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Session 6a: Monstrous Images
Chair: Charlene Burns

Monstrous Modernism, Monstrous Bodies, Christian Iconography and ‘Degenerate Art’
Jennifer McComas
Department of Art and Art History, Indiana University, Bloomington, and Curator of Western Art after 1800, Indiana University Art Museum, Indiana, USA

Modern art, Christian iconography, and Nazi perceptions of human monstrosity collided ominously in the Degenerate Art exhibition, which opened in Munich in July of 1937. Often overlooked in art historical scholarship on the Nazi era is the fact that fifteen percent of the artworks on display—including every work in the very first room of the exhibition—depicted Christian imagery. These paintings and sculptures, most of which portrayed scenes from Christ’s Passion, were primarily by expressionist artists, and invariably represented the figure and physiognomy of Christ as disfigured, distorted, and physically ugly. In some cases, he bore attributes typically identified as Jewish. This paper considers the collision of religious imagery with the Nazi rhetoric of the body, which rejected expressionist depictions of Christ as racially monstrous.
Christ’s body, as depicted by expressionist artists such as Max Beckmann and Emil Nolde, was indeed far removed from the ideal body type promoted by Nazi racial theory, with its ideological emphasis on the maintenance of an ideal, pure-blooded citizenry. While the Nazis lamented that “the Negro and the South Sea Islander” had “become the apparent racial ideal of ‘modern art,’” the Nazis themselves judged the human body against the standard set by classical Greek sculpture. This bodily aesthetic—characterized by strong, virile male warriors and athletes—was powerfully disseminated through Nazi-approved art and film. Visual propaganda promoted the notion of Jewish racial monstrosity through a reliance on stereotypical physical attributes, while modern art’s approach to the human figure was discredited through rhetoric rife with medical and racial tropes. The expressionist Christ, with his distorted body and his “Jewish” attributes, was thus castigated for promoting an aesthetic of human monstrosity. Expressionist religious art was ultimately purged from Germany through confiscation, sales, and destruction, a chilling antecedent to the program of eugenics, euthanasia, and genocide aimed at people whom the Nazis perceived as monstrous

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Torn Posters and Monstrous Images: Damage and Spectacle
Jim Cross
Department of Media, Trinity & All Saints College, affiliated with the University of Leeds, United Kingdom

Advertising posters crowd our walls, subways, and streets with unambiguous offers. They are carefully designed to express a single message as persuasively as possible. Often, though, a transformation takes place as weather, neglect, and over-postering impact on them. In place of a clear call to consumer action something results that is murky, confused, unclear as to provenance, purpose, or meaning. Sometimes promise is transformed into threat as slashed and mutilated figures start forth from the wall. Their ambiguous assault on our apprehensions is aided by text which is equally deformed and fragmented; a radically incomplete and seemingly random palimpset.
These urban works, thrown together by the ‘anonymous lacerator’ of chance, offer a dark and compelling contrast to what they once were. Half-headed portraits and torn figures and text stand in brief progress from the unspotted progeny of an ad-agency to totally inscrutable, totally weathered-away oblivion. What do they tell us, these brutalised wrecks of what was once meant to appeal?
I have researched this area creatively, using my camera to generate images that can constitute both an exploration and catalogue of what is presenting itself. This photographic re-presentation will permit an exploration both of the monstrously deformed and inscrutable imagery that torn posters offer us and also, by contrast, of the omnipresent ‘society of the spectacle’ that the undamaged poster helps to pen us into.  The mangled and shredded visages, and unfathomable text of the torn item may give us pause to address the glossy, demanding plausibility of the undamaged display- and perhaps see something more monstrous yet?

Refracted Gazes: ‘Monstrous’ Children and Photography
Lois Drawmer
Department of Arts and Media, Buckinghamshire Chilterns University College, United Kingdom

No abstract is presently available

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