, would exhume himself to become a sucker for Oriental religions and an octogenarian flower child. Schad’s minutely rendered subjects were freaks, transsexuals, cripples, deviants, whores, priests of the night: the sodales of the whip and the fascinum. It might be assumed that in Nazi eyes he was the most obviously ‘degenerate’ of painters. But his degeneracy was not of the type that was hunted down by the NSDAP’s warrior aesthetes and taste police. Indeed such was their ethical inversion that they would not have acknowledged his delinquency, which coloured his behaviour rather than his art.

This glacial painter, whose work is as much about his strident gaze as it is about his teratological subjects, shunned solidarity with fellows such as Nussbaum, joined the NSDAP in an act of uncritical self-betrayal, quit painting (to become a brewery executive) and was content for his old work to be exhibited in several editions of the Great German Art Exhibition, the state’s corrective to the celebrated and better attended Degenerate Art Exhibition.

But no painters, however dishonourable, appear to have behaved with the sheer bloody-minded effrontery and amorality routinely exhibited by architects in peace and war, especially war. Mies van der Rohe was so keen to deal with the Nazis that he was prepared to alter his designs to their will. It got him nowhere. Le Corbusier even opened an office in Vichy, another town of press-ganged hotels. His risible ploy failed to gain him any commissions. Walter Gropius proceeded more cautiously. Like Mies, he had been the director of the Bauhaus. Bémol! It was further noted by the NSDAP that among his works was a monument to those who had died in 1920 resisting the failed Kapp Putsch against the Weimar government. The monument was jaggedly expressionistic, stylistically atypical of Gropius’s usually understated oeuvre. The design was, however, irrelevant: it was the thought that counted. The anti-proto-fascist sentiment was self-inculpating. Another black mark, although Gropius was, perplexingly, invited to submit plans in a competition to rebuild the Reichsbank. Rejected. The racial state of Germany was as opposed to modernism as it was to Jewry.

Less than a year after the Machtergreifung, Gropius, although diligently mute about the new Nazi regime, was resigned to receiving no further commissions in Germany. Fearing what was to come, he fled via Italy to Britain, where he accepted an offer from Dorothy Elmhirst and her husband, Leonard, to work on their Bauhaus-ish project at Dartington, not altogether enthusiastically described by Owen Hatherley as ‘that exceptionally British establishment thing, a progressive private school’. It was rather more than that. Gropius was amazed by the display of wealth and opulence: ‘A vast park … trees I have never seen … sixty motorcars.’ He demonstrated the traditional architectural appetite for toying with biting the hand that feeds: ‘The wife is an American and has an enormous fortune.’ Unhappily, it didn’t feed. The Swiss American architect William Lescaze had already been appointed to design the dance school, the model farm, the weaving mill etc. Gropius was thrown the pre-gnawed bones. After working with Maxwell Fry to design one of a pair of complementary and now celebrated houses in Chelsea (the other was by Erich Mendelsohn and Serge Chermayeff), Gropius quit Britain for the US, disappointed by the lack of recognition and central heating, by the food, the reserve, the puritanical self-denial, the subfusc, the scorched smell of dodgy electricity.

This was the ubiquitous damp shivery backdrop against which these ruptured lives tried to remake themselves or hoped to be allowed to continue. Thousands sought refuge in a country without music, save German music: Hallé, Bruch etc. It seemed backwards, isolated and provincial. London was no exception. But it was intermittently friendly, cautiously hospitable, seldom life-threatening. Its xenophobia was generally occluded. The overtness of antisemitism was determined by class: gentlemen had their sly codes, other ranks chortled rhyming slang. A rabble was roused by, among others, the MI5 operative Joseph Ball, who moonlighted as the editor of Truth and coined the non-adhesive epithet ‘refu-spy’. The reliably squalid Daily Mail was, of course, active in this area. A correspondent, signed only ‘Brigadier, Eastbourne’, recommended that enemy aliens should wear armbands stating their country of origin.

During the 1930s and into the war years, the Mail’s readers regarded refugees, in Hatherley’s neat formulation, as ‘a series of ranting Cassandras dropped in English suburbia, warning of imminent catastrophes that were impossible to believe in – carpet-bombing, concentration camps, genocide – until they happened’. Many of the Cassandras were artists, so doubly untrustworthy. This was a two-pronged attack. According to the lawyer, painter and energetic connector Fred Uhlman, ‘psychoanalysts were overrunning the country.’ If only the incursion had been filmed. This genial hyperbole conflated ‘Finchleystrasse’ and ‘JW3’ with the whole of Britain. When he first arrived in London, three years before the outbreak of war, Uhlman knew so little about the country that, as Hatherley writes, he expected to find ‘a happy isle of lotus eaters’, a ‘backwater’ that had ‘somehow sat out the 20th century’.

