Power, no glory.

Painters, sculptors and architects have always been extremely interested in power and the people who wield it, for power means money, and money means patrons and clients. So it is not at all surprising that when the authoritarian regimes of the inter-war period became concerned to impose their will on the arts (as they were on all aspects of life) most artists were delighted. At last the state had seen sense and was prepared to put millions of public money into buildings, paintings and sculpture.

But of course there are no free meals and prices had to be paid, principally in adherence to the dogma of the ruling party. The results of this principled patronage are explored in a new exhibition, Art and Power: Europe under the Dictators 1930-45 at the Hayward Gallery, London.(1)

It must be said at once that the exhibition is a great step forward. Only 10 years ago, there was the colossal German Art in the Twentieth Century exhibition at the Royal Academy in which the period between 1933 and 1945 was completely left out, apart from a few pictures by Max Beckmann, who was all right because he had been shown in the Munich Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) Exhibition held by the Nazis in 1937. The folly of trying to ignore the enemy in the hope that he will go away has at last been abandoned, though there is still a slight tendency to hold him up as a doltish monster. In fact, we have been terrified of the art of the authoritarian states because we fear that its power may seduce us. So (except in Russia) it has been kept largely hidden for the past 50 years.

The Hayward show starts with the Paris International Exhibition of 1937, where the towers of the German and Soviet Pavilions faced each other across the main axis, different mainly in their tops, where the monumental eagle of the Nazis faced the heroic Soviet couple bearing the hammer and sickle.

In the Spanish Pavilion, an elegant exercise in calm Modernism designed by Josep Lluis Sert and Luis Lacasa for the Republican government, Picasso's Guernica cried out against the monstrosity of war and the evils of the Nationalists. Over the entrance were the words of the Republican president Azana: 'Il y a plus d'un demi million d'Espagnols avec des baionnettes dans les tranchees qui ne se laisseront pas marcher dessus.' After Paris in 1937, the exhibition focuses on Moscow, Rome and Berlin.

It is difficult to look back on the period without hindsight. While Spain can now be seen as the training ground of the Second World War, the ordinary citizen of Italy, Germany and Russia was not too troubled. Things were looking up on the whole: people were more prosperous (the slump and inflation were beaten), existence was stable and there was a clear direction to the whole of life. Security was the message that the artists were required to project: the security of living within a well-led country, the security of prosperity, the security of Blut und Boden (Blood and Earth) that tied you to Mother Russia, the Fatherland or the Patria. A few artists escaped, many went into internal exile (doing things ignored by the state - Scharoun's pitched roof houses are an example), but most were happy to conform - at least to start with - and, once drawn into the Mephistophelean machine, it was almost impossible to escape.

The exhibition confusingly, but quite rightly, shows the work of both the conformists and the rebels in the same rooms, almost without comment. Beckmann, for instance, is there, as well as the artists celebrated by the Nazis. So we see that it was not just Mies who famously entered the 1933 competition for the Reichsbank, but Gropius too, and even Poelzig. Poelzig stayed and died poor (in 1936), but the other two, after trying to get the Nazis to support the Bauhaus, escaped to affluence in the United States. The emigres would not have stood much chance if they had stayed on. Hitler looked at Werner March's first design of the Deutsches Stadium for the 1936 Olympic Games and was outraged by its naked Modernism saying, as Albert Speer recalled, that 'he would never set foot in a glass box like that'(2) (a rather frightening pre-echo of the view from Kensington Palace). They might perhaps have eked out a living making factories and engineering works, for the Nazis allowed sachlich Modernism to continue in what they thought of as utilitarian buildings.

Speer's monumental stripped Classicism became the formal expression of the state. The style was united with the formidable powers of German industry to make monuments at surprising speed (the Reich Chancellery was erected in not much more than 18 months, partly by using precast concrete elements). For building in the country and housing generally, Heimat vernacular revival was favoured, and it has to be admitted that some of the best artisan housing ever built under the influence of Arts and Crafts ideals was made in Germany under the Nazis.

