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How to crush a nation's soul: The Nazi crusade against "degenerate" art
In July 1937, artist Marc Chagall discovered that his paintings were enjoying a star turn in a singularly unexpected venue — an exhibition organized by the Nazi Party in Munich, the birthplace of its political fortunes. Chagall's work often addressed explicitly Jewish themes: In one such painting, a bearded rabbi takes a pinch of snuff in ochre-yellow surroundings, his wry eyes looking in the direction of the viewer but not necessarily at them. How one is meant to interpret this painting, or the artist's intent, is not clear. Adolf Ziegler, the Nazi functionary charged with overseeing the exhibition, perceived no ambiguity. He provided the supposed answer for "The Rabbi" and every other artwork displayed alongside it. "Look around you at these monstrosities of insanity, insolence, incompetence and degeneration," he declared in his opening address. "I would need several freight trains to clear our galleries of this rubbish ... This will happen soon." But through the end of November that year, at least, this "rubbish," served as a useful prop for the Third Reich's campaign to excise society of its corrupting elements and usher in a new era in which art represented the superior virtues of the German nation, as the Nazis saw it. The 'Degenerate Art Exhibition,' as it was unsubtly named, drew an audience that eventually exceeded two million visitors. It featured 650 works confiscated from German museums and judged by a panel to represent "decadence," "weakness of character," "mental disease," "racial impurity" and other hallmarks of Weimar-era modernity. The exhibition included an entire room dedicated to the "Revelation of the Jewish Racial Soul" and featured paintings by and about the ethnic and religious group whom the Nazis largely blamed for Germany's supposed moral and material decline. That room and others also included works whose subject matter offended reactionary Nazi sensibilities for other reasons, such as Otto Dix's "The Trench": a gruesome tangle of human remains, discarded weapons, leaking brain matter and faces, suspended in agony in the aftermath of an artillery bombardment, with a soldier's body propped up by a tripod of fixed bayonets high above the carnage. In another of Dix's works, the drypoint "War Cripples," disfigured veterans return home, many of them with limbs missing — a common sight across Germany after World War I. (Dix was himself a combat veteran.) Such depictions of war, the curators wrote in the exhibition catalogue, were tantamount to "military sabotage." "Here, the 'art' enters the service of Marxist propaganda for conscientious objection," the catalog essay continued, referring to the practice of resisting conscription on moral grounds, even under threat of punishment by the state. Dix's art was deemed an 'insult to the German heroes of the Great War.' Elsewhere in the exhibition, one could visit the "Insanity Room,' which displayed abstract paintings. The Nazis were not fans. 'In the paintings and drawings of this chamber of horrors, there is no telling what was in the sick brains of those who wielded the brush or the pencil,' the catalog explained. Once the point had been made, some of these artworks were burned. Others, however, fell into the hands of collectors, including a number of high-ranking party officials. The Nazi penchant for playing the role of art critics and connoisseurs, combined with the party's aim of attaining complete control over all aspects of German life, resulted in a far more heavy-handed effort to twist the form and spirit of art to political ends than the scattered bleating characteristic of today's culture wars. In this campaign, the Nazis styled themselves as saviors, rather than mere destroyers, of culture. 'You artists live in great and happy times. Above you the most powerful and understanding patron the Führer loves artists, because he is himself one. Under his blessed hand a Renaissance has begun," proclaimed propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. Art, as the Nazis understood it, was to be the reference point by which the German master race recognized its own superiority, and must be used to serve its ends. 