America’s set for another explosive race trial. On May 1, Jordan Neely, a black homeless schizophrenic, was causing mayhem in New York’s subway when Daniel Penny, a white ex-marine, stepped in. Penny subdued Neely with a chokehold. What happened next is disputed but Neely was later pronounced dead in hospital. Penny is now charged with second-degree manslaughter.

Others have commented on the implications for criminal justice and race relations. As a sculptor, my eye was caught by an image doing the rounds on Twitter. It favourably compared the handcuffed but undaunted Penny to a sculpture which is almost a caricature of masculinity. The resemblance is just short of uncanny. The sullen bronze superman has curly hair, high cheeks, a firm jaw, and a neck as thick as a linebacker’s. 

I assume that most people enjoying the comparison had no idea who sculpted it. 

It’s called Bereitschaft, which means Readiness. Sculpted in 1939, the full figure is that of a nude warrior unsheathing his sword. It’s the work of Arno Breker, an artist who counted Adolf Hitler amongst his patrons. Breker’s sculptures The Party and The Army stood guard outside the Reich Chancellery. In order to work for the regime, he was exempted from military duty alongside Josef Thorak, his rival for the big commissions. Indeed, sculptures by Breker and Thorak are often mixed up. There is a sameness to their later work and the confusion is compounded since many of their monuments did not survive the war. 

Many think that this obscurity is entirely deserved.

The belief that artists must be moral exemplars is increasingly common. So low have Roman Polanski’s and Michael Jackson’s reputations fallen that many cannot bring themselves to watch Chinatown or boogie to Billy Jean. Our justice system may give suspects the benefit of the doubt, but the court of public opinion is unforgiving. Filmmakers like Alfred Hitchcock or Woody Allen who have never been charged with anything, let alone convicted, are in the permanent bad books of the bien pensants. The monument of this age of self-absorbed fastidiousness is perhaps, “What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?,” Claire Dederer’s breast-beating essay for the Paris Review.

The famous denizens of Montmartre, once as celebrated for their bohemianism as much as their painting, are also being subjected to scrutiny that would make a nun squirm. Pablo Picasso no longer seems such a jolly old satyr and the Gary Glitter vibes with Paul Gauguin are getting too strong to ignore. I would not mind seeing less of both—purely on aesthetic grounds—but to judge art by the artist’s morality seems to me an obvious category error. 

I learned to keep them separated in Florence.

The Piazza della Signoria has more masterpieces per square mile than most anywhere on Earth. As a sculpture student, I used to go jogging there early. Dawn’s the best time to see the old city uninterrupted. Most tourists come to marvel at the David copy outside the Palazzo Vecchio. Nothing wrong with that but they stand with their backs to Perseus with the Head of Medusa, one of the most sublime bronzes ever cast. It was made by Benvenuto Cellini, a total bastard. 

It didn’t take revisionist historians to discover that Cellini had the morals of a stockbroker. He boasts of his wicked ways in his Autobiography, a literary work for which the term “unreliable narrator” might have been coined. While not perhaps the genius he repeatedly claims to be, Cellini is incredibly crafty. Whether he’s melting down cooking pots and cutlery to cast Perseus or helping a pope out of a jam, Cellini is equal to any challenge. He considered a day he did not steal, stab a rival, or bugger a boy, a day wasted. 

Cellini’s boisterous humour disarms readers but it was Perseus that convinced me that he truly was a bad man. A chilling allegory of the triumph of reason over irrationality, the hero holds aloft the gory head of his female victim. At his feet, the gorgon’s body gushes blood. This is the dark side of the Renaissance, the violent era that taught Machiavelli how power truly worked. If Michelangelo rediscovered the Classical world’s grace, Cellini exhumed its violence. 

Now, Cellini’s Perseus is far better than anything Arno Breker or Josef Thorak ever sculpted, but I cannot deny that they possess a similar spirit. One also finds beautifully-rendered brutality in Canova’s Neoclassical sculpture Theseus and the Centaur. This is one reason Nazi-era art is often dismissively called Neoclassical—as if it is merely anachronistic, wholly disconnected with European norms. That downplays the influence of Art Deco, the emphatically modern style which was internationally popular in the 1930s. The 1936 statue of Atlas in New York’s Rockefeller Plaza is very similar to the art of contemporary Germany. We see the same pneumatic musculature rendered with the same clean lines (Thorak was nicknamed “Professor Thorax” for his homoerotic obsessions). Above all, we see the same solemn veneration of power.

Detractors invariably describe it as bombastic but I’d argue that this style—call it Decoclassical—was a more productive fusion of Rodin’s expressionism and primitive forms than anything achieved by Brâncuși or Modigliani. Indeed, it was a student of Rodin, Frenchman Antoine Bourdelle, who first explored the grand possibilities. His Hercules the Archer, created in 1909 but cast later, has all the hallmarks—simplified forms, a harsh masculinity, the hint of violence.

This international trend took on a strange intensity in 1930s Germany as Goebbels strove to make Nazi propaganda and art indivisible. It would be nice to pretend that they cannot coexist—that propaganda is always political, partisan, and transient and great art is always universal. The truth is more complicated. No artist ever celebrated a budding young tyrant as magnificently as the Neoclassical painter Jacques-Louis David; the only difference is that Napoleon is a safely interred historical figure while Hitler’s ghost still haunts us. 

