Degenerate art

Degenerate art (from the German: entartete Kunst) was the official platform adopted by the Nazi regime for banning modern art in favor of Heroic Art. Based on Romantic realism, Heroic Art was meant to exemplify the German race in order to project a moral statement in a simpler, and more conventional style. Heroic Art symbolized racially pure art, free from distortion and corruption, while modern styles deviated from the prescribed norm of classical beauty. Racially pure artists produced racially pure art, and modern artists of an inferior racial strain produced works which were contorted. Ironically, the theory originated with the Jewish intellectual, Max Nordau. In the Nazi adaptation it was used to defend claims of a cultural decline and racist theory.

The entartete Kunst exhibit

By 1937, this concept was firmly entrenched in Nazi policy, and authorities purged German museums of modern art now condemned as degenerate. The entartete Kunst exhibit premiered in Munich in March, 1937, and travelled to eleven other cities in Germany and Austria.

Related Topics:
1937 - Museums - Munich

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The show was intended as an official condemnation of modern art, and included over 650 paintings, sculptures, prints, and books from the collections of thirty two German museums. Expressionism, which had its origins in Germany, contained the largest proportion of paintings represented.

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The exhibit was held on the second floor of a building formerly occupied by the Institute of Archaeology. Viewers had to reach the exhibit by means of a narrow staircase. The first sculpture was an oversized, theatrical portrait of Jesus, which purposely intimidated viewers as they literally bumped into it in order to enter inside. The rooms were made of temporary partitions and deliberately chaotic and crowded. Pictures were crowded together, mostly without frames, and often hung by cord. The first three rooms were grouped thematically, by the demeaning of religion, Jewish artists in particular, and how modern artists attempted to portray the depravity of women. The rest of the exhibit had no particular theme.

Related Topics:
Archaeology - Sculpture - Jesus

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There were slogans painted on the walls:

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• Insolent mockery of the Divine under Centrist rule
• Revelation of the Jewish racial soul
• An insult to German womanhood
• The ideal - cretin and whore
• Even museum bigwigs called this the 'art of the German people'

Speeches of Nazi party leaders contrasted with artist manifesto from various art movements, such as Dada and Surrealism. Next to many paintings were labels indicating how much money a museum spent to acquire the artwork. Many paintings were acquired during the radical post-war Weimar inflationary years in the 1920s, when a loaf of bread cost trillions of German marks, which drastically exaggerated the prices of the paintings. The entire exhibit was designed to promote the idea that modernism was a conspiracy by people who hated German decency.

Related Topics:
Manifesto - Dada - Surrealism - Money - Radical - Weimar - Inflationary - 1920 - Bread - Trillions - Marks - Conspiracy

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It was considered the first blockbuster art exhibit of the twentieth century, with an estimated attendance of three million visitors. The exhibition was far more popular than the nearby exhibition of officially sponsored so called heroic art.

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