Hatherley’s despondent verdict is apt if the criteria for admission to the 20th century are the promotion of architectural modernism and a cadre of workers steeped in Marx. There was little of the former, while the English proletariat’s indifference to ideology baffled European socialists – as did what Hatherley calls its ‘relative irrationality’. This overlooks the Workers’ Educational Association, the Unity Theatre and the countless institutes, libraries and galleries funded by philanthropists at a time when that word signified something other than narcissistic wealth boasting to narcissistic wealth.

The imperilled brought with them multitudinous kinds of suffering. The absence of the mechanism and conditions that might sanction self-determination caused widespread helplessness: changing one’s name became the first of several desperate devices to fit in, to assimilate, to go unnoticed. The biographies of this book’s personae – sculptors, metal forgers, typographers, designers, carvers etc – are often well-researched lists of enforced trajectories and places, which too may own several names. By the time the longed-for destination, deemed safe, is reached it has been conquered. The streets now honour the victor’s generals and nephews. Boundaries are obliterated with a pompously heraldic rubber stamp; they are reinforced by itchy-fingered sentries. Former monoglots make pidgins from lex’s off-cuts. The soil beneath their feet changes. The self inhabits a distorting mirror.

The social disparities of Berlin or Vienna or Prague were as pronounced as England’s, but those polyglot cities possessed hierarchies of a different shape from that of London, wishfully characterised as ‘a rain-slicked Gotham of sex, dreams and threat’. For Bill Brandt, England was a nation of ‘dreamers in a surreal landscape’, a nation he struggled to be part of. He spoke with an unidentifiable accent and bent both language and nation to his will, constructing tableaux vivants which ‘purists’ – i.e. the primly artless – call cheating. No more or less than any other art, photographs are inventions. They are not windows through which we see the world. Representation is no more involved than it is in cinematic or prose fictions. They ought not to record; they should create their own actuality. Brandt changed the way the English look at the English. He was cosmopolitan. His disciple, Tony Ray-Jones, wasn’t. He allowed his once provincial eye to be led by Brandt. Ray-Jones may have shared his subjects with Donald McGill or Ken Russell but his compositions of simultaneous actions by competing players are stolen from a different world.

They are translations. Here is a material example of the ‘alienation’ that possesses multiple meanings from Brecht onwards so that Hatherley was bound to use it as his title: these parallel lives cross or collide without acknowledgment, without realisation of each other’s proximity let alone existence until that existence becomes a belligerent cause to prosecute or defend, one way or the other (origin forgotten). Both groups suffer alienation. The long-since-installed and the supposedly threatened and threatening novice-fugitive are bound in mutual suspicion, confrontation, provocation and 180° misunderstanding. Hatherley concludes his introduction to this grand panorama thus: ‘The aliens made us all a little bit alien too.’

The​ incomers had a lot to get used to: the way the other uses a knife and fork (availability of scran in DP camps permitting); the profoundly white pastry rumoured to be the rendered sub-cutaneous fat of nuns or, perhaps, equine plasma; the so-called English sense of humour; the absence of architectural history from university curricula; the punishing joylessness of besuited Sundays, still available in Stornoway.

The sheer volume of dullness and the ubiquity of lack weighed on the English and their by no means entirely welcome guests. It would have been a rash cardinal who bet his crimson biretta on, say, a revival of sacred architecture within a couple of decades, but then he would not have bet on attempted extinction causing that revival unless he had had the practical good sense to endure Mein Kampf and so discover what was coming. And after what came – after apocalypse – there would be redemption, shame, anger that God could have let this happen and a renewal of faith that would include pardoning God for his gross lapse and expressing that forgiveness literally, physically, by placing the celebrant among, rather than in front of, the congregation so that it might be closer to the host that had been magically rendered tangible, subject to sight and touch and scent.

