In the summer of 1937, two exhibitions sponsored by the Nazis opened in Munich. For the Degenerate Art exhibition, hundreds of confiscated works by banned modern artists – including Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Pablo Picasso – were gathered: a derisive demonstration of the supposedly anti-German spirit of contemporary culture. The show was also meant as a counterpoint to the first Great German Art Exhibition, essentially an art fair for state-sanctioned work, which ran annually until 1944. The official style of Aryan art was traditionalist neoclassicism; popular subjects included idealised female nudes, pastoral landscapes and heroic battle scenes. Hitler was among the main buyers. You probably haven’t heard of any of those artists.
A Jewish artist under a pseudonym
What if one of them were secretly a Jew, working under a pseudonym? Rebecca Birrell’s debut novel imagines this scenario, telling the story of a fictional Jewish artist who comes of age in Berlin in the last days of the Weimar republic. Hannah Sherman is working as a seamstress for the family business when she learns that she is about to be married off. She runs away, finding lodgings using the “desirable Christian” name of Schmidt, and begins to realise her artistic ambitions. A free-thinking New Woman, she also takes two lovers: Saul, a museum curator, and Charlotte, a dancer at a lesbian bar where Hannah likes to sketch.
History looms over the story
We all know where history is going. The worsening economic and political situation – which Hannah, our narrator, prefers to allude to only obliquely – engulfs what might otherwise have been a straightforward story of an artist’s progress. As the Great Depression sets in, Hannah turns to a former client for mending work. Elke Grese, a glamorous older woman, sees Hannah’s art and makes an offer of patronage so generous it would be mad to refuse. But as Hannah soon learns, there are strings attached. How far will she go to survive?
Birrell is an art historian by training; in 2021 she published This Dark Country, an idiosyncratic blend of group biography and cultural criticism about female artists working with still life in early 20th-century England. Her deep understanding of artists and their work is evident here. Both Hannah’s inner thoughts and her conversations with others are filled with imaginative and insightful observations, including but not limited to the old master paintings in Saul’s workplace (the Kaiser Friedrich, a real museum whose holdings were destroyed in a fire in 1945) and the postcard reproductions of famous works that she trades back and forth with family, friends and lovers.
While painting her mother, for instance, Hannah is prompted to reflect on Rembrandt’s series of portraits of an elderly woman believed to be his own mother: “In my favourite, his mother’s ageing skin resembles wax, the wrinkles etched into her flesh echoed in the detail of her embroidered cloak, life weighing so heavily upon her she can hardly keep her eyes open.”
An artist’s eye and emotional distance
Hannah sees the rest of the world through the eyes of an artist, too. On a car journey: “From the windows of the taxi, the clouds were zinc white, paint fresh from its tube.” This makes her an arresting narrator when it comes to visual description – although perhaps a touch too ready with similes and metaphors: are leaves really “like small hands in the breeze”?
By contrast, her emotional landscape is not as vividly rendered. Without giving away too much of the plot – there are some good twisty turns – it often isn’t clear why Hannah gets involved with certain other characters, who seem more like sketches than people. When talking about feelings, she tends to resort to abstract nouns: “fear stirred in my chest”, “shock gave way to shame” and so on. You get the sense that she doesn’t understand her own motivations. “I didn’t interrogate why I wanted a role,” she admits at one point, when describing her choice to insert herself as a background figure in a painting of someone else. This is not unrealistic: she is, after all, a painter, not a novelist. But it can make for frustrating reading.
A shift in perspective
Towards the end of the book, Birrell offers a glimpse of her own narratorial range with an abrupt shift in perspective, and for the first time enters the mind of another character. Elke – until now a rather distant and mysterious figure – is sitting in a car on a street in Munich, about to pay a visit to the Great German Art Exhibition of 1942. It’s a welcome moment of strangeness closer to the quirky style of Birrell’s nonfiction: a reminder that literature, like art, is at its best when embracing its fullest capacity for invention.
