Well-written, magisterially conceived, and impeccably documented, this volume is both a superb introduction to Franz Radziwill, an intriguing figure almost unknown outside Germany, and an authoritative social history of art that thoroughly revises understandings of the world of modernism during the Weimar Republic and Third Reich. As he considers the ambiguities and contradictions of Radziwill’s art, politics, and self-presentation, James A. Van Dyke confronts issues of how to write about and exhibit the works of artists who were sympathetic toward or lived under National Socialism.

Radically historicized accounts of “Weimar culture” and the Third Reich, Van Dyke argues, should give more consideration to Radziwill (1895–1983), an artist who was critical of much modern culture, fascinated by modern technology, and for several years believed in National Socialism’s promise. As Van Dyke indicates, Radziwill’s old-masterly technique and unsettling modern content associated him with Otto Dix and the tendencies of New Objectivity and New Romanticism, or “New German Romanticism,” as it became known in an age of growing nationalism, and found him representation among leading modernist dealers and museums. Radziwill’s The Street (1928), for instance, is a carefully crafted view that evokes the seaside town of Dangast in which the artist lived; it initially recalls Jan Vermeer, but is topped by an unnerving black sky, its ground quaking as a small airplane emerges from spectral lights. The Street won distinction among leading contemporaries in Düsseldorf in 1928, and was swiftly acquired by the Prussian Cultural Ministry; included in the regime’s first showing at a Venice Biennale, the painting continued to be exhibited in the early years of the Third Reich before it and Radziwill began to be excoriated in Degenerate Art actions of 1938. As Van Dyke demonstrates, neither The Street nor many of Radziwill’s later works conform to typical conceptions of “Nazi art.” How could Radziwill, who oriented himself toward the modernism of Vincent Van Gogh and the Expressionists before he associated with Dix, Christian Schad, George Grosz, and other avant-gardists of the left, become a champion of National Socialism, and why did many continue to champion his art well through the Third Reich? To understand him and his art, Van Dyke argues, we must rethink much of what we know of both Weimar and Nazi art and culture.

Van Dyke finds a useful model in historian Jeffrey Herf’s 1984 study of “reactionary modernism,” the paradoxical phenomenon of conservative German intellectuals and writers such as Oswald Spengler and Ernst Jünger who were discouraged by modern civilization but fascinated by the promise of modern technology (Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986). Although once inclined toward the left, Radziwill was disgruntled by many aspects of modernity and the modern art world and increasingly associated with advocates of the “conservative revolution.” His art, as Van Dyke carefully indicates, was no simple paean to the Heimat, or homeland. As he painstakingly detailed structures of Dangast and the northwestern German countryside around the regional capital of Oldenburg, Radziwill repeatedly rendered motifs of falling or ascending planes, telephone and radio wires, electric masts, and new ships and naval vessels, embracing technology because it seemed to signify the best of Germany’s modern prowess and productive labor.

Van Dyke’s undertaking is also new and original because he focuses on Radziwill’s history paintings and because he roots the artist firmly in the periphery of that northwestern German territory, far from the best-known and much-studied art center of Berlin. Although Radziwill is primarily known as a painter of still lifes and landscapes, Van Dyke investigates the paintings of modern history in order to examine those works’ origins, reflections of ideology, and contemporary reception; these were also works on which Radziwill later wrote useful commentaries as he sought to differentiate his production from “conventional” National Socialist art in the postwar period. Having won distinction for his representations of northwestern Germany, new ships in harbors, and scenes of World War I, Radziwill was briefly art-politically active in Berlin at the regime’s inception before being appointed to teach at the Prussian-controlled Düsseldorf academy in July 1933. He found favor in Berlin and Düsseldorf only through the spring of 1934, however, and then returned to Dangast. By examining Radziwill’s interactions with individuals and institutions on the periphery of Dangast and Oldenburg, Van Dyke contributes much new insight into the Third Reich’s polycratic operations, how individuals and localities were able to act independently of a center and cultural policies previously presumed to be all-powerful and monolithic.

Van Dyke’s first chapter traces Radziwill’s orientation to the world of modern art he discovered in northwestern Germany, Dresden, and Berlin in the Weimar period. The largely self-taught and articulate Radziwill modeled himself as a salt-of-the earth German artisan or “worker of art” after training as a bricklayer and architect, and after his service in World War I. As Van Dyke indicates, Radziwill was consistently a beneficiary of interaction with intelligent, Nietzschean vitalist mentors and modernist critics (including the famed Jewish champion of Expressionists, Rosa Schapire), even if those writers tended to speak more of his “primeval materials” and “natural soul” than of his modernism. Chafing amid challenges of the contemporary market and the “decadent” scene of the large cities, Radziwill was grateful to be praised as a “primitive,” but gravitated continuously between the regional and the modernist: for instance, he elected to exhibit with Oldenburg’s Association for New Art, an organization for contemporary art, rather than join its regionalist Artists’ League. Van Dyke demonstrates how Radziwill forged his identity and the works that established his name and first major museum acquisitions; he explores several possible interpretations of those paintings to enable us to understand and question the responses of apologists, critics, dealers, and museum directors that formed the basis of Radziwill’s initial reception. Van Dyke not only introduces the complexities of those works’ political and historical backgrounds; he underlines the strongly conservative, rather than just the liberal, bearing of the Weimar era.

