IIn 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 collected: a mocking display of the alleged anti-German sentiment of contemporary culture. The show also served as a counterpoint to the earlier The Great German Art Exhibition, essentially an art fair for state-sanctioned works, ran annually until 1944. The official style of Aryan art was traditionalist neoclassicism; Popular subjects included idealized female nudity, pastoral landscapes, and heroic battle scenes. Hitler was one of the main buyers. You probably haven’t heard of any of these artists.
What if one of them was secretly Jewish, working under a pseudonym? Rebecca Birrell’s debut novel imagines this scenario, telling the story of a fictional Jewish artist who comes to adulthood in Berlin in the last days of the Weimar Republic. Hannah Sherman is working as a tailor for the family business when she learns she is engaged to be married. She runs away, finding accommodation using Schmidt’s “desirable Christian” name, and begins to realize her artistic ambitions. An independent-minded new woman, she also has two lovers: Saul, a museum curator, and Charlotte, a dancer at a gay bar where Hannah likes to sketch.
We all know where history is going. Deteriorating economic and political conditions – which Hannah, our narrator, likes to allude to only indirectly – cloud what might otherwise have been a straightforward story of an artist’s progress. As the Great Depression begins, Hannah turns to a former client for repair work. Elke Grace, a glamorous older woman, sees Hannah’s art and makes such a generous offer of patronage that it would be madness to refuse. But as Hannah soon discovers, there are some strings attached. How far will she go to survive?
Birrell is an art historian by training; In 2021 she published This Dark Country, a unique blend of group biography and cultural criticism about female artists working with still life in early 20th-century England. His 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, Old Master paintings in Saul’s workplace (the Kaiser Friedrich, a de facto museum whose estate was destroyed in a fire in 1945) and postcard reproductions of famous works, which she passes back and forth with family, friends, and lovers.
For example, while painting her mother, Hannah is inspired to consider Rembrandt’s series of portraits of an elderly woman, believed to be her own mother: “In my favourite, her mother’s aging skin appears waxy, the wrinkles forming across her body are echoed in the details of her embroidered cloak, life weighing so heavily on her that she can barely keep her eyes open.”
Hannah also sees the rest of the world through the eyes of an artist. On a car journey: “From the taxi windows, the clouds were zinc white, the color fresh from its tube.” This makes him a fascinating storyteller when it comes to visual description – although perhaps a touch too willing with similes and metaphors: are the leaves really “like little hands in the wind”?
In contrast, his emotional landscape is not presented as clearly. Without revealing too much of the plot – there are some nice twists – it’s often unclear why Hannah gets involved with some of the other characters, who seem more like sketches than people. When talking about feelings, she resorts to abstract nouns: “Fear shook in my chest”, “shock replaced shame”, etc. You get the sense that she doesn’t understand her motivations. “I didn’t inquire about why I wanted the role,” she admits at one point, when describing her choice to include herself as a background in someone else’s painting. This is not unrealistic: after all, he is a painter, not a novelist. But reading this can be disappointing.
At the end of the book, Birrell offers a glimpse of her own narrative series with a sudden shift in perspective, and enters the mind of another character for the first time. Elke – by now a quite distant and mysterious figure – is sitting in a car on a street in Munich, going to visit the Great German Art Exhibition of 1942. It’s a welcome moment of strangeness, close to Birrell’s quirky style of non-fiction: a reminder that literature, like art, is at its best when embracing its full potential for invention.