'True art is and remains eternal,' Hitler once said. "It does not follow the law of fashion. Its effect is that of a revelation arising from the depths of the essential character of a people.' Indeed, Nazi artists spared no effort in ferreting as much inspiration as they could from the pre-modern and mythic German past — the wars of the Nibelungen, the medieval Reich, the Teutonic crusades in the Baltic, the Protestant Reformation — and making extrapolations about the timelessness of German virtue. The Nazis even infringed on cultural prerogatives claimed by Benito Mussolini's fascist Italy, citing Germanophile philosopher Houston Steward Chamberlain's claim that the German people, by right of Aryan blood passed down from the Greeks and Romans, were destined to revive the 'lost ideal' of classical beauty. Revival was indeed the operative word. The Nazis held that German society had become diseased by the advent of modern art — meaning not just works that questioned or contradicted Nazi policy, but any kind of art bearing the hallmarks of modernity: visually distorted Expressionist paintings, atonal music unfettered by a central key, edifices of the Dada movement that defied aesthetic logic. As such, it was their mission to expunge such art from the public memory. Even before seizing national power in 1933, the Nazis implemented test cases on the state level. In 1930, the Nazi Party chief in Thuringia and state Minister of Education and the Interior, Wilhelm Frick, issued orders to remove 70 Expressionist paintings from the Schloss Weimar museum, fire the director of another museum for displaying modern art in its exhibitions, and ban all pacifist or antiwar books and films, including Erich Maria Remarque's legendary World War I novel 'All Quiet on the Western Front.' The sources of modern art, according to social critic Max Nordau, were decadent, corrupted societies whose artists, afflicted with 'degeneration' as a form of mental illness, could only produce work reflecting their degenerate selves. But what the Nazis seized upon most fervently – although they certainly didn't admit to inspiration from Nordau, who was both Jewish and a Zionist — was his claim that an individual's mental deformity lay in the presence of physical deformities like 'multiple and stunted growths in the first line of asymmetry, the unequal development of the two halves of the face and cranium… etc.,' and his prescribed solution: 'Characterization of the leading degenerates as mentally diseased: unmasking and stigmatizing of their imitators as enemies to society; cautioning the public against the lies of these parasites.' Here was the framework by which the Nazis attacked modernists not just as purveyors of low-quality creations, but also as perverted, dangerous and, whenever applicable, racially inferior. Artistic works that eschewed the so-called Nordic ideal of beauty, in subject or in style, were likewise condemned for undermining German high culture. Nazi architect Paul Schultze-Naumburg later pushed Nordau's theory of degeneration further down the slippery slope, arguing that it was not social conditioning that produced such despicable degenerates, but race, and in particular race-mixing. Only racially pure artists could produce art that embodied classical ideals, he argued, while their racially-mixed colleagues could create only disorder and monstrosity. Nazi leaders like racial theorist Alfred Rosenberg embraced Schultze-Naumburg's theory as a magnificent insight. Nordau, who had declared that composer Richard Wagner — perhaps the Nazis' most venerated cultural icon — possessed a 'greater abundance of degeneration than all the degenerates put together with whom we have hitherto become acquainted,' would no doubt have disagreed. While Nordau's distaste for Wagner – whose operas were embraced by Hitler with quasi-religious fervor – was not 'racial' in nature and may have been inflated by the composer's notorious antisemitism, questions over what qualified as degenerate art illustrated how nebulous the concept was. Goebbels and Rosenberg squabbled over whether some forms of modern art should have a place in the new Germany, with the former taking great pains to keep Expressionist artists such as avowed Nazi Emil Nolde in the political fold and dispel criticism that Nazi cultural policy was overly reactionary. "We National Socialists are not unmodern; we are the carrier of a new modernity, not only in politics and in social matters, but also in art and intellectual matters,' Goebbels argued. 