ONTARIO.- Those who have not had the chance to see The 1930s: The Making of "The New Man" exhibition, on view until September 7 at the National Gallery of Canada, have a week left to do so. The exhibition, which has already attracted more than 50,000 visitors, has been well received by both critics and public. Tickets, which also include admission to Utopia/Dystopia: The Photographs of Geoffrey James and to the NGC Collection.
The 1930’s: The Making of “The New Man” brings together paintings, sculptures, and photographs by 103 European and North American artists including Jean Arp, Vassily Kandinsky, Max Ernst, Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, Salvador Dalί, Alberto Giacometti, August Sander, Diego Rivera, Alex Colville, Hart Benton, Grant Wood, Ivan Albright and Walker Evans. These works are grouped together under nine themes: Genesis, Convulsive Beauty, “The Will to Power,” The Making of “The New Man”, Mother Earth, The Appeal of Classicism, “Faces of our Time,” “Crowds and Power,” and The Charnel House.
Over 95% of the works presented in this exhibition are loans secured from some of the most prestigious public and private collections in Austria, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Holland, Hungary, Israel, Italy, Spain, Russia, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Mexico, the United States and Canada.
Going through the exhibition with the Bell audioguide allows the visitor to better understand the context in which the works were created. The audioguide gathers several historical anecdotes that give another dimension to the visitor’s experience by offering a wealth of information. For instance, we learn that the work The Four Elements : Fire, Water, Earth and Air, by Adolf Ziegler, one of Hitler’s preferred painters, embodied the Nazi ideology to the extent that Hitler hung this work in the living room of his Munich residence. In the work The Judgment of Paris, painted by Ivo Saliger, an official artist of the Third Reich, the artist portrays the Trojan Prince Paris, clad in the emblematic Hitler Youth uniform, selects the perfect Aryan woman to propagate the Germanic race.
