Brought to Light Australian Art 1850-1965

soon ... With this ceremony a seal has been set upon the incorporation of the Austrian Army in the German fighting forces .6 Press photographs supplied other images. The motifs of dramatically lifted guns and the swinging rhythm of the goosestep had been much exploited by press photographers of the 1930s. The specific motif of soldiers standing to attention derived from a photograph that appeared in the Times in March — 'German Infantrymen lined up at Aspem airport where they had landed from troop carrying machines'.7Purves Smith had holidayed twice at Aspern in the mid-1930s. The title The Nazis, Nuremberg can be directly attributed to Purves Smith, who generally had a title in mind from the start. Too precise to be the invention of anyone else, this title was supplied when the work was reproduced in 1943 in Ure Smiths publication Australian Present Day Art.8 Maisie Purves Smith informed the Queensland Art Gallery in 1961 that 'the picture was a composite burst of irritation about the Anschluss... & a Nuremberg Rally held about then'.9Nuremberg in its flat hinterland (there were no hills within twelve kilometres) was the Nazi Party's headquarters and the site of their annual, elaborately staged and well-propagandised rallies. For these grand celebrations the Nazis modified a large Zeppelin airfield on the outskirts of the city, laying acres of gridded pavement, building long arcades of neo-classical columns, a huge amphitheatre and glorious pavilions.10 Fascist Nuremberg as expensively restructured in the 1930s was nothing like the small baroque town shown in The Nazis, Nuremberg. Rather, Purves Smith showed a Bavarian or Austrian town in the foothills. Another indication of place and date is the army's winter uniform of greatcoats. Since Nuremberg, north of Munich, is nowhere near the Austrian border and played no part in the Anschluss of March 1938, Purves Smith chose that part of the title to indicate that his image focused on the Nazi Party. The SA troops at the centre of his image were the Nazi Party's own troops, and through the 1930s their rallies presented the glory and the might of the Germanic cause. Their heyday had passed by 1938, following Roehm's downfall and Himmler's concentration on the more sinister élite SS troops, though Purves Smith would not have known that at the time. He referred to the Nazis' prewar promise rather than their wartime performance: in fact the subject of The Nazis, Nuremberg is not war but the dangerous narcissism of the Nazis — in 1938 war was by no means a certain outcome of Germany's expansionary activities. Again, Purves Smith may have chosen to paint a rally rather than, for example, the German troops entering Austria — though there were numerous photographs in the London newspapers and on the newsreels — because he had experienced (and enjoyed?) the uplift and excitement of a German rally himself. In Berlin in the summer of 1934 or 1935 he photographed German soldiers marching to the music of a large military band in the wide, tree- lined streets by the Brandenberg Gate. In one photograph, he actually captured in the centre foreground the figure, blurred but unmistakable, of a young Nazi stormtrooper, chin out, cheeks sucked-in, wearing the SA troop's distinctive cap and brown shirt. 'He hated the Nazis in a much more anxious way (more politically anxious) than the rest of us.'1 There are several possibilities as to which particular rally so irritated Purves Smith that he was led to paint The Nazis, Nuremberg: the March celebrations in Austria and Berlin immediately following the Anschluss; the Führers widely publicised tour in early April leading to an overwhelming victory for Anschluss at the plebiscite; or the annual bonanza of the Nazi government at Nuremberg for a week from 5 September, at which the Nazis congratulated themselves on the Anschluss. If the last, as seems probable, the buildings that resemble mins in The Nazis, Nuremberg may refer to the large Jewish synagogue and the administration building of the Jewish Cultural League at the centre of the old city, which were demolished by the Nuremberg municipal authorities in the month before that year's rally.12 Maisie Purves Smith thought that the painting may have been completed in Purves Smith's lodgings in Pimlico. That would tie in with a ten-day trip to London in early September 1938, during the time of the Nuremberg rally, when the 'masterpiece' he had begun in mid-May was revised and completed. Judging from photographs that Purves Smith took of paintings at various stages of production, his method was to start with the background — setting the stage — and to add narrative details as he thought about them later. The painting, at first so wholesale in effect, on reflection resolves into a series of elements in subtle opposition. The sad faces of the regular army troops, the lowering sky and empty-windowed buildings are posed against the strutting SA troops in their viciously feminised costume. Various levels of disengagement from Hitler's aggressive takeover of Austria are indicated by the hysterical attitude of the Nazi overmen, the reduction to neat cobblestones of noble German Kultur, the blank withdrawal of the old town, the grieving sky, and the group of mournful soldiers. The Nazis, Nuremberg, by no means a simple condemnation of the Germans, refers instead to those different races and cultures that formed the German nation. Mary Eagle is Senior Curator, Australian Art, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. A PAINTER'S SILENT PROTEST 151