‘Kalenberg Peasant Family’ (1939) by Adolf Wessel: Compliant Nazi Artist or Compliant Dissident?

‘‘I am opposed to tyranny of any form over the mind of man.’’

(Thomas Jefferson)

If you search for ‘Adolf Wessel’ online you will see the Wikipedia entry for him and this on the very first line: ‘He was one of the official artists of Nazism.’

However, at the very end of this extremely short characterisation of his work as being compliant with the prevailing ideology and cultural tropes of Nazism we find this rather interesting and revealing caveat: ‘…but his work contains subtle distortions and accentuations influenced by expressionism.’

I believe there were certainly ‘subtle distortions’ in Wessels paintings but they had nothing to do with ‘expressionism’ and everything to do with an artist cleverly showing the world, that all is not, as harmonious and idyllic as the Nazi regime under Adolf Hitler, wanted it to be.

The development of a fascist aesthetic to support a political ideology demands that it is widely disseminated and seen. The Nazis created museums and galleries and one of the first buildings Hitler had built was a museum to display the art he was so enamoured of. It was here that in 1937 that the first ‘Great German Art Exhibition’ took place.