In Italy the Modernists did better for most of the Fascist period. Terragni, after all, built the famous Casa del Fascio in, Como between 1932 and 1936, and Mussolini supported Modern approaches to architecture until the late '30s, when he started to take his propaganda about the Fascist state being the real successor of Imperial Rome seriously, and a stodgy Neo-classicism became the preferred style. Futurism had been one of the mainsprings of the Fascist ethos and became to some extent part of its cultural expression: it is strange to see Gerardo Dottori's 1933 portrait of the Duce which uses and makes official (in a rather tired way) the clash of fractured planes that had been so exciting 20 years earlier.

In the USSR, architecture and planning were given the tasks of drawing the huge empire together from the Baltic to the Pacific, imposing the presence of the Revolution and what were thought of as decent standards of living and working. Such a programme demanded strong policies and Stalin, always alert to the powers of art, demanded Socialist Realism, an industrialised Classicism similar to the work of Speer and his friends. The adventures of Constructivism were decried as being too wilful, not enough in touch with the real taste of the people (in fact perhaps not clearly expressive enough of the power of Moscow and the dictator over the vast territories). But, again, as the exhibition shows, the edges were not quite as clear-cut as we have often assumed. K.S. Mel'nikov, for instance, brilliantly related the radicalism of the Constructivist movement to the new diktat that buildings should be easily readable by everyman in his competition project for the commissariat of heavy industry in Red Square in a kind of Busby Berkeley set. (Photographs of pyramids of pretty girls in poses by Rodchenko were used as propaganda for the regime's health policies).

The exhibition is reasonably objective about the architecture of the three dictatorships. But in painting, particularly in German work, it seems to fall into the trap of holding up the most turgid, silly examples to show how the enemy was really vulgar and stupid, so no wonder we won. We are shown Arthur Kampf's sweaty Michelangelesque Venus and Adonis, and Adolf Zeigler's nude that seems to have been painted in Bovril.

But it was not all kitsch. Some of the painting of the Nazi time has great power. That is why we fear it so much. Ira nation's painters are set to a task, some of them will remain good, whatever the constraints. There were genre paintings that demonstrated Blut und Boden with great tenderness for instance Adolf Wissel's super-realist Farm Family from Kahlenberg (1939);(3) Oskar Martin-Amorbach's Harvest, shown in the great German art exhibition of 1938, is an amazingly powerful comment on the cycle of human life; Franz Eichhorst's Street Fighting, a picture of frightened, brave soldiers given nobility by defending their crumbling redoubt on the eastern front, is quite as good, and as touching, as anything in the Imperial War Museum.

But there, you see, I am almost being drawn into excusing the horrors a little by their clang and glamour. As Neal Ascherson says in a moving and perceptive afterword to the catalogue, the West embraced abstraction after the war to try to avoid the appalling predicaments of realism, which in one way or another indicate how the artist (and his patron) think people should live. But of course, there is no escape. Abstract art has been commoditised and made into an instrument for celebrating the values of contemporary capitalism (for instance in the Saatchi and Saatchi collection).

In the end, we have to stand and fight evil, as our fathers and grandfathers did so bravely with guns. Our battle is less violent, and there will be little blood lost, but it is just as important. We must somehow try to project (in work and words) the belief that architecture's purpose is to ennoble humankind, that our activity is at bottom to make life better over a very wide spectrum, ranging from the state to the individual.

The authoritarian regimes of the '30s disastrously over-emphasised the state. At present, in many Western countries, the individual is the prime focus, so there is little, if any, of the notion of res publica with which the dictators were so preoccupied. We need to find many ways forward that strike a balance between public and private realms. There are a few precedents that offer hope. All the work of Alvar Aalto is a discussion of the relationship of the individual to society. The German Organic school continues the tradition of celebrating the individual within community. There is a roll-call of fine architects, including Erskine, de Carlo, Van Eyck, Cullinan and Kroll, who continue to confront these hugely complicated problems with love and humour - qualities lacking in all the work of the creatures of the authoritarians.

1 Until 21 January 1996, after which it will travel to the Centre de Cultura Contemporania de Barcelona and the Deutsches Historiches Museum, Berlin

2 Quoted in Art and Power, Europe under the Dictators 1930-1945, Hayward Gallery, London, 1995, [pounds]29.95

3 This and the other paintings mentioned in this paragraph are in The Arts of the Third Reich by Peter Adam, Thames & Hudson, London, 1992, [pounds]24.95. They are not in the exhibition.