Iron Fists by Steven Heller You can appreciate the Sistine
Chapel without being a Catholic, and respect the Parthenon
without believing in Athena. You are even free to praise the
aesthetic productions of certain murderous modern regimes. The
crimes of the Soviet Union notwithstanding, Vladimir Tatlin’s
design for a Monument to the Third International remains a
landmark of modern art. In schools of architecture, it has long
been chic to affect a liking for Giuseppe Terragni, the gifted
architect of Benito Mussolini. But whatever you believe, you may
not admire anything about the art of the Third Reich. Albert
Speer, Leni Riefenstahl, the sculptor Arno Breker—all
exceptional talents, who would have made their mark under any
system—remain beyond the pale. Or so common decency dictates.
For Nazi art, it is said, was not merely incidentally the
official accoutrement of a criminal regime but was intimately
complicit in the worst of its crimes. Even the apolitical
Breker, whose long-limbed, angular statues would not