Is Art Inevitably Tainted by Politics?

by Norman Berdichevsky (December 2012)

Politicized artists

The Fountainhead provoked outrage in many circles, all the more so since Cooper had previously achieved stardom in roles playing Leftwing heroes. The very title of her non-fiction work, The Virtues of Selfishness branded her as an outcast. Perhaps her best known book Atlas Shrugged had to wait more than 60 years before being turned into a feature film.

Guilt by Association

His tragedy was that he refused to speak against the evil of Stalinism, including the elimination of Jewish intellectuals whose fate he knew but denied for fear of giving further ammunition to the enemies of his people in the United States. His behavior cast suspicion on all Black Americans including baseball star Jackie Robinson, forcing him to issue a statement at a press conference, that Robeson did not speak for all American Negroes and that he would do everything to promote the cause of civil rights and equality while remaining a patriotic American.

Art, Patriotism and Morality

An artist who became a propagandist for Fascism but did not devastatingly compromise his work was the avant-garde American poet, Ezra Pound, who broadcast for the Axis in Italy where he lived during World War II. Pound was tried for treason but found mentally unstable and sent to a hospital rather than prison. His work never enjoyed wide popular appeal. Moreover, poets have always enjoyed a reputation for eccentricity and Pound had, prior to the war, cultivated many close connections with Italian authorities and artists, all of which account for a willingness to divorce his achievements in the 1920s and 1930s from his later aberrations.

Great German writers such as Erich Maria Remarque (All Quiet on the Western Front) and Herman Hesse (Steppenwolf, Beneath the Wheel, Demian) have become even greater since the war because their views really did express the noblest impulses of the German people. It is for the opposite reason that one of the great writers of modern literature, Knut Hamsun so grievously wounded his reputation by being the only Norwegian artist of any standing to openly support the German invasion and occupation of his country in 1940.

Many foreign readers may still consider him a great writer but all of his work was subsequently contaminated by the understanding of the modern Norwegian reader that Hamsun wrote from a tragically distorted anti-democratic viewpoint against the noblest values and traditions of a humane, Christian Norwegian society.

In 1937, Joseph Goebbels appointed Harlan as one of his leading propaganda directors. Jew Suss became the most effective popular film made for anti-Semitic propaganda purposes in Germany and Austria and was seen by more than twenty million Europeans during the war. After the war, Harlan was charged with participation in the Nazi regime but he successfully defended himself by arguing that the Nazis controlled his work and that he should not be held personally responsible for its content. Although acquitted, the court decisions also permitted a campaign to boycott his films.

Kazan and Montand

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