'To be modern means to stand near the spirit of the present Zeitgeist. And for art, too, no other modernity is possible.' In the first year of Nazi rule in Germany, the Expressionists continued to enjoy Goebbels' patronage. And in the battle for practical control of the party's cultural policy, Goebbels, a far more consummate politician and organizer than the pedantic Rosenberg, appeared to seize the upper hand; in September 1933, Goebbels founded the Reich Chamber of Culture, which all working German artists were required to join, Aryan certificate in hand. (Its members, of course, were all artists whom Goebbels considered to be loyal Nazis and sufficiently 'Nordic' in ethnicity and character.) But the next year, Hitler himself declared that all forms of modern art were degenerate and had no place in his Germany, which would not 'be befuddled or intimidated' by modernist 'charlatans.' Rosenberg received an even harsher rebuke from Hitler, who preferred Greek and Roman classicism to Rosenberg's neo-Gothic aesthetic and denounced 'those backwards-lookers who imagine that they can impose upon the National Socialist revolution, as a binding heritage for the future, a 'Teutonic art' sprung from the fuzzy world of their own romantic conceptions.'With the party's cultural doctrine now clear, artists who previously enjoyed Nazi patronage suddenly found themselves stripped of official sanction and saw their art torn from museum walls. Ernst Ludwig Kirschner, an Expressionist painter who privately disdained the Nazi regime, sought to assure Nazi authorities that he was 'neither a Jew nor a Social Democrat,' but was expelled from the Prussian Academy of Arts anyway. The aforementioned Emil Nolde, who had condemned the paintings of 'half-breeds, bastards, and mulattoes' in his 1934 autobiography, could not stop government officials from removing 1,052 of his works from museums, the most of any artist in Germany. Some of his paintings, in fact, wound up in the 1937 Degenerate Art Exhibition, alongside Dix's antiwar compositions and Chagall's rabbi. The mass removals were codified in 1938 by the sweeping Degenerate Law Act, which declared that 'products of degenerate art that have been secured in museums or in collections open to the public before this law went into effect… can be appropriated by the Reich without compensation.' Nazi officials, on the other hand, were happy to be compensated for unloading undesirable works of art to foreign collectors. Those that couldn't be sold abroad or hidden within officials' palatial homes were consigned to the bonfires. In 1939 alone, 4,000 paintings met such a fate. Artists who complained too much about any of this, or who were suspected of defiance, soon faced worse fates. Shortly after his disgrace, Expressionist painter Max Pechstein received teaching offers from schools in Mexico and Turkey, but Nazi authorities refused to grant him an exit visa and left him to languish in rural Pomerania until the end of the war. In 1939, Dix was thrown in jail over an improbable accusation that he was involved in an assassination attempt against Hitler. Max Beckmann fled to the Netherlands in 1937, only to watch German tanks enter Amsterdam in 1940. In a desperate bid to preserve 'degenerate' art he had produced in exile, Beckmann hid his 'Departure' in the attic and wrote on the back of the canvas: 'Scenes from Shakespeare's 'Tempest.'" He came under police surveillance, but was not arrested. More conformist artists, on the other hand, enjoyed much more flattering official reviews. Just blocks away from the infamous Degenerate Art Exhibition, Nazi officials staged a competing show, the 'Great German Art Exhibition,' whose centerpiece was an enormous canvas featuring Hitler on horseback and in immaculate plate armor, gazing toward the future and carrying a Nazi flag. For all of Hitler's obsession with aesthetics, art had become politics by other means. Degeneracy had not been replaced by morality, wrote artist Oskar Schlemmer, but by 'tried and true purveyors of kitsch.'
