Degenerate Art Exhibition


The Degenerate Art Exhibition was an art exhibition organized by Adolf Ziegler and the Nazi Party in Munich from 19 July to 30 November 1937. The exhibition presented 650 works of art, confiscated from German museums, and was staged in counterpoint to the concurrent Great German Art Exhibition. The day before the exhibition started, Hitler delivered a speech declaring "merciless war" on cultural disintegration, attacking "chatterboxes, dilettantes and art swindlers". Degenerate art was defined as works that "insult German feeling, or destroy or confuse natural form or simply reveal an absence of adequate manual and artistic skill". One million people attended the exhibition in its first six weeks. A U.S. critic commented "there are probably plenty of people—art lovers—in Boston, who will side with Hitler in this particular purge".

Background

Hitler's rise to power on 30 January 1933 was quickly followed by actions intended to cleanse the culture of so-called degeneracy: book burnings were organized, artists and musicians were dismissed from teaching positions, and museum curators were replaced by Party members. In September 1933 the Reichskulturkammer was established, administered by Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's Reichminister für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda.
The arbiter of what was unacceptably "modern" was Hitler. Although Goebbels and some others admired the Expressionist works of artists such as Emil Nolde, Ernst Barlach, and Erich Heckel, a faction led by Alfred Rosenberg despised the Expressionists, and the result was a bitter ideological dispute which was settled only in September 1934, when Hitler—who denounced modern art and its practitioners as "incompetents, cheats and madmen"— declared that there would be no place for modernist experimentation in the Reich.
, Der Gott der Flieger, 1921, oil on canvas.
In the first half of 1937, preparations were underway for the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung, which was to showcase art approved by the Nazis. An open invitation to German artists resulted in 15,000 works being submitted to the exhibition jury, which included allies of Goebbels. When the works they selected for the exhibition were shown to Hitler for his approval, he became enraged. Hitler dismissed the jury and appointed his personal photographer Heinrich Hoffmann to make a new selection.
In a diary entry of 4 June 1937, Goebbels conceived the idea of a separate exhibition of works from the Weimar era, which he called "the era of decay. So the people can see and understand." The art historian Olaf Peters says Goebbels' motivation in proposing the exhibition was partly to obscure the weakness of the works in the Great German Art Exhibition, and partly to regain Hitler's trust after the dictator's replacement of Goebbel's jurors with Hoffmann, who Goebbels feared as a rival. On 30 June, Hitler signed an order authorizing the Degenerate Art Exhibition. Goebbels put Adolf Ziegler, the head of the Reichskammer der Bildenden Künste, in charge of a five-man commission that toured state collections in numerous cities, in two weeks seizing 5,238 works they deemed degenerate. This collection would be boosted by subsequent raids on museums, for future exhibitions. The commission focused on works by artists mentioned in avant-garde publications, and was aided by some vehement opponents of modern art, such as Wolfgang Willrich.
The exhibition was prepared in haste, to be presented concurrently with the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung scheduled to open on 18 July 1937. Imitating Hitler, Ziegler delivered a mordant critique of modern art at the opening of the Degenerate Art Exhibition on 19 July 1937.

Event

The exhibition was hosted in the Institute of Archeology in the Hofgarten. The venue was chosen for its particular qualities. Many works were displayed without frames and partially covered by derogatory slogans. Photographs of the exhibitions had been made, as well as a catalogue, produced for the Berlin show, which accompanied the exhibition as it travelled. A film of sections of the exhibition had also been produced. The Degenerate Art Exhibition included 650 paintings, sculptures and prints by 112 artists, primarily German: Georg Grosz, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Paul Klee, Georg Kolbe, Wilhelm Lehmbruck, Franz Marc, Emil Nolde, Otto Dix, Willi Baumeister, Kurt Schwitters and others. Ziegler also confiscated and exhibited works of foreign artists, such as Pablo Picasso, Jean Metzinger, Albert Gleizes, Piet Mondrian, Marc Chagall and Wassily Kandinsky. A large number of works were not displayed, as the exhibition focused on German works. The exhibition lasted until 30 November 1937, and 2,009,899 visitors attended it, an average of 20,000 people per day.

Layout

The first three rooms were grouped thematically. The first room contained works considered demeaning of religion; the second featured works by Jewish artists in particular; the third contained works deemed insulting to the women, soldiers and farmers of Germany. The rest of the exhibit had no particular theme.
There were slogans painted on the walls. For example:
Speeches of Nazi party leaders contrasted with artist manifestos 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. In the case of paintings acquired during the post-war Weimar hyperinflation of the early 1920s, when the cost of a kilo loaf of bread reached 233 billion German marks, the prices of the paintings were of course greatly exaggerated. The exhibit was designed to promote the idea that modernism was a conspiracy by people who hated German decency, frequently identified as Jewish-Bolshevist, although only six of the 112 artists included in the exhibition were Jewish.
The concurrent Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung was intended to show the more classical and "racially pure" type of art advocated by the Nazi regime. That exhibition was hosted near Hofgarten, in the Haus der Deutschen Kunst. It was described as mediocre by modern sources, and attracted only about half the numbers of the Degenerate Art one.

Subsequent events

Another Degenerate Art Exhibition was hosted a few months later in Berlin, and later in Leipzig, Düsseldorf, Weimar, Halle, Vienna and Salzburg, to be seen by another million or so people. Many works were later sold off, although interested buyers were scarce and prices dropped drastically with the addition of such a large quantity of works to the art market: Goebbels wrote of them changing hands between U.S. collectors for "ten cents a kilo", although some "foreign exchange... will go into the pot for war expenses, and after the war will be devoted to the purchase of art." Almost 5,000 were burned on 20 March 1939.
In 1991, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art staged a forensic reproduction of the exhibition.
300 of the exhibited works were apparently purchased or otherwise appropriated by art dealer Hildebrand Gurlitt who had reported them destroyed by bombardments; however, they resurfaced when details of the Gurlitt Collection which had been inherited by his son Cornelius were made known in 2013. Cornelius Gurlitt left the collection to the Museum of Fine Arts Bern in Switