A group of renowned experts will tomorrow tackle the difficult question of how - or if - art and propaganda associated with Europe's most hated regimes should be displayed.
(Media-Newswire.com) - A group of renowned experts will tomorrow tackle the difficult question of how - or if - art and propaganda associated with Europe’s most hated regimes should be displayed.
At a workshop organised by historians at The University of Manchester, they will discuss how recent research has uncovered a hidden modernist agenda not just in the Italian fascist regime, but also Nazi Germany.
“By understanding how these regimes used modernism to further their cause, we will be able to learn some important lessons about how to stop them in the future,” said joint organiser Dr Maiken Umbach, a Senior Lecturer in Modern European History at the University .
“We have to understand that the backward-looking “blood and soil” imagery we associate with these regimes today was not what constituted their attractiveness for many of their supporters at the time.
“Fascist regimes were modern in many ways: they had their own modern consumer and leisure industries, used the modern mass media extremely effectively, and even promoted modernist art when it suited them.”
Speaking at the event will be academic Gregory Maertz who will discuss his discovery of an unknown collection of Nazi war art - by a group of artists embedded in the German army, commissioned directly by Hitler.
He will also speak about the difficulties he has encountered in trying to stage an exhibition of the works in the United States.
Bizarrely, the officially sanctioned paintings were modernist and at odds with the official Nazi line - which banned what Hitler himself described as “degenerate” modern art.
Avant-garde German artists were branded both enemies of the state and a threat to German culture, and some - such as Max Beckmann, George Grosz, Paul Klee and architect Mies van der Rohe - went into exile; Ernst Kirchner even committed suicide.
Also at the workshop is Hans Ottomeyer, Director of the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin, who will speak about a new exhibition on “Hitler and the Germans” in Berlin.
Rachel Knight, Head of Exhibitions, Imperial War Museum North, Manchester will join the debate.
And leading cultural historians of Nazism and Fascism, Roger Griffin, Charles Burdett, and Jeffrey Schnapp will look at the how our understanding of the role of modernism within fascism is changing.
Dr Maiken added: “Hitler and Mussolini presided over some of Europe’s most appalling regimes.
“Millions of people also died under the Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union, but its modernist realism has often been displayed in galleries across the world.
“Censoring the display of the modernist art and culture that came out of fascism today is politically much more dangerous than taking it seriously, and displaying it to the wider public.”
Notes for editors Dr Maiken Umbach is available for comment
Visualising And Exhibiting Fascism is which will take place on Friday 19 March at the University of Manchester’s Whitworth Art Gallery.
Mike Addelman Media Relations Faculty of Humanities The University of Manchester 0161 275 0790 07717 881567 michael.addelman@manchester.ac.uk
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