What Emil Nolde's Past Can Tell Us about How to Deal with Photography
In which I talk about "cancel culture", an artist's biography, and my most recent article on CPhMag.com
This is a 1940 painting entitled Herbsthimmel am Meer (Autumn Sky at the Sea) by German painter Emil Nolde. In 2012, it sold for almost $700,000 at a Christie’s auction. Nolde, the story went at that time, had had a hard time under the Nazis, having been included in their “Degenerate Art” exhibition. So he retired to the North German coast to paint, using the “degenerate” style he had been using for so long. In fact, German author Siegfried Lenz used Nolde as inspiration for a major figure in one of his most famous novels, Deutschstunde (The German Lesson).
I read the novel (at some stage, I tried to catch up on noteworthy post-war books), and it’s pretty good. I found it a bit too stilted and the painter’s righteousness was a bit too on the nose, but still, it’s a good read.
There’s only one problem with the above: Nolde was in fact a rabid anti-Semitic, and he had no problem whatsoever with the Nazis — until they confiscated his work and decided he wasn’t going to be one of their painters. After the war, Nolde carefully hid all of that, and successfully so (truth be told, especially in the early years of West Germany, you didn’t have to do all that much to hide your Nazi past — people were eager to embrace those who said they hadn’t been a Nazi, and if you didn’t look carefully, you wouldn’t be surprised).
It was only after 2013 when the truth finally came to light. Christian Ring, head of the Nolde Foundation (that had also hidden the artist’s racist past), allowed for the public to see the real Nolde:
an exhibition at Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof museum that opened this summer and remains on view through September 15. “Nolde: A German Legend, the Artist in National Socialism” (the title on display at the museum, as opposed to its online mantle “Emil Nolde. A German Legend. The Artist during the Nazi Regime”) is the first attempt by the foundation to break the German public’s impression of Nolde as a victim of Hitler’s regime rather than an advocate for his anti-Semitic worldview.
You can read all about this in this article, from which the above quote was taken.
This was a huge deal in Germany. One of their presumably anti-Nazi painters, glorified in a famous novel, had been unmasked. Paintings of his had been hanging in the Chancellery — Angela Merkel had them taken down.
I’m telling you all this because of late, debates about a so-called cancel culture have reached photoland. There was an open letter, published by a large number of very established writers in Harper’s Magazine, that decried a danger to free speech and that was then translated and published in other countries. This was followed by a counter-letter, which vehemently disagreed with the first letter… And now there’s a huge debate over “cancel culture” (larger parts of it driven by the right and far right).
I have two problems with the idea of “cancel culture.” First, while there are a few cases where people got into trouble even though they shouldn’t have, now the term is used as a blanket defense against any attempt to hold the powerful accountable. Here’s the thing: Criticizing someone, attempting to hold them accountable, is not canceling. But more and more, we’re seeing exactly that connection being made.
The second problem I have with the idea of “cancel culture” is that more often than not, the actual issue at hand is not being talked about. Instead, there is a fight over a term “cancel culture”.
The question of power is a big deal in photoland, but so are the other topics that are being brought up. Reducing everything to “cancel culture” doesn’t help anyone.
Having said that, now read this article: Martin Parr’s resignation from photo festival sparks ‘cancel culture’ debate. From what I wrote above (and also have been writing for quite some time), it’s probably clear that I’m aligned with this statement by John Edwin Mason that addresses the fact there is a reckoning happening:
This troubles many people who aren't used to being held accountable for what they do and say and the harm they cause,” Mason says. “Some of them lash out and foolishly call this ‘cancel culture’. No. It's accountability for doing racist and sexist things, whether it's being blind to a demeaning juxtaposition of photographs or failing to hire photographers of colour.
The piece also quotes Damion Berger who said
By this new standard, Robert Frank’s The Americans would be thrown on the same bonfire. How would Garry Winogrand’s 1967 picture of the mixed race couple in Central Park each holding a baby chimp be perceived today? As the commentary on interracial prejudice that it was or would the photographer be perceived a racist today?
This brings me back to Nolde.
(As an aside, that Garry Winogrand photograph has been — rightly — deemed racist by a number of critics for decades now. Also, I really don’t understand why Robert Frank’s book now somehow “would be thrown on the same bonfire”.)
Was Merkel “canceling” Nolde when she had the paintings taken down at the Chancellery? And what was that museum doing, shattering the old idea of Nolde as the anti-Nazi? Once you start imagining articles about Nolde with the “cancel culture” approach, you realize how ridiculous that would be. Also, there was a Nolde exhibition at Hamburger Bahnhof, but they included a lot of material and writing that taught viewers more about the artist.
In fact, that’s what art historians do all the time: re-evaluate artists and/or their work after new knowledge comes to light, in whatever way.
If we want to treat photography as a serious form of art (which is what I thought we had all agreed on), then this means that we also need to adopt proper art-historical standards and procedures. That might entail finding out that one (or more) of our beloved heroes was (were) in fact a lot more problematic than we thought…
That’s the way this works. If we want to make progress.
Unrelated: I thought I knew all there was to know about Yayoi Kusama. In particular, I had read An Artist for the Instagram Age. And then I read The Kusama Industrial Complex: How Yayoi Kusama Came to Captivate the World, Fueling Museums and the Market.
Or rather I didn’t read it at first because the headline had convinced me what it was all about. I actually only read it once I found out that it had been written by Greg Allen. And now I’m very glad that I did, and I can only encourage you to do so, too. The description of Kusama’s early career is incredibly revealing and insightful, and I bet it’s not even remotely what you might imagine (it certainly wasn’t what I had thought).
In July 1960, two days after an assistant at the Martha Jackson Gallery canceled a long sought-after studio visit with Kusama, the distraught artist threw herself out her second-story window. She spent the next six weeks recovering from her injuries and unable to work.
I can honestly say that I’ve come to see Kusama’s work with completely different eyes now. That doesn’t happen all that often after reading about an artist’s life.
Lastly, I just published a long piece on power, consent, and obligations in photography. It centers on a few thing I have been thinking about a lot recently, and they happen to tie in with some things I wrote about years ago.
Also: originally, I thought that consent would be the key to the piece, but that shifted while I wrote it. We need to talk about consent a lot more, but the discussions shouldn’t stop there. At least that’s the realization I ended up coming to. Feel free to share your thoughts with me!
As always, thank you for reading. I hope that you’re safe and well, and please wear a mask!
— Jörg
I’m a freelance writer, photographer, and educator currently living and working in the US.
This Mailing List is my attempt to bring back some of the aspects that made early blogging so great -- community engagement and a more relaxed and maybe less polished approach to writing and thinking about photography. You can find the bulk of my main writing on CPhMag.com.
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