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Klee’s way

“Despite frequent comparisons between his art and that of children,” the Swiss-born modernist Paul Klee (1879–1940) “was not childish,” observes Martha Bayles, a professor in the A&S Honors Program, writing in the August 21, 2006, issue of the Weekly Standard. The occasion for her article was the exhibition Paul Klee and America, at the Menil Collection in Houston, Texas, until January 28.

A member of the faculty at the influential German art school Bauhaus from 1921 to 1930, Klee was one of the artists featured in a four-year, 650-work traveling exhibition of “degenerate art” commissioned by Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels in 1937. Seventeen of Klee’s pieces, notes Bayles, “were included as examples of ‘idiotic art’ spewed out by a ‘primitive’ mind mired in ‘disorder’ and ‘confusion.’” Bayles continues, “Both Stalin and Hitler hated abstraction and loved representational realism. Because of this, abstraction got a good rap after the war, realism a bad one. . . . [And] today, of course, the art market has boomed itself into senile dementia, with the world’s number one artist . . . best known for his 1990s installations featuring animal carcasses and maggots.”

Bayles proposes a third way for 21st-century art, and Klee, who worked between abstraction and realism in paintings like The Twittering Machine (1922), Little Regatta (1922), and Arches of the Bridge Stepping out of Line (1937) is her torchbearer. Most of the art in the “degenerate” show, she points out, was not pure abstraction but offered distortions of reality—expressionism, cubism, fauvism. “Why did the Nazis make such a fuss about art that was neither fully abstract nor fully representational?” asks Bayles: Could it be because the general public enjoys such art, she writes, even as it is frustrated by purely abstract work? Provided with the slightest hint of meaning, Bayles writes, “most of us will accept, even relish, large amounts of what the Nazis dubbed ‘distortion.’ Especially if it looks beautiful.”

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When Billy didn’t meet Reinhold

Before the evangelist Billy Graham’s 1957 crusade in New York City, Reinhold Niebuhr—longtime New Yorker and liberal theologian—editorialized that Graham’s appearance (he was renting Madison Square Garden) would enable every prejudice that “enlightened” individuals might have about religion. Writing in the July/August 2006 issue of Books & Culture, Andrew S. Finstuen, a staff member at the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life, probes the tensions between the two men, both icons of 1950s Protestant Christianity.

Niebuhr, writes Finstuen, faulted Graham’s evangelism for providing “simple answers to complex questions of social order and justice.” But Niebuhr also acknowledged that “the ‘pietistic evangelist’ had a contribution to make” in ministering to those with “pressing personal, moral, and religious perplexities.”

Finstuen finds Niebuhr unfair in his censure of Graham: “Not only did he reveal himself to be somewhat territorial during Graham’s New York City crusade”—he declined a meeting offered by Graham—“but he had clearly not read Graham’s work carefully, if at all.” In an “exchange” on racism, Niebuhr wrote that it was not enough to condemn prejudice, as Graham had done; the Christian must see and repent of his complicity in the sin and pursue a “whole-souled effort to give the Negro neighbor his full due.” Graham’s response, in a Life magazine article, was dismissed by Niebuhr as “incomplete.” But if Niebuhr was tendentious, says Finstuen, Graham was forgiving: “When Dr. Niebuhr makes his criticisms about me,” he said in an interview, “I study them, for I have respect for them.”

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Bad fences

Last summer, Congress passed immigration reform bills mandating that hundreds of miles of physical barriers be added to the existing 125 miles of fence along the 2,000-mile U.S.–Mexico border. But in the political controversy over the fence, says Peter Skerry, a political science professor, “few have bothered to consider the mundane, physical details of the fence itself.” In the September/October 2006 issue of Foreign Policy, Skerry describes the existing fence as a “jerry-rigged example of American ingenuity” that “reflects ambivalence about immigration [and] the competing objectives and compromises” of America’s political system.

The “primary” border fence, built out of horizontal corrugated steel panels—military surplus from the Vietnam War—extends 42 miles inland from the Pacific Ocean. Begun in 1990, it averages 10 feet in height and is not topped by barbed wire or a south-facing flange, for fear of offending Mexico. A “secondary” fence, mesh set in concrete rising to 15 feet, backs the primary fence for 10.5 miles along a heavily populated section of San Diego County. “Border Patrol agents report that individuals routinely manage to scramble over both the primary and secondary fences in less than one minute,” writes Skerry. As one Border Patrol officer explained, “The fences were never meant to be more than a filter.”

“The primary rationale for building the entire border fence,” says Skerry, “was never about stopping illegal immigrants. It had more to do with the interdiction of illegal drugs, a policy goal for which there was much more political consensus.”

Thus, the fence’s form in eastern San Diego County: a rail barrier “that can stop a drug smuggler’s 4×4 vehicle, but not illegal aliens on foot.” Today, “the counter-drug rationale has been superseded by counterterrorism . . . [and] once again immigration control comes in second.”

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