page_title: Propaganda in Nazi Germany
section_title: Fine art
hierarchical_section_title: Propaganda in Nazi Germany / Media / Fine art
context_page_description: The propaganda used by the German Nazi Party in the years leading up to and during Adolf Hitler's leadership of Germany was a crucial instrument for acquiring and maintaining power, and for the implementation of Nazi policies. The pervasive use of propaganda by the Nazis is largely responsible for the word propaganda itself acquiring its present negative connotations.
context_section_description: By Nazi standards, fine art was not propaganda. Its purpose was to create ideals, for eternity. This produced a call for heroic and romantic art, which reflected the ideal rather than the realistic. Explicitly political paintings were very rare. Still more rare were anti-Semitic paintings, because the art was supposed to be on a higher plane. Nevertheless, selected themes, common in propaganda, were the most common topics of art.
  Sculpture was used as an expression of Nazi racial theories. The most common image was of the nude male, expressing the ideal of the Aryan race. Nudes were required to be physically perfect. At the Paris Exposition of 1937, Josef Thorak's Comradeship stood outside the German pavilion, depicting two enormous nude males, clasping hands and standing defiantly side by side, in a pose of defense and racial camaraderie.
  Landscape painting featured mostly heavily in the Greater German Art exhibition, in accordance with themes of blood and soil. Peasants were also popular images, reflecting a simple life in harmony with nature, frequently with large families.  With the advent of war, war art came to be a significant though still not predominating proportion.
  The continuing of the German Art Exhibition throughout the war was put forth as a manifestation of German's culture.
caption: Arno Breker's sculptures of the Nordic man made him Hitler's favorite sculptor.[80]
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