The Arts Under a Dictator

For most of the past 15 years I have written an Art Blog purely focused on the art world. In good conscience I have to continue to speak to the attempt to stifle artistic expression as that is what the man or men in the White House are doing their best to achieve.

An article in Hyperallergic by Ed Simon dated February 20, 2025 is titled, “Donald Trump Brings Back, “Degenerate Art”. For those who do not recall the history, Hitler held two exhibitions in 1937. The first was “The Great Art Exhibition” showing art that Hitler approved with depictions of statuesque blond nudes, idealized soldiers and landscapes. The second was “Entartete Kunst” (Degenerate Art, an exhibition that Hitler curated to illustrate what he considered bad art. It included modern non-representational art and particularly that by German Jews. Some of those artists were Max Beckmann, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Paul Klee, Otto Dix, Marc Chagall, Franz Marc, Lyonel Feininger, George Grosz, and Emil Nolde.

Simon’s article continues, “The president’s obsession with cultural control is evidence of a continued fascist creep not just another joke exercise in narcissism”. I for one have not been laughing. Before the press would acknowledge it, I was predicting what was coming. Not because I was prescient but because I knew the playbook… my parents had to leave Germany. My father was thrown out of University in Munich when the book burnings started in the same town in 1933. If you want to know more you will find it in histories of Germany in the 1930’s when Hitler rose to power.

Hitler had a vision of architecture for what he called “Germania”. He said in 1942 that, "Berlin will be comparable as a world capital only to Egypt, Babylon or Rome." a city full of bloated marble architecture and grandiose boulevards broader than the Champs Elysee reflected his idea that Berlin would become the center of his global Third Reich.

Model for Germania

On the first day of his second Presidency Trump signed an executive order on how Federal architecture should look. https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/promoting-beautiful-federal-civic-architecture/ Already in 2020 he had mandated that all future federal projects conform to Neoclassical architectural styles.

Exactly one week ago, the Los Angeles Times published an article on Trump and the arts. The article mentions that because of the latter’s DEI directive, there followed the cancellation of both a U.S. Marine Band performance featuring high school students of color and an exhibit featuring Black and LGBTQ+ artists at the Art Museum of the Americas. Under a dictatorship, it is not necessary to forbid actions directly but to let those in charge fear retribution. Unfortunately, it works!

Tracing the current editing of cultural history Adam Schrader wrote on Artnet on February 27, Following Trump’s January executive order announcing that the U.S. will only recognize two sexes, the National Park Service has deleted transgender and queer references on the Stonewall National Monument website. All mentions of “LGBTQ+” (seen on an archived version of the site from February 12) now read “LGB.”

Further, funding for a planned exhibition on physician-scientist Anthony Fauci at the National Museum of Health and Medicine has been canceled by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). I am sure that action would reduce the National Debt by some thousands of dollars, but it will also deny people the opportunity to learn about a man who staunched the epidemic that took more lives than America lost in the Civil War and World Wars I & II combined!

Hugo Crosthwaite’s portrait of Dr. Anthony Fauci

The arts bring people together, be it in a gallery or theater, to share emotions and broaden understanding. It is fundamental to our lives though we may not always realize it. That is why every dictator throughout history tries to control the culture of their society telling the people what is good and what is bad. Our president joins a line of infamous leaders in addition to the one mentioned above. This from the Human Rights Foundation, “In both Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia, art was simultaneously silenced and weaponized to reinforce propaganda. Both authoritarian regimes understood the threat art posed to them; their totalitarian systems were built on specific narratives, which art could question, critique, and probe. Today, these are truths authoritarian leaders in countries around the globe still know. The fight to protect art continues, and with each passing day, it becomes more necessary.”