ABSTRACT
Explicit propaganda in the Third Reich was generally restricted to the modern mass media – press, radio and newsreel – whose capacity for rapid response to issues were, for so opportunistic a regime, essential. By contrast, the sterile academic and anatomical perfectionism of the nudes in the nearby Great German Art exhibition was intended to prove that the Third Reich had succeeded in bringing to a halt the ‘crisis’ proclaimed by the cultural pessimists. Nazi sculpture fabricated a vision of the race of supermen that would one day spring from the Reich’s purified blood. The female nude is offered up as an object for male visual consumption, and in the perverse context of fascism it is disturbing to have to admit that some of the paintings possess a certain erotic power. Male nudes, by contrast, are to be found primarily in sculpture, often of larger-than-life size.
