A painting best left hidden?

Several paintings lost in the aftermath of WWII have been found hidden in an apartment in Munich. One of them is interesting for the wrong reasons. Painted by the German Otto Dix it is a reminder of how corrupt European high art was in the early 1900s. It is meant to be a portrait of a woman:



Portrait of a woman by Otto Dix


Otto Dix is one of the better known painters of the era, and the painting above is estimated to be worth about ten million dollars.

Dix was part of an art movement called the "Neue Sachlichkeit" or "New Objectivity." He belonged to the "verists" subgroup of this movement:

The verists' vehement form of realism emphasized the ugly and sordid. Their art was raw, provocative, and harshly satirical. George Grosz and Otto Dix are considered the most important of the verists.

The problem is that the other competing art movements, at least in Central Europe, were equally unappealing. You had the Dada movement, which took the nihilist line of destroying everything in the belief that something better would appear afterwards:

This dissolution was the ultimate in everything that Dada represented, philosophically and morally; everything must be pulled apart, not a screw left in it customary place, the screw-holes wrenched out of shape, the screw, like man himself, set on its way towards new functions which could only be known after the total negation of everything that had existed before. Until then: riot destruction, defiance, confusion. The role of chance, not as an extension of the scope of art, but as a principle of dissolution and anarchy. In art, anti-art.

Note the aim of "the total negation of everything that had existed before" - this I take to be an expression of nihilism.

And then you had futurism, which was also committed to destroying traditional Europe, particularly "closed and predetermined forms" (which suggests a belief in the autonomous, self-determining individual "liberated" from whatever is predetermined):

The Futurist programme was based on the refusal of all closed and predetermined forms, on the exigency of a constant renewal of the arts, and the affirmation of the individual’s creative mind above all social hierarchy.

In their manifestos of 1909 to 1913 the Futurists celebrated the dynamism of great cities, the energy and destructive force of modern inventions. The hectic, deafening chaos of a mechanized world would destroy the old morality, the old society, the outmoded human product. They saw the cycle of death and rebirth repeated in men's entanglement with the machine, with electric power and kinetic force.

I've written recently about how liberal modernity bases itself, in part, on a certain understanding of human individuality, namely a belief that the creative unfolding of self is best achieved when the individual is detached from natural forms of human community such as the family, ethny and nation. It is possible that this was part of the futurists' "affirmation of individual's creative mind above all social hierarchy."

There were Australian artists who looked on in dismay at what was happening in the Old World. Australian art was still in a golden age, particularly when it came to landscapes:

Hans Heysen, Droving into the light

Finally, back to Otto Dix. It is sometimes said that the paintings of Otto Dix were the product of his traumatic experiences in the First World War. But there is evidence that Dix was a certain kind of nihilist prior to this. His thought shows the influence of both realist and vitalist forms of nihilism. Eugene Rose described realist nihilism this way:

He is the believer, in a word, in the "nothing-but," in the reduction of everything men have considered "higher," the things of the mind and spirit, to the lower or "basic": matter, sensation, the physical...the Realist world-view seems perfectly clear...in place of vague "higher values" naked materialism and self-interest.

Dix claimed later in life that he volunteered for service in WWI because he wanted to experience violence and death close at hand, because "I have to experience all the ghastly, bottomless depths of life for myself." We learn that:

Dix himself took a perverse pleasure in the events unfolding around him. Olaf Peter relates how Dix would often appal his friends by providing a “detailed description of the pleasurable sensation to be had when bayoneting an enemy to death.”

For a time, too, it seems that Dix was influenced by a vitalist nihilism:

Dix's worldview was deeply influenced by Nietzsche and the vitalism in life's 'will to power'. He, like the majority of his contemporaries, saw World War I as an opportunity to achieve both personal and national greatness through struggle and battle. In this spirit Dix intentionally signed-up with the German Army to fight, to experience life and action as it happened.

But the war was not transforming in the way that "struggle and battle" was supposed to achieve:

He was embittered and disappointed that the war, in which he and many others of his generation had placed such great hopes of vital change, had altered neither men nor their environment.

I've set all this out because when you look at the timing of European decline it becomes clear that a certain nihilism amongst the intelligentsia was prominent even before WWI (it may even have been part of the push toward war).

Have a look at the Otto Dix painting again. That is the disfigured soul of Otto Dix looking at you, a man charged with the cultural leadership of Europe in the early decades of the 1900s.

When did Australia turn?

In a recent post I discussed how the churches had pushed for internationalism as early as 1942, well before the influence of the Cultural Marxism of the 1960s.

This led to some discussion in the comments thread of when the decision to change course on immigration policy was made in Australia. I pointed out that it was made during the war cabinets in WWII. Although the Labor Party initiated the changes, they were supported by the Liberal Party.

