Vox Populi

Two exhibitions might have helped define the world of modern art:  the 1913 Armory Show, organized by the Association of American Painters at the Lexington Street National Guard Armory in New York -- introducing Fauvism, Cubism and Futurism to broad public audiences (it was advertised as the "new spirit" in art [figures like Georges Braque, Marcel Duchamp, Henri Matisse and Picasso gained their first exposure to major North American publics]) -- and Hitler's 1937 exhibition of "degenerate art" in Munich, exhibiting the work of some of the exact same artists, or their inheritors, as examples of "dilettantism" and that ever-dangerous Jewish imagination.  You know -- the Jewish imagination that apparently ran the worldwide banking conspiracy and the Bolshevik revolution at the same time.  The American exhibition was relatively well-received.  Publics were shocked but interested; after New York, the show made its way to Chicago and Boston.  The Munich show was really well-received.  More than two million people went through its doors on its four  month run.  Down the street, Hitler put on another shindig with his favorite Nazi artists; happy farmers and Teutons with bulging muscles.  About a tenth as many people went to that.

The Neue Galerie, on New York's Upper East Side, has recently replicated Hitler's show based on what few pieces it was able to get its hands on -- some Klees, some Kirchners, some Kokoschkas (trouble makers, all of them).  The New Yorker reports in its March 24 issue that the exhibition also features a room with large empty frames formerly housing works by many of the same artists, probably destroyed during the War -- vanished into illicit black markets, or burned in that great symbolic gesture often used from inquisitions to anti-Semitic purges: tossing intellectually important artifacts onto a fire.  The "degenerate" show is a heck of a thing to try to reproduce.  Art in the first decades of the twentieth century was surrounded by torsion; how do you represent the human being on occasions when the West and the world were about to make themselves into a "slaughter bench," as philosopher G.W.F. Hegel once termed it -- and technology and politics were moving to extremes of space, time and logic which human minds were not used to comprehending?

Of course, looking back now, we can see the significance of daring strikes to remake representation; to tear the human being down to his or her psychological soul, as so many at the start of the twentieth century were prone to do, or simply contemplate the very nature (and possibility) of a straight line or whether the color blue (or any other color) made sense anymore (as more than a few were also prone to do in those years).  "Artists before their times," we might say; free spirits in search of publics, or because of their daring and "larger" society's lack of comprehension, figures doomed to be misunderstood and experience the pain of persecution before acceptance.  It's a funny thing with the popular mind or voice, though; that which can vote (sometimes hyper) nationalist parties into power, descend into the illogic of pogroms or bandy about anti-intellectualism over dinner tables.  It's the same people, at least in some cases, who can detect free expression when they see it and whose curiosity can be the beginning of acceptance even when acceptance is more curiosity than acceptance to begin with.  The art, and memorialization, at the Neue Galerie, is undoubtedly important and a historical monument worth noting.  The most significant monument, however, might be the faint echoes of the footsteps of the more than two million people who saw the show that one can still hear if one puts one's ear up to history.  Indeed, their footsteps echo especially loudly when compared with the very few footsteps echoing through the halls of the show Hitler and his cronies wanted us to see -- silence around art no one really wanted.  Seventy-seven years later, footsteps in an art gallery, of all places, ring like the sound of distant yet constant truth; the possibility of human insight subverting the worst attempts to deliver truths that, in the end, aren't really that.