Nightmare decade

The 1930s, presently at the National Gallery of Canada, is an exhibition I must recommend, but only if you're feeling strong, because the art works chosen for it have a nightmarish quality, especially, because of their historical context, the ones attempting to be images of perfection. The surrealist pictures, sculptures and photographs, in response to the messages of fascist / socialist totalitarianism, were nightmarish on purpose. Rejecting "control exercised by reason", as it said in the exhibition notes, they were created to record the "violent, strange, hysterical, erotic subconscious" that lay just below the surface of those days.

The first part of the exhibition is all about eggs, which symbolize the generation of the New Man or new world that North Americans, Russians and western Europeans were hoping for, latter-day annunciation paintings by Feitelson of the USA entitled Genesis I, Genesis II, featuring melon seeds, avocado pits and the ubiquitous egg alongside some idealised naked woman or Madonna, and with smooth stone carvings called Mysterious Egg (by Max Ernst) or Triumph of the Egg (by Flannagan), hatching an American eagle. Salvador Dali made an ironic comment on all this in a later painting (1943) called Geopoliticus Child Watching the Birth of the New Man, a picture in which a man emerges backwards from a bleeding egg or globe into a desert.

In the next gallery hung cell-like abstractions by Kandinsky, in the kind of shapes and colours you might see through a microscope, followed by large bronzes by Masson and Giacometti, respectively entitled Ecstasy: looked like a couple of praying mantis mating, and Woman with her Throat Cut: praying mantis on its back with its legs apart, neck bones chopped like a tree. Nasty, but clever. I couldn't help thinking of Kafka's short story Die Verwandlung in this room. In fact there was a Miró painting entitled Metamorphosis, too.

Then we came to the hero-worship section, with images of Stalin beautified and an enormously magnified bronze head of Mussolini, of colossi striding among the masses at their feet: parades of revolutionary Russian workers or identical soldiers. In a separate room, an extract from Leni Riefensthal's film Triumph des Willens (1934). documenting a Hitler rally. The thousands upon thousands of fit, disciplined and devoted young men ready to build a new world but actually trained to wreak destruction on the old one were conditioned by the 1930s glorification of sport; witness Rodchenko's Russian photographs of Male and Female "pyramids," paintings of oarsmen and gymnasts muscular as Greek gods, Nazi propaganda leaflets exorting the Aryan people to be healthy and multiply (Gesunde Frau, gesundes Volk).

There were idealised paintings of farmworkers in the German countryside, in a pre-Raphaelite, ultra realistic 19th century style, although in one of these (Kalenberg Farming Family by Adolf Wissel, 1939) the faces of the people portrayed look terribly sad. They remind me of the family in the film chronicle, Heimat. Then came the Four Elements by Adolf Ziegler, a triptych that used to hang over Hitler's mantelpiece and now belongs to a museum in Munich, the classically-proportioned, naked women representing Fire, Water, Earth and Air.

And finally, a selection of the rebels' art, Entartete Kunst as the Nazis described it: the monstrous images created by Picasso, Stanley Spencer, Max Ernst, Otto Dix, Pyke Koch, Ivan le Lorraine Albright, Christian Bérard, August Sander (his Victims of Persecution series being photo-portraits of intelligent-looking Jews), George Grosz, Rudolf Schlichter and John Heartfield. Their work, distorted, contorted and painful as it is, was at least honest and it felt strangely like relief to get among it, however troubling, after the propaganda perpetrated by their contemporaries.