Van Dyke’s second chapter examines Radziwill’s short life as a revolutionary in the National Socialist Party. Always skeptical regarding politics, Radziwill plainly moved toward the party by 1930. In 1933 he joined what Van Dyke deftly identifies as a new right-wing vanguard in Berlin—both new officials in the Prussian Cultural Ministry and the sculptor Günther Martin—to produce alternatives to the Weimar artistic system and to keep the National Socialist movement true to what they saw as its founding ideals. The author of a long-forgotten but influential anti-democratic tract advocating new forms of artistic education, Martin invited Radziwill to help mount several well-received “community” exhibitions of artists linked by common interests, war experience, and faith in “charismatic authority.” Radziwill’s own war experience and identity as a New German Romantic contributed to his appointment to the coveted Düsseldorf position formerly held by Paul Klee, where he also worked within the Reich Chamber of Art to plan and supervise exhibitions (he apparently censored a show of the respected figurative artist Carl Hofer, whom Nazis abruptly removed from Berlin appointments in 1933) and on other projects.

Radziwill began to render the war only in the late 1920s, amid the flood of representation and discussion that accompanied the decade commemorations of the war, Germany’s rearmament, and the controversial pacifism of Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front. Exhibited, admired, and reviewed from the time of their appearance to the end of the Third Reich, Radziwill’s horrific if ambiguous depictions of technologically wasted warscapes differed significantly both from the challenging war depictions of Dix that were certainly known to him and from more conventionally heroic representations. Van Dyke carefully demonstrates variations in their contemporary reception, but also how they correspond to war narratives of authors and intellectuals of the conservative revolution. He notes how Radziwill painted his 1933 Steel Helmet in No Man’s Land at a moment of growing commitment to the party: completed soon after Hitler came to power and first exhibited in a show commemorating the tenth anniversary of the Munich putsch, the work echoes the frequently articulated theme of the new day that dawns from the awful grit of battle.

Van Dyke’s reconstruction of the history of Radziwill’s controversial Revolution (1934) demonstrates how the painting originated in a period in which artists were urged not just to memorialize but also to emulate as cultural heroes fallen S.A. men such as the idolized Horst Wessell; Van Dyke suggests Radziwill expressed personal solidarity by representing the fallen figure before a brick wall characteristic of the northwestern German region. After Hitler purged the S.A. and other critics of his regime to consolidate political power and conciliate the German military in “the night of Long Knives” of June 30, 1934, Radziwill’s sympathetic portrayal of a dead S.A. man was suddenly too politically dangerous to exhibit. After the war the artist changed the work considerably, adding the new title of Demons and date of 1933 to imply that Germany had been overtaken by irrational powers and that he himself had opposed the regime from the start.

Van Dyke’s third chapter investigates how Radziwill was affected by both the workings and the dysfunction of the Hitler state in its later stages. Student denunciations of Radziwill’s early expressionist works led the way for powerful party enemies to cause Radziwill’s Düsseldorf dismissal by July 1935; he was gravely harmed by the Degenerate Art actions, but seems to have remained unaware of his surveillance by Alfred Rosenberg and the Secret State Police. Van Dyke’s narration of how Radziwill was rehabilitated by party, military, and private patrons in his home area beginning in 1936 reveals a totally new story of how an artist was able to exhibit, sell, and be celebrated—if only in that region—in spite of the central state’s attack. Increasingly disgraced, Radziwill persisted believing that he would be exonerated; discouraged by the final course of the war, and ultimately sympathetic toward the resistance, he remained loyal toward Germany—as opposed to National Socialists who increasingly persecuted him—to the end. As Van Dyke indicates, Radziwill gave form to those times in a 1938 still life, embattled Total War seascape of 1939, and melancholic figurative works of 1944.

Van Dyke’s powerful conclusion illuminates Radziwill’s bewildering postwar trajectory. Furious at the victors and at Germany’s new order as contemporaries such as Hofer denounced him for complicity in the Third Reich, Radziwill unsuccessfully sought a court ruling to upturn his Düsseldorf dismissal. His mystifying transformation of Revolution into Demons was just one step that paved the way toward the East’s celebration of him as an anti-fascist and the West’s official decoration of his apolitical “magic realism” in the 1960s and 1970s. Van Dyke argues how as a provincial northwest German modernist and a National Socialist, Radziwill represents an extreme case, both ordinary and extraordinary; those tensions and contradictions should be noted, not ignored.

It is hard to fault anything in such a huge, well-disciplined study that brings so many large thoughts to the table. Rich, dense, and painstakingly clear and well-vetted, the text sometimes becomes a bit more logical than convincing. The pictorial analyses are sharp and enlightening, but when Van Dyke suggests how Radziwill differs from such “conventionally dramatic” war painters as Claus Bergen, he occasionally fails to differentiate adequately between them.

In a letter that grants permission for the use of illustrations, quoted in its entirety in the book’s first footnote, the artist’s daughter, Konstanze Radziwill, roundly praises Van Dyke’s contribution, but disputes his interpretation of Radziwill’s National Socialist activities; she argues that every document might be interpreted differently, and rightly hopes that future English-language studies might consider other aspects of the artist’s work. Yet Van Dyke’s sober and forcefully contained history would seem to be transparent. He not only guides others to the documents, but provides a handle with which to determine the viability of his assertions.

Though Van Dyke looks squarely at Radziwill in his worst moments, he also captures him at his best, and is fair and nuanced to scrutinize all within a much larger picture. By tunneling into the complicated history of Radziwill’s interactions in both the Weimar and Third Reich periods, Van Dyke opens huge new fields of investigation. By illuminating continuities as well as contradictions, and by detailing the realities of artists under both systems, he has dispensed with much that has long mystified histories of the art of both eras. Regardless of whom they are studying, art historians, historians, museum professionals, and students will profit enormously from this indispensable and refreshing account.