The Exhibition Of Degenerate Art

The Exhibition Of Degenerate Art

For it is an affair of the State ..... to prevent a Folk from being driven into the arms of spiritual lunacy ..... for on the day that this kind of art were actually to correspond to the general conception, one of the most severe changes of mankind would have begun; the backward development of the human brain. -- Adolf Hitler, My Struggle.

                It is not the function of art to wallow in dirt for dirt's sake, never its task to paint the state of decomposition, to draw cretins as the symbol of motherhood, to picture hunchbacked idiots as representatives of manly strength, Hitler had declared at the Party Rally in Nürnberg in 1935.

                In July, 1937 Hitler and Goebbels decided to clear museums of all remaining modern works and to mount an exhibition of modern works as an example of the most horrific art ever created. The custodians of all government and private museums and art collections are busy removing the most hideous creations of a degenerate humanity and of a pathological generation of so called artists, the magazine Der SA-Mann reported triumphantly in the issue of September 18th, 1937.

                And the director of the German Art Association had this to say to the cultural theorist Alfred Rosenberg: Throw this decaying foulness out of the art of the awakening Germany! Out also all those who still allow and foster cultural Bolshevism! ..... The undersigned knows that The Leader and you, Herr Reich Leader, cannot do everything alone ..... Therefore we make ourselves available to fight unreservedly, with all our strength and ability, for a German worldview, for the fertility of German life, and through this for German art. We are at your command. Heil Hitler!

Degenerate Art, München, 1937. Cover of the exhibition guide with the sculpture The New Man by the idiot Otto Freundlich

A Commission under the painter Adolf Ziegler, President Of The Reich Culture Chamber, aided by some art historians, including the Director Of The Folkwang Museum in Essen, Klaus Graf von Baudissin, seized over 5,000 works from private and public collections. Among the works were:

1,052 by Emil Nolde,
759 by Erich Heckel,
639 by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, and
508 by Max Beckmann.

They also took works by:
- Alexander Archipenko,
- Georges Braque,
- Marc Chagall,
- Giorgio de Chirico,
- Robert Delaunay,
- André Derain,
- Theo van Dösburg,
- James Ensor,
- Paul Gauguin,
- Vincent van Gogh,
- Albert Gleizes,
- Alexei Jawlensky,
- Wassily Kandinsky,
- Fernand Léger,
- El Lissitzky,
- Franz Masereel,
- Henri Matisse,
- László Moholy-Nagy,
- Piet Mondrian,
- Edvard Munch,
- Pablo Picasso,
- Georges Rouault,
- and Maurice Vlaminck.
Hitler at an early Degenerate Art exhibition, Dresden, 1935. Paintings: Erich Heckel: Seated Man; Ernst Ludwig Kirchner: Five Women; Hans Grundig: Boy With Broken Arm; Johannes Tietz: Double Image -- As in all things, the Folk trust the judgment of one man, our Leader. He knows which way German art must go in order to fulfil its task as a projection of the German character. I open the exhibition of Degenerate Art. -- Adolf Ziegler

                Right from the start the National Socialists began to stage propaganda exhibitions of the most blatant examples of bad modern art. The League For The Defence Of German Culture had organised a show in Karlsruhe in 1933 which showed official art in Germany from 1918 to 1933. Official in these terms were the spiritually worthless works by Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter as well as paintings by Max Slevogt, Lovis Corinth, and Munch. Each of the works on show had a price tag to indicate how much the museum had paid for it. The aim was to educate the public by showing them how, in times of stupefying economic hardship, taxpayers' money was spent. Stuttgart followed with an equally critical show of the works of Marc Chagall, Max Beckmann, and Otto Dix. As soon as the Dresden Museum was cleared of its modern art, the City Hall put on a show of the confiscated works entitled Mirrors Of The Decadence In Art. The Nürnberg and Dessau Museums also opened their own Chambers Of Horrors, displaying modern art. The National Socialist educator Gebele von Waldstein wasted no time. In the spring of 1933 he opened an exhibition of Cultural Bolshevism in the Kunsthalle in Mannheim; the show then travelled to München and Nürnberg. The painter Hans Adolf Bühler, the Director Of The School Of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe, quickly followed with an exhibition caricaturing the art sponsored by the previous Government: Official Art From 1918 To 1933. All these defamatory exhibitions were widely publicised and attracted many visitors. In München, The Eternal Jew, an exhibition of Jewish history in theatre, film, painting, and sculpture, attracted 150,000 visitors.

                In 1936, Hitler decided to stage his own show of the hated modern art. An official exhibition of Entartete Kunst -- Degenerate Art opened in München on July 19th, 1937, a day after the opening of the first Great German Art Exhibition, to which it was a useful pendant. With great satisfaction, Goebbels announced:

                How deeply the perverse Jewish spirit has penetrated German cultural life is shown in the frightening and horrifying forms of the Exhibition Of Degenerate Art in München ..... This has nothing at all to do with the suppression of artistic freedom and modem progress. On the contrary, the botched art works which were exhibited there and their creators are of yesterday and before yesterday. They are the senile representatives, no longer to be taken seriously, of a period that we have intellectually and politically overcome and whose monstrous, degenerate creations still haunt the field of the plastic arts in our time. (Goebbels, November 26th, 1937, in Von der Großmacht zur Weltmacht.)

