Degenerate Art: The Trial of Modern Art under Nazism

‘Degenerate’ art: the trial of modern art under Nazism. ‘In particular, it examines the propaganda exhibition Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art), held in Munich in 1937, which showed over 700 works by around a hundred artists representing the different currents of modern art, from Otto Dix to Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, from Vassily Kandinsky to Emil Nolde, from Paul Klee to Max Beckmann, in a setting designed to provoke the visitor's disgust.

Entartete Kunst’ was the culmination of a series of infamous exhibitions staged in several museums from 1933 onwards (Dresden, Mannheim, Karlsruhe, etc.) to denounce the artistic avant-garde as a threat to German “purity”, against the backdrop of a methodical “purge” of German collections. More than 20,000 works, including those by Vincent Van Gogh, Marc Chagall and Pablo Picasso, who had been labelled a ‘degenerate’ artist in France and Germany since the 1920s, were withdrawn, sold or destroyed. At the heart of this history, the term ‘degeneracy’, which emerged in the nineteenth century in various disciplines (natural history, medicine, anthropology, art history, etc.) until it crystallised at the heart of the National Socialist ‘world view’, served as a vector for the deployment of racist and anti-Semitic theories within the history of art.