"Degenerate Art," The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany

Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) is a term that was used by Nazi authorities to identify, censure, and confiscate art they considered inconsistent with their ideology. It was the cornerstone of an ambitious propaganda campaign that culminated in the exhibition Entartete Kunst, which took place in Munich in 1937. The majority of this so-called degenerate art was Avant-Garde in both form and subject. Abstract Art by German artists, including Max Beckmann, Max Eernst, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Paul Klee, and Franz Marc, was particularly vulnerable to Nazi attack; non-German artists such as Vasily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian were also singled out. As a polarizing concept, Entartete Kunst stems from an essentially anti-modernist, xenophobic and anti-Semitic position. It was designed to legitimize the art of the Third Reich, which was rooted in traditional art forms and characterized by an idealized naturalism that promoted heroic virtues and racial purity.

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FROM THE STUDIES ON ‘DEGENERATE ART’ TWENTY YEARS AFTER THE WASHINGTON CONFERENCE. SZCZECIN’S CASE (MUSEUM DER STADT STETTIN)

Muzealnictwo ◽

10.5604/01.3001.0013.2857 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 60 ◽

pp. 126-142

Author(s):

Dariusz Kacprzak

Keyword(s):

Fine Arts ◽

Departure Point ◽

Art Collections ◽

New Objectivity ◽

Avant Garde ◽

Art Dealers ◽

History Of ◽

German Revolution ◽

Degenerate Art ◽

First Time

On 5 August 1937, fulfilling the orders of the Chairman of the Reich Chamber of Fine Arts (Reichskammer der bildenden Künste), a confiscation committee showed up at the City Museum in Stettin, and demanded to be presented by the Director of the institution the Museum’s collection in view of ‘degenerate art’. While ‘hunting’ for the Avant-garde and ‘purging museums’, the Nazis confiscated works that represented, e.g. Expressionism, Cubism, Bauhaus Constructivism, pieces manifesting the aesthetics of the New Objectivity, as well as other socially and politically ‘suspicious’ art works from the late Belle Époque, WWI, German Revolution of 1918–1919, or from Weimer Republic Modernism of the 1920s and 30s. The infamous Munich ‘Entartete Kunst’ Exhibition turned into a travelling propaganda display, presented in different variants at different venues. A three-week show (11 Jan.–5 Feb. 1939) was also held in Stettin, in the Landeshaus building (today housing the Municipality of Szczecin). Provenance studies: biographies of the existing works, often relocated, destroyed, or considered to have been lost, constitute an interesting input into the challenging chapter on German and European Avant-garde, Szczecin museology, and on Pomerania art collections. Side by side with the artists, it was museologists and art dealers who cocreated this Pomeranian history of art. The Szczecin State Archive contains a set of files related to ‘degenerate art’, revealing the mechanisms and the course of the ‘museum purge’ at the Stettin Stadtmuseum. The archival records of the National Museum in Szczecin feature fragments of inventory ledgers as well as books of acquisitions, which provide a particularly precious source of knowledge. The published catalogue of the works of ‘degenerate art’ from the Museum’s collections covering 1081 items has been created on the grounds of the above-mentioned archival records, for the first time juxtaposed, and cross-checked. The mutually matching traces of information from Polish and German archives constitute a good departure point for further more thorough studies.

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Representations of illnesses and invalidity as 'degenerate art' in Nazi Germany

Timocki medicinski glasnik ◽

10.5937/tmg1502092v ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 40 (2) ◽

pp. 92-96

Author(s):

Ada Vlajic

Keyword(s):

Nazi Germany ◽

Degenerate Art

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Expositions of ‘degenerate’ art and music in nazi Germany: reflections on totalitarian aesthetics and education

Revista Digital do LAV ◽

10.5902/1983734848141 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 13 (3) ◽

pp. 097-113

Author(s):

Guilherme Prado Roitberg ◽

Fabiana Maria Baptista ◽

Luiz Roberto Gomes

Keyword(s):

Nazi Germany ◽

Degenerate Art

Durante o Terceiro Reich (1933-1945), os intelectuais nazistas conceberam a música e as artes plásticas como elementos formadores de valores morais, podendo corromper a educação e comprometer a vida política e social. A partir da formulação teórica da estética totalitária, toda arte considerada "degenerada" passou a ser censurada e exposta como exemplo de imoralidade. Inauguradas em 1937, as exposições Entartete Kunst (Arte Degenerada) e Entartete Musik (Música Degenerada) trouxeram até a cidade de Munique obras ligadas ao modernismo, ao bolchevismo, bem como a produção artística de negros, judeus e soviéticos. Com base em uma pesquisa bibliográfica amparada pela teoria crítica da sociedade, o presente artigo analisa o conteúdo dessas exposições, demonstrando a caráter pedagógico da arte na formação dos valores morais da sociedade alemã, sob a ótica dos intelectuais nazistas.