Los Angeles Times
07-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Commentary: 'Degenerate' or 'woke,' Paris museum exhibit shows what happens to art in the crosshairs of politics
PARIS – If all you saw of the exhibition at the Picasso Museum here was the art itself, you would recognize at once that here are wonderful canvases, powerful canvases, from many decades and countries and artists — Van Gogh, Klee, Picasso of course, Kandinsky, Chagall, landscapes, portraits, abstracts and striking sculpture. But what's the theme, the organizing concept? It's hate. The unifying theme is that every one of these works, and thousands more, were despised and maligned by Hitler and the Third Reich as 'degenerate art,' destined to be burned up, sold off, hidden away, or lost during the 10-plus years of the Nazi crusade against any art that it decreed was too modern, too un-German, work that Nazis said was created by 'idiots,' 'criminals,' 'speculators,' 'Bolsheviks' and 'Jews.' The exhibition, 'Degenerate Art: Modern Art on Trial Under the Nazis,' is at this museum until May 25. It's in Paris' Marais district, once the center of the city's Jewish life. And it's the first such exhibition in France. It takes a lot of time to assemble so many artworks from so many different collections and museums, but the show launched serendipitously not quite a month after Donald Trump was sworn in as president. His name does not appear in the exhibit, but a connection is palpable if not visible. Since Trump took office, the art world has watched his mission to end 'woke' art in taxpayer-funded federal programs and institutions. He justified his takeover of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts by claiming on social media that he would put an end to 'woke' performances of drag shows and 'anti-American propaganda.' He filled its board with allies who voted him in as director. He's cut the entire National Endowment for the Arts funding from his proposed budget. Vice president JD Vance has been tasked with removing 'improper ideology' from the Smithsonian Institution, those things and ideas that 'degrade shared American values' or 'divide Americans based on race.' President Trump stands in the presidential box as he tours the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington on March 17. This French museum's show offers a flashback to the era when, apart from the works including those displayed here, the artists who created them were reviled and persecuted. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, whose glamorous 1913 'Rue a Berlin' is here, died by suicide in 1938. Otto Freundlich's striking Easter Island-style human head was on the cover of the original July 1937 Nazi exhibition guide to some 700 'degenerate' works, and beneath it the German word for 'art' — 'KUNST' — in capital letters and quote marks, leaving no question that the Nazis did not regard it as art at all. Freundlich was sent to a concentration camp on March 4, 1943, and died there five days later. Before the fatal train departed, he wrote a note to his partner and fellow artist, Jeanne Kosnick-Kloss, ending, 'May heaven protect you and give you strength. I love you and will always be with you.' Room by room, the works unfurl their themes, among them 'Race and Purity,' 'Purging German Museums' and 'Trade in Degenerate Art.' In 1933, Marc Chagall's intense painting of a rabbi, 'The Pinch of Snuff,' was an obvious target. Taken out of a museum in Mannheim, pulled through the city streets on a handcart, inviting Germans to mock it, and then set in an art gallery window with the sign, 'Taxpayer, you should know how your money was spent.' Others make you wonder how they came to be reviled. Why would a striking Van Gogh landscape, 'Field of Poppies,' be offensive? Probably because the Nazis classed him as anti-traditional as well as insane, as they did the avant-garde artist Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler. She was committed to an asylum, where she drew portraits of her fellow patients, some on display here. The Nazis murdered her under their forced euthanasia program. 'Metropolis,' a painting by German artist George Grosz, is part of the 'Degenerate Art: Modern Art on Trial Under the Nazis' at the Picasso Museum in Paris. George Grosz's canvas 'Metropolis' was painted during World War I and shows a nighttime street teeming with the delights and vices of city life. The Nazis put it on display and then sold it at auction, in 1939, as they did many of the artworks they damned, to finance their handiwork. The painting wound up in New York. So did Grosz, who years later bought it back himself. Most of the work is vertical, on the walls. But horizontally, under glass in a large table, this caught my attention: an engrossing collection of 1930s and 1940s newspaper clippings Picasso kept — he was quite the packrat — about the Hitler 'degenerate' purges. My French is pretty fair, so I think I read it right. One article, on Aug. 20, 1937, is from the French illustrated