The sculptor Naomi Blake was born Zisel Dum at Mukachevo, then in Czechoslovakia. The city was annexed by Horthy’s Hungary. The Jews were deported. She survived Auschwitz and the death march. She left Europe for Mandate Palestine, where she began to sculpt while recovering after being shot by a British soldier. Later, in England, she made often anthropomorphic sculptures for new churches. One of Hatherley’s achievements – and this is far from the first time he has succeeded in this – is to turn the fragmented skeleton of research into undeservedly unheralded artists and their patrons of three-quarters of a century ago into smooth sweeping prose. Blake was one of several refugee artists who were commissioned by the higher clergy of an Anglican Church bent on ecumenicism and renewal, and appreciative of art’s balm, whether or not healing was the maker’s intention.

These decent humane clerics were sympathetic to an oneiric architecture that shifted from dream to diurnal reality when it was sanctioned by Vatican II. Refugees had brought with them not only their plight but their conceits of that plight’s relief through architecture for architecture’s sake, an architecture of abstraction that broke with ecclesiastical norms. The example of theatre in the round anticipated the sacred in a reversal of many centuries’ practice. The cool, deserted, puttyish interiors of Pieter Saenredam were one sort of cynosure. Icons and bondieuserie were obviously reckoned vulgar and excised. Minimalist ‘good taste’ and the inverse snobbery which discloses wealth through its negative are ultimately founded in iconoclasm.

A further aspiration was the rejection of orthogonal geometry and of symmetry, which are authoritarian properties no matter what idiom or polity incorporates them: the cathedrals of Strasbourg and Sens, Beauvais and Troyes are doucer than they would be if whole. They carry the germ of ruination and, hence, of the picturesque, a deathless mode which the cravenly francophile English intelligentsia savoured. Herbert Read was an exception. In the eyes of the battalions of Bells, Frys, Grants, Garnetts and other assorted mediocrities art was French and had something to do with having to go to Dieppe and Boulogne-sur-Mer to find splodgy French subjects and drink rough French wine with real French people.

It didn’t have much to do with the invigorating sexual sadism and vertiginous brutality and severed intestines on the ceiling that were Europe’s norms if one believed Beckmann, Grosz, Dix. They were the children of Bosch and Bouts, the pejorist prophets of bodies piled high. Of course it may be that they were simply wishful and that the Berlin and Vienna of échangisme, of old Etonians buggering rents like ‘maxi my friend from the mariahilfer strasse’ (the parody is Osbert Lancaster’s), of flagellation, every body a chunk of merchandise, Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science, transvestism and Beardsley-come-to-life was an invention and the claim that 25 per cent of Berliners frequented sex clubs a libidinous exaggeration. Whatever the actuality, the supreme painters of the age would, with the exception of Schad, soon be quashed by the Nazi terror and, after its defeat, by the fatuous CIA-promoted disparagement of representational painting because it was contaminated by that terror.

Abstraction does not lend itself to satire. The once savage collagist John Heartfield, lost without his galère of targets, became well-mannered. Few were able to bring with them so much as a fraction of their past work. And the ethos, the society and the gallery of subjects peculiar to that society dispersed, vanished into exile, turned to ash. All they had was what was in their heads.

Even those who enjoyed solid reputations in the countries and languages they had abandoned found that such reputations did not count for much in their new ‘home’. Finding appropriate employment, any employment, was a problem. Would Lolita have existed had Nabokov obtained the position he sought at Leeds University? A resounding no!

Oskar Kokoschka painted portraits in a studio in Mayfair, which doesn’t suggest penury. He was an exception. ‘He became one of the foremost German Expressionists,’ without, as Hatherley puzzlingly puts it, ‘belonging to any school’. The implication is that Expressionism was polyvalent. Kokoschka himself stated baldly: ‘My paintings … contained no promise of an idyllic peace.’ He became peripatetic. He saw promise in Käthe Strenitz, the future poet of rusting girder bridges who had been delivered by Kindertransport to a farm in Hampshire, where, undernourished, she slept on a floor. He got her a place at the Regent Street Polytechnic.

Hatherley accuses Britain of doing ‘much less than it could have done’. What it, and its immigrants, did do was to create a dependence between art schools and the more laughably self-regarding end of pop music, youth fashions, cultish ‘movements’ and an accompanying taxonomy, all of which alienate anyone bereft of the hairdo of the moment. Hatherley has a neat aptitude for finding links across the decades: Berlin and Vienna in the 1920s were very approximately recreated in the clubs of London and Manchester half a century later. The link here is tenuous: these were clubs with no greater political purpose or social cause other than that of getting off your face and sharing sweat in latex.