‘Degenerate’ art. Modern art on trial under the Nazis

“‘Degenerate’ art: Modern art on trial under the Nazis” looks in particular at the propaganda exhibition “Entartete Kunst” (degenerate art), held in Munich in 1937, which showed over 600 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 disgust of the public.

“Entartete Kunst” was the culmination of a series of infamous exhibitions held in a number of 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including those by Vincent Van Gogh, Marc Chagall and Pablo Picasso, an exemplary case of the “degenerate artist”, were withdrawn, sold or destroyed. At the heart of this story is the term “degeneracy”, which emerged in the nineteenth century in various disciplines (natural history, medicine, anthropology, art history, etc.) and crystallised at the heart of the National Socialist “world view”, serving as a vector for the deployment of racist and anti-Semitic theories within the history of art.