weekly Voila, which was edited by a pair of Jewish brothers. The article appeared a month after July 18, 1937, when Hitler opened a Munich museum of approved Nazi artworks. The next day, he visited the 'degenerate' art exhibition. Voila used the back-to-back events to mock Hitler and his taste in art, as well as 'the violence of his methods and the scale of his offensive' against modern art. It begins by reminding readers of the incompetent doctors in the plays of French playwright Moliere, men who endangered their patients' lives. It then likens Hitler to a doctor who cautions German artists to 'paint according to my directives, otherwise you'll be sterilized.' Instead, the writer imagines Hitler advising Germans to paint 'scenes from the life of the SS and the SA,' Hitler's armed Nazi forces, along with depictions of heroic young athletes in the mode of the mythic German hero Siegfried, and 'opulently formed women.' Stingingly, the article shows readers some examples of Hitler's own work, the rather stodgy and static products of a draftsman who aspires to art. Hitler twice applied and was twice rejected for admission to Vienna's Academy of Fine Arts, which remarked on his 'unfitness for painting.' The article notes that the mighty fuhrer had very recently 'wielded a paintbrush,' and 'not only as a housepainter.' That last is a sly point that's been an enduring comic take of Hitler's artistic preening. There's debate of long standing that Hitler's crusade against 'degenerate' art grew in part from his academy rejections. The 'housepainting Hitler' trope got a big boost, and a big laugh, in Mel Brooks' 1967 film 'The Producers.' The title characters find the worst screenplay they can, written by a crazed ex-Nazi soldier played by Kenneth Mars. The schnappsed-up Mars goes on a rant against Winston Churchill, 'with his cigars, with his brandy, and his rotten painting! Rotten! Hitler — there was a painter! He could paint an entire apartment in one afternoon — two coats!' A painting of President Trump is seen in the Grand Foyer of the White House as Trump speaks about investing in America on April 30 in Washington. With Trump now issuing an executive order about the contents of federal art institutions, his own artistic tastes are being highlighted, like his fondness for paintings of himself, and his touchiness about them. He and his supporters have shared 'fan' portraits of him painted as a boxer, a general and a king. He recently received — reportedly from Vladimir Putin — a portrait of himself with raised fist after the assassination attempt in Pennsylvania last year. A portrait of him that had hung in the Colorado state capitol for almost six years — a painting commissioned by Colorado Republicans and paid for by a $10,000 GoFundMe campaign — recently was taken down after it came to Trump's attention and he proclaimed it 'truly the worst' image of himself. In 2016, the Washington Post detailed how Trump had spent $20,000 of his charitable foundation's money to buy a large portrait of himself, which was said to have been installed in his New York golf club. Years before, when Trump invited his biographer Tim O'Brien aboard his plane as O'Brien was researching his 2005 book 'Trump Nation,' O'Brien spotted what looked like the Renoir painting 'Two Sisters (on the Terrace).' O'Brien said Trump told him, 'You know, that's an original Renoir.' In a Vanity Fair podcast, O'Brien said he told Trump, 'Donald, it's not.' He said, 'I grew up in Chicago, that Renoir is called Two Sisters on the Terrace, and it's hanging on a wall at the Art Institute of Chicago.' The original has, indeed, hung in the institute for more than 80 years. The Trump copy appeared to have been moved to Trump Tower, O'Brien said, because it could be seen in the background when '60 Minutes' interviewed Trump there not long after the 2016 election. The day before Germany's 1937 'degenerate' art exhibit debuted, Hitler opened another art show, also in Munich — an apotheosis of Germanic taste, the 'great German art exhibition.' Much of his speech was spent attacking the art he didn't like. 'Cubism, Dadaism, Futurism, Impressionism, etc., have nothing to do with our German people … I will therefore confess now, in this very hour, that I have come to the final inalterable decision to clean house, just as I have done in the domain of political confusion, and from now on rid the German art life of its phrase-mongering.' ' … with the opening of this exhibition, the end of German art foolishness and the end of the destruction of its culture will have begun. From now on we will wage an unrelenting war of purification against the last elements of putrefaction in our culture … ' The German artist Otto Dix was unsparing in his painted critiques of war. He'd already been under the disapproving eyes of Nazis for years, and several months before the Munich 'degenerate' art exhibit, he flung down this challenge in a letter to his fellow 'degenerate' artists: 'Then let's stay what we are. Long live degeneracy!'
