ARTH 503
Clark Visiting Professor Seminar: Fascism and Art Spring 2025
Division I
Cross-listed

This course examines the complex and multifarious relations between art and fascism in interwar Europe, focusing on the cultural politics and the use of art in fascist movements and regimes, particularly in Germany and Italy. Exploring Walter Benjamin’s dictum that fascism practices the “aestheticizing of politics” and Eric Michaud’s argument that an “assimilation of work into artistic activity” lay at the center of the Nazi myth, we will also examine the role of art in fascist ideology as well as the problematic of artistic modernism and fascism. We will analyze fascist imaginaries of nation, empire, nature, technology, violence, gender, and race through the work of Ernst Jünger, F. T. Marinetti, Leni Riefenstahl, Le Corbusier, and Wyndham Lewis, among others. Early theories of fascism, including portions of Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism and Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, as well as the work of contemporary historians and art historians, will inform our discussions.