The question then remains, if you hate Hitler, must you also hate his favourite sculptor? I would very tentatively say, Nein. In private, most people will, I suspect, agree with me but it’s not really a binary question. It is complicated even with German artists who died before Hitler was born. Richard Wagner died in 1883 and the dissonance between the sublimity of his music and the barbarity to which his antisemitism led troubles anyone with a conscience.

But can an artistic style be inherently Fascist? One can make that case for Italian Futurism, with its radical fetishisation of machinery, militarism, and modernity. With Decoclassical, it’s less clear-cut. The public murals of Roosevelt’s New Deal America would not look out of place in Hitler’s Berlin and I detect little difference, mutatis mutandis, between Nazi art and the Soviet Union’s Heroic Realism. Neither, incidentally, did Stalin who offered Breker work after the war. To his credit, Breker turned him down. “One dictatorship,” he said, “is sufficient for me.” 

It is harder to deny that Decoclassical is authoritarian. It comes as no surprise to learn that Breker sculpted a bust of Anwar Sadat and Thorak sculpted Atatürk. Their work certainly celebrates order, strength, military valour, and family. That list chimed with many mid-century totalitarian regimes but, in fairness, most ordinary people consider those things to be virtues too. Authority can after all be exercised in noble causes; Daniel Chester French’s colossal Abraham Lincoln statue (1922) exudes authority. The Great Emancipator glowers over the mall of Washington, DC, with a clenched fist resting upon the fasces, an ancient Roman symbol of power that was appropriated by Mussolini’s followers in the same decade.

Even if Decoclassical is not intrinsically wicked, it may still be utterly banal. But how likely is that? The Nazis may be moral monsters but it is undeniable, and indeed the subject of many nervous jokes, that the Third Reich had, as the kids say, “swag”—stylish uniforms thanks to Hugo Boss, sexy cinematography from Leni Riefenstahl, and epic set design by Albert Speer. Even so, it’s still assumed that their visual art was puerile, the reactionary taste of the autodidactic Hitler and his philistine enablers. There’s truth in that view but it is also something of victors’ history. 

After the war, America needed Nazi rocket scientists, but they had artists enough in Greenwich Village. Into the 1950s, American propagandists championed abstraction as a hip alternative to Heroic Realism. They mocked Soviet art as simple-minded propaganda, which it often was, and the reign of Decoclassicalism was scrubbed from the history books. Even today, eccentric megalomaniacs in fiction often have a taste for it—the diminutive costume designer Edna Mode from Pixars’s The Incredibles decorates her house with Breker pastiches.

Can Decoclassical be rescued from the taint of tyranny? Unlikely. Should it be? Beats me. 

I would unequivocally say yes, it should be rehabilitated—if it was merely a question of aesthetics. I throw up my hands because it’s not. The enormity of the Holocaust makes it a moral question too. There is guilt by association. Willing collaborators like Breker are indelibly tainted. 

But if fumes of sulphur obscure Breker’s art, why is Wagner still part of the opera repertoire? Is Wagner simply better? Perhaps. The Jewish conductor Daniel Barenboim, who in 2001 defied taboo by playing the prelude from Tristan und Isolde in Israel, said, “Wagner influenced the way the whole world, without exception, looked at the music that had come before him, the classics, mostly German or middle or central European music—Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann.” Better than anyone Barenboim knows how Wagner’s innovations with leitmotif, harmony, and tone changed twentieth-century music. He also knows how Wagner’s retelling of the Norse myths fired the imagination of a bigoted Austrian soldier with a gift for oratory.

The key difference, I would suggest, has more to do with chronology than merit. Wagner’s reputation was firmly established before the Nazis took power. The barbarity they unleashed has certainly stained Wagner, for many irrecoverably, but many more feel that loving the music does not obligate one to love the composer. As Barenboim memorably put it, “I might invite him to dinner for study purposes, but not for enjoyment.”

This is a grown-up response to a difficult problem. If Breker was merely a propagandist, defending his work would be perverse. But he’s more than that. Breker’s contemporary, the French sculptor Aristide Maillol, called him “Germany’s Michelangelo.” You needn’t agree with that extravagant praise, or even like Breker particularly, to find it a little odd that his name isn’t as familiar as Giacometti, Henry Moore, or Alexander Calder. Musicologists still write long books about the Tristan Chord, but there has been no major scholarly interest in Breker and his milieu—only silence. The simple truth is that Breker was cancelled before cancelation was invented. That’s hardly the worst tragedy of World War II. From most perspectives, it’s justice. Vae victis and all that.

The entertainer Stephen Fry remembers his mother—her family were Hungarian Jews—and how she hated Wagner played loud, something young Fry loved. Years later in Bayreuth, Fry wrestled with the problem while standing next to a bust of Wagner (sculpted incidentally by Breker). “We all recognise that loving Wagner is not the same as loving almost any other artist. We can try to pretend it is, and would that it were so. But,” Fry said, “we also know there is something profoundly important about this artist: something that shaped the twentieth century, in benign ways.” To Fry, letting the Nazis “define how the world should look at Wagner” would be granting them a victory from the grave. 

Perhaps Wagner can still be saved. For Breker, it’s probably too late. And only time will tell Daniel Penny’s fate. One thing I know is that folks who think he’s a mensch do him no favours comparing him to an Übermensch.