Is Georg Baselitz Right About the Ziegler Triptych?
By Heloise Pinto
On 2nd October 2022, the Süddeutsche Zeitung reported that a letter had been written by the internationally renowned contemporary artist, Georg Baselitz, to the general director of the Bavarian State Paintings Collection in Munich, Bernhard Maaz, and the state minister for science and art, Markus Blume. In this letter, Baselitz called for the removal from display in the Pinakothek der Moderne’s current exhibition, ‘MIX& MATCH’, of Die Vier Elemente (The Four Elements, 1937) by Adolf Ziegler, who was president of the Reichskammer der Bildenden Künste under the Nazis and personally favoured by Adolf Hitler. According to the report, Baselitz claimed the painting served as Nazi propaganda, insulted its surroundings and did not belong in a room with the victims of Ziegler’s cultural destruction; Ziegler played a significant role in the regime’s purge of ‘degenerate’ art that took place from 1937, and his painting was given pride of place in its first ‘Great German Art’ exhibition in the same year.
Pinakothek Der Moderne ©Alice Wiegand/CC-BY-SA 4.0 (via Wikimedia Commons)
In response, Maaz and exhibition curator Oliver Kase told the Deutsche Presse Agentur that they rejected Baselitz’s categorisation of the painting as propagandistic. They described the critical examination of National Socialist art as one of the museum’s important tasks and insisted that an attitude of historical objectivity was needed when engaging with it. They said that continuing to hide “problematic” art only ever results in the preservation of its taboo.
Adolf Ziegler, Die Vier Elemente, 1937 ©Sibylle Forster, Bavarian State Painting Collections
MIX & MATCH is a temporary rearrangement of the Pinakothek der Moderne’s collection, designed, as its title suggests, to bring together works of art from the last 120 years according to new themes which transcend time and media, prompting new dialogue between them. It states that the exhibition’s “unconventional juxtapositions” offer vivid perspectives into our own time – the museum wants visitors to gain an awareness of a newly discovered art history to take forward. In this context, then, Die Vier Elemente does not represent Nazi propaganda, as Baselitz claims; MIX & MATCH is not promoting or enforcing ideology.
We can speculate about why Baselitz also claims the painting insults its environment. As an artist, he may well believe that paintings have a power and agency to affect their surroundings – surroundings which, in this case, include his own work. He has also publicly stated his personal inclination towards looking into the past over looking into the future. The latter is closely tied to the museum’s aims for MIX & MATCH because it does not exclusively deal with Die Vier Elemente’s early history.
Furthermore, his request implies that he believes the need to kill that power, which he feels only taking the painting down could achieve, overrides any duty to objectivity on the part of the museum. But this would also amount to a neglect of the museum’s responsibility to address it. Through the piece’s continued confrontation with the public, in new and forward-thinking circumstances, its taboo is lifted, and its power killed. But Baselitz does highlight the facts that, regardless of this, the distressing nature of Nazi art will never subside, and that a museum’s task in presenting it is both crucial and very difficult.
Bibliography
Cook, William. “Haus of Ill Repute”.14.01.17.https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/haus-of-ill-repute
Lehnen, Christine. “Georg Baselitz: Pinakothek soll NS-Kunst entfernen”. 06.10.22. https://www.dw.com/de/baselitz-adolf-ziegler-pinakothek-m%C3%BCnchen-gem%C3%A4lde-entfernen/a-63354648
Schlenker, Ines “Defining National Socialist Art: The First “Grosse Deutsche Kunstausstellung” in 1937”. In Degenerate Art: The Attack on Modern Art in Nazi Germany 1937, edited by Olaf Peters, pp.90-104. London: Prestel, 2014
Villa, Angela. “Georg Baselitz Calls for Removal of Nazi-Era Painting in Munich Museum”. 3.10.22. https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/george-baselitz-calls-for-removal-of-nazi-era-painting-in-munich-museum-1234641519/
https://gagosian.com/artists/georg-baselitz/
https://www.pinakothek-der-moderne.de/ausstellungen/mix-and-match/