Kirchner's Self Portrait as a Soldier: Degenerate by Hitler

At the peak of his reign, Hitler found it necessary to profoundly make evident of his already evident anti-semitism. He organized two art exhibits to be set up in Munich, one with “degenerate” art called the “Entartete Kunst,” the other called and displaying “Great German Art.” The Entartete Kunst was divided into different rooms with different themes, “art that was blasphemous, art by Jewish or communist artists, art that criticised German soldiers, art that offended the honour of German women” (Burns). Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s Self Portrait as a Soldier was displayed in the Third Room of the exhibit.

First look at the piece, it is clearly German Expressionism, which was the majority of the art Hitler claimed degenerate. German Expressionism borrows from Van Gogh’s loose brushstrokes, Gauguin’s wild colors, and the jagged lines of woodcut art (Brown and Flanagan). Humans depicted in that style often do not have the supple, rosy flesh of Classical art that Hitler preferred. Evident in Kirchner's piece, both the soldier and the woman depicted are of dark yellow, nearly green skin tones. The soldier’s and woman’s face have no expressions and depth. The woman’s head is shown in profile, while her body is posed full frontal, making her more two dimensional and less realistic. The soldier’s eyes, though are the blue Hitler liked, were uneven and slightly demonic due to their sizes. The soldier’s body proportions are sharp and jagged, his head having an almost triangular shape. His fingers are long and distorted, melted together. His other hand is missing at the arm, depicted by a sickly green and gory red, with a small stroke of white to show the bone. While this is a soldier in uniform, Kirchner does not depict a battle scene, but rather there is a nude woman in the background. Her body features are bleak, unlike the glorified images of plump and healthier looking women Greeks and Romans often depicted.

The background is not plain nor singular, blocks of color with scribbles of more color making up the background. The rest of the image is mostly a violent red, provoking a sense of conflict to the viewer. The soldier is essentially not in a real place to identify, but rather the painting suggests the artist’s personal psychological dilemma between duty to country and to manhood. Hitler deemed German Expressionism to be art of children’s work, immature and unsophisticated. Such a regression was unacceptable for Hitler to make Germany great again, regardless of the artist's’ intentions. Art, according to Hitler, should be of reality, and any distortion is a systematic fault of the artist and his/her mind.

Works Cited:

Burns, Lucy. “Degenerate art: Why Hitler hated modernism.” BBC World Service. BBC News. 6 Nov 2013. Web. 26 Apr 2016.

Brown, Christie, and William G. Flanagan. "`Degenerate Art.'." Forbes 154.14 (1994): 342-344. Business Source Complete. Web. 26 Apr. 2016.

Sax, Benjamin, and Kuntz, Dieter, eds., INSIDE HITLER’S GERMANY: A DOCUMENTARY HISTORY OF LIFE IN THE THIRD REICH. 1st edition. Lexington, MA, and Toronto: D.C. Heath & Company, 1992, pp. 224-32.

Image Source: https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/art-1010/early-abstraction/expressionism1/a/kirchner-self-portrait-as-a-soldier