Fascists had secret modernist programme

A group of renowned experts will tomorrow tackle the difficult question of how - or if - art and propaganda associated with Europe's most hated regimes should be displayed. At a workshop organised by historians at The University of Manchester, they will discuss how recent research has uncovered a hidden modernist agenda not just in the Italian fascist regime, but also Nazi Germany. "By understanding how these regimes used modernism to further their cause, we will be able to learn some important lessons about how to stop them in the future,” said joint organiser Dr Maiken Umbach, a Senior Lecturer in Modern European History at the University . "We have to understand that the backward-looking "blood and soil” imagery we associate with these regimes today was not what constituted their attractiveness for many of their supporters at the time. "Fascist regimes were modern in many ways: they had their own modern consumer and leisure industries, used the modern mass media extremely effectively, and even promoted modernist art when it suited them. Speaking at the event will be academic Gregory Maertz who will discuss his discovery of an unknown collection of Nazi war art - by a group of artists embedded in the German army, commissioned directly by Hitler. He will also speak about the difficulties he has encountered in trying to stage an exhibition of the works in the United States.