The shift toward a multiethnic nation was supported by Arthur Calwell. Calwell believed in diversity as a matter of social justice:

As a school boy in Melbourne Calwell grew up in the shadow of his mixed Irish and Welsh ancestry. His wide reading in American history, into the lives of the English Chartists, Fabian Socialists and the nationalist struggles in Ireland and Continental Europe imbued him with a strong sense of history in which Australia was to be seen as an inheritor of the ideals enshrined in Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. In newspaper articles, speeches made as president of the Victorian Labor Party during the 1930s, and later after election as federal member for Melbourne in 1940, Calwell's deep concern for social justice was invariably linked with the creation in Australia of an ethnically mixed society through large-scale immigration.

...in a confidential note addressed to Chifley in 1944 he wrote of his determination to develop a heterogeneous society

Calwell, it is true, wanted to draw a particular line the sand: he wanted a diverse, heterogeneous, ethnically mixed society drawn from different European sources rather than non-European ones. But that's not a line that was ever going to hold. If it is thought socially just to build a society based on the principle of diversity, then the "moral" thing was always going to be to go the next step and to open up to non-European immigration.

Last year, the Labor minister Simon Crean gave a speech on Calwell's legacy:

He firmly believed in the principles of fairness, equality and social justice...Arthur Calwell successfully argued for the acceptance of a more heterogeneous society...In doing so he brought the union movement and the nation with him...His conviction to the cause was underpinned by his values and his commitment to equality, fairness and social justice...He not only led the debate on immigration—he was responsible for laying the fundamental foundation of modern Australia—an Australia that is inclusive, diverse and tolerant.

Calwell is a classic example of someone who wanted to take a radical principle to a certain point and then no more. But the next generation inevitably wanted to push on further and Calwell's objections were brushed aside.

As Simon Crean recognises, the principle that led to the open borders of today was put in place in the 1940s by men like Arthur Calwell, a Catholic Labor man who wanted to follow the example of the American melting pot. It didn't require the influence of the continental European cultural Marxists.

Did the institutions in 42 really need marching through?

There are people who blame Cultural Marxism/The Frankfurt School for what has gone wrong in the West.

The argument runs as follows. In the 1950s the West was going well. But a group of European Marxists (the Frankfurt School) had developed a new strategy. Instead of relying on a class war to win power they would instead begin a long march through the institutions. The 60s student rebellion gave these cultural Marxists their opportunity and they began to win influence in the institutions. This has then led to Western decline.

This theory of decline does have its merits. It refers to something real that did have seriously negative consequences in the West. It's worth understanding the particular theories generated by the Frankfurt School and how they influenced university life in particular from the 1960s onward.

But there are problems with the theory as well. And a major problem is the timing. The theory suggests that things were basically OK in the West until the 1960s. I don't think that's true and I'll give just one bit of evidence for that in a moment. Apart from this, the theory also suggests that the liberalism which dominated the West up to the 60s was also OK and that it was only when Cultural Marxists subverted this liberalism that things went wrong. That seems to me to let Western liberals off the hook and to discourage the kind of rethinking of liberal orthodoxy that needs to take place.

So what is some evidence that things were going seriously wrong before the 1960s? In 1941, when the Axis powers were triumphant in Europe, there was a conference of liberal Anglicans in Malvern, England. Led by the Archbishop of York and 23 bishops, these Anglicans wanted to lead "the ordering of the new society" which they were sure would emerge following the war.

How did they envisage this new society? Most notably, they were keen to build a European Union:

After the war our aim must be the unification of Europe as a cooperative commonwealth

There were also debates about dropping the importance of the mass in favour of social activism and of switching from private ownership of property. But what is really noteworthy are the speeches about how the old order must be swept away in favour of a completely new society - and this new society was envisaged in modern liberal terms.

Anyway, in 1942 an even more significant conference took place of American Protestant church leaders. This occurred in March around the time that the Japanese were invading Java (in other words, when the Axis powers were still predominant). 375 representatives of 30 denominations met together at Ohio Wesleyan University. What did they decide?

It was their view that the U.S. should lead the way in creating an international system of government. Here are some of the post-war policies they favoured:

• Worldwide freedom of immigration
• A world government of delegated powers
• Elimination of all tariff and quota restrictions on world trade
• International control of all armies and navies

The ultimate aim to be achieved was the following:

a duly constituted world government of delegated powers; an international legislative body, an international court with adequate jurisdiction, international administrative bodies with necessary powers, and adequate international police forces and provision for enforcing its worldwide economic authority.

So the question to be asked is this: did the churches really need to marched through and captured by cultural Marxists? Or had they already reached a point of post-nationalism under the influence of liberalism as early as the 1940s?

I think it's clear that the rot had already set in. Liberalism had already done the job by the 1940s - there was no need for the cultural Marxism of the 1960s to swing the churches.