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Reconstructing Cold War Cultural Diplomacy Exhibitions

Stedelijk Studies Journal ◽

10.54533/stedstud.vol002.art07 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 1 ◽

Author(s):

Jennifer McComas

Keyword(s):

United States ◽

New York ◽

Twentieth Century ◽

Modern Art ◽

New York Times ◽

Third Reich ◽

The United States ◽

Avant Garde ◽

Degenerate Art ◽

Armory Show

As museum and exhibition histories have become significant subjects of art historical investigation in recent decades, museums themselves have subjected some of the most groundbreaking and controversial exhibitions of the twentieth century to reevaluation through elaborate reconstructions. These restaged exhibitions can shed new light on the shifting boundaries of the canon, question long-accepted art historical interpretations, and provide insight into the intersection of art and politics. Restaged exhibitions, however, are not simply exercises in historical research, but often serve as commentary on contemporary issues. A relevant example is the 1991–1992 exhibition ‘Degenerate Art’: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany, a reconstruction of the 1937 Nazi propaganda exhibition Degenerate Art.[1] Organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the restaged exhibition introduced late-twentieth-century American audiences to the cultural censorship practiced by the Third Reich at a time when the withholding of federal funding for controversial art was being hotly debated in the United States.[2] It also helped to revive interest in the issue of Nazi art looting, which is now a major subject of research within European and North American museums. Reconstructed exhibitions also focus attention on how and why certain art forms have become canonical. This was the case with the New-York Historical Society’s 2013 exhibition The Armory Show at 100: Modern Art and Revolution, a partial reconstruction of the 1913 International Exhibition of Modern Art.[3] Better known as the Armory Show, this exhibition, held in New York City in February and March 1913, is lauded for introducing European avant-garde art to American audiences and setting the stage for its eventual entry into the canon in the United States. The majority of critics in 1913, however, condemned the Armory Show, perceiving the fauvist and cubist works on display as anarchic, ugly, and even immoral. Revisiting the exhibition a century later allowed for reflection on our changing artistic preferences as new forms of art transition from shock-inducing to canonical. As Ken Johnson of the New York Times noted in his exhibition review of October 10, 2013, “now that the Cubists and the Fauves are museum-certified old masters, it takes some imagination to comprehend what made the Armory Show such a controversial sensation.”

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Schwitters, Kurt (1887–1948)

Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism ◽

10.4324/9781135000356-rem1428-1 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Silvio Gaggi

Keyword(s):

20Th Century ◽

Visual Art ◽

Three Dimensional ◽

Major Influence ◽

The Political ◽

Two Dimensional ◽

Art Exhibition ◽

Avant Garde ◽

Music And Architecture ◽

Degenerate Art

Kurt Schwitters is most commonly associated with Dada, but his relationship to that movement’s aesthetic, political, and philosophical rebellion was ambivalent. Although he was friends with the Berlin Dadaists and participated in shows with them, he never formally became a member of their group. Schwitters was also involved with the Expressionist gallery and magazine, Der Sturm, and Dada purists disdained Expressionism, with its focus on the personal rather than the political, the dominant concern of other German Dadaists such as George Gros and Richard Huelsenbeck. The formalist aspect of much of Schwitters’s work also separated his work from Dada "anti-art." Nevertheless, Schwitters is generally regarded as the greatest collage artist of the 20th century. He named his particular style of collage, which often incorporated three dimensional as well as two-dimensional elements, Merz. Merz became a tag prefix for all his works, which included poetry, music, and architecture, as well as visual art. After Schwitters’s art was included in the Nazi’s Degenerate Art exhibition, he escaped, first to Norway and then to England, where he continued to be artistically active until his death in 1948. Schwitters’s Merz aesthetics has been a major influence on avant-garde art throughout the 20th and early 21st centuries.

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