                The exhibition of Degenerate Art was installed in the old gallery in the Hofgarten. In his opening speech Adolf Ziegler announced: Our patience with all those who have not been able to fall in line with National Socialist reconstruction during the last four years is at an end. The German Folk will judge them. We are not scared. The Folk trust, as in all things, the judgment of one man, our Leader. He knows which way German art must go in order to fulfil its task as the expression of German character ..... What you are seeing here are the crippled products of madness, impertinence, and lack of talent ..... I would need several freight trains to clear our galleries of this rubbish. He added proudly, to thundering applause, This will happen soon. (Ziegler, July 19th, 1937, Mitteilungsblatt der Reichskammer der bildenden Künste, August 1st, 1937.)

                The Degenerate Art show in München was the most frank, radical, and brutally instructive of its kind. The pictures were jammed together with descriptive labels which seemed merely insulting until one noticed the garbage which they were labelling. In its arrangement the Directors borrowed from the much despised Dadaists. The way of hanging the pictures, the aggressive slogans resembling graffiti on the walls, the whole idea of wanting to shock had all been done years before by the Dadaists. Hitler and Goebbels came to look at the cream of Cubism, Dadaism, and Expressionism: approximately 650 works by 112 artists, among them Barlach, Beckmann, Corinth, Grosz, Heckel, Kandinsky, Kirchner, Klee, Kokoschka, Nolde, and Pechstein.

                Young people were barred from the show due to the obscenity of the exhibits from which decent German youth had to be protected. The Directors of the show wished that they could place the previous criminal museum directors and idiotic artists next to the works so that the public could spit at them.

Stupidity Or Impertinence -- Or Both -- Pushed To The Limit!. Page 32 of the Degenerate Art exhibition guide. Paintings: Max Ernst: La Belle Jardinière; Willi Baumeister: Figure With Pink Stripe III; Johannes Molzahn: Twins
                The apparently chaotic display had order built into it. The exhibits were classified by subject just as in the other official exhibition. Only the themes here were Farmers Seen By Jews, Insult To German Womanhood, Mockery Of God. The spectacular and sensational way in which the art was displayed was aimed at mobilising vigorous popular protest. It was meant to be the last chapter of a barbaric age, while the official show signalled the dawn of a new one. Over two million visitors came. Does this not sufficiently prove the necessity for such an education through the horror chambers of degenerate art? reasonably asked one of the prominent members of the League For The Defence Of German Culture. (Dr. Walter Hansen, Judenkunst in Deutschland, Berlin, 1942, page 197.)

                The press joined in the tirades against the modern artists and announced proudly that the cleansing of the temple of German art was complete. The aim of the show was to kill off modern art, and it succeeded. Goebbels had achieved his aim of making the public the true judge of art:

                Had the representatives of decadence and decline turned their attention to the masses of the Folk, they would have come up against icy contempt and cold mockery. For the Folk have no fear of being scorned as out of step with the times and as reactionary by enraged Jewish literati. Only the wealthy classes have this fear ..... They succumb all too easily to that kind of demiculture which is coupled with intellectual pride and conceited arrogance. These defects are familiar to us under the label snobbism ..... Snobbism is sick and wormeaten ..... We have had the courage to reject the products of its insolent arrogance. Today they are assembled in the Exhibition Of Degenerate Art, and the Folk, by the million, walk by this staggering nonsense, shaking their heads angrily ..... In fact, The Leader has acted in the fulfilment of a national duty when he interfered here and again established order and a sure footing in this chaos.

Degenerate Music, Düsseldorf, 1938. Cover of the exhibition guide by Hans Severus Ziegler

                There were suggestions that the remaining works be burned, and on March 20th, 1939, 1,004 paintings and 3,825 watercolours, drawings, and graphic works were burned in the courtyard of the fire station in Berlin. The confiscation of the moderns from the museums also provoked hectic activity among international art dealers. The Berlin art dealer Karl Buchholz offered his services in the cleansing action in order to take over some works. Karl Haberstock, a München art dealer who organised an auction of banned art in Lucerne in 1939, proposed a further cleansing action. Dr. Franz Hofmann of the Degenerate Art Commission proposed to sell these unsaleable works. Goebbels was reluctant, but Hitler, realising that this art could be a source of considerable income, decided to sell it for the good of Germany.

Installation view of the Degenerate Art exhibition. Paintings: Emil Nolde: The Mulatto; Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Portrait of B. R.; at far right, a portion of Emil Nolde, Man And Woman -- The niggerising of music and theatre as well as the niggerising of the visual arts was intended to uproot the racial instinct of the Folk, and to tear down blood barriers. -- wall statement
Soon the London dealer P. D. Colnaghi, trying to outbid the two Jewish dealers from Paris, Wildenstein and Seligmann, offered to take over the entire stock of the Degenerate Art exhibition, referring to the fact that he was the only prominent English art dealer never to have offered degenerate art from any country for sale.

Ultimately it fell to the Galerie Fischer in Lucerne to organise the sale, in June, 1939.

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