Art that triumphed beneath the Nazi jackboot

Artists fought the censorship of France’s cultural life, writes Tracy McNicoll

OF THE many indignities foisted on occupied France, the charade of a vibrant Paris art scene under the Nazi jackboot was salt on an open wound.

A pageant of rubber-stamped galas filled an ersatz cultural calendar while, in hovels across the country, artists — many persecuted for their heritage, beliefs, or “degenerate” creations — defied a war waged not least against art. Now, at the Musée d’Art Moderne of the City of Paris, a retrospective, L’Art en Guerre, France 1938–1947, explores that dark era.

Vast and affecting, the exhibit features 400 pieces by 100 artists — from headliners such as Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and Marc Chagall to unknowns with thin but powerful repertoires. The most revealing pieces are those, many rare or never before seen, from inside internment camps: Bleak or ironic, mundane or fanciful, devised with the materials at hand in defiant proof of humanity. “No, painting is not done to decorate apartments,” Picasso famously declared in 1945. “It is an instrument of war for attack and defence against the enemy.”

The show opens ominously, inviting visitors through a vestibule strung with blackened burlap sacks. Photos of disjointed dolls confected by German surrealist Hans Bellmer set the tone. A flashback to Jan 1938 — just months before appeasement in Munich would seal Europe’s fate — when Marcel Duchamp hung 1,200 sacks of coal from the rafters of the International Exposition on Surrealism in Paris. Curators Laurence Bertrand Dorléac and Jacqueline Munck hold that 1938 show up as no less than a premonition. A waking nightmare, soundtracked with asylum screams, strewn with dead leaves, permeated with coal-roasted coffee, it invited visitors to explore Salvador Dalí’s Rainy Taxi installation (also known as Mannequin Rotting in a Taxi-Cab) by flashlight.

It was, L’Art en Guerre argues, the surrealists’ take on the horrors to come. Within months, the show’s illustrious roster would be forced into hiding or exile, personae non gratae in a sombre new order. Bellmer and Max Ernst were caged as “foreign undesirables” in camps on French soil. Between 1938 and 1946, 200 such camps would detain 600,000 people — preludes, for some, to Nazi death camps.

L’Art en Guerre also showcases pieces from the launch of the Musée National d’Art Moderne. Clinical, cleansed of daring, abstraction, and disorder — and of foreign content — that 1942 show aimed to please.

However, behind the scenes, artists in hiding, exile, or captivity used their craft to cope and resist. Banned from exhibiting, Picasso persisted in the same Left Bank atelier that yielded Guernica in 1937.

On the Mediterranean coast, artists took refuge while US rescuer Varian Fry sought to smuggle them abroad. Surrealists invented a fantastical tarot-like game, Jeu de Marseille, the most famous of the collective works in the exhibit.

The real showstoppers here are by prisoners. With paltry wares, some catalogue horrors: Barbed wire, latrines, lice, pestilence. The desolation of Felix Nussbaum’s 1940 tableau In the Camp is hardly bearable, knowing his war would end at Auschwitz.

But the show shines brightest when it savours individual stories. Jeanne Bucher, a tough Alsatian in her 70s, sheltered artists and dared to show Wassily Kandinsky in her discreet Paris gallery. Joseph Steib, an ailing amateur, fought Hitler with a paintbrush. His vivid scenes, soaked in wishful thinking, flit between anger, hope, and satire.

The exhibit exposes them as Steib did at war’s end, in a “Salon of Dreams”. They are eloquent figures in a war waged on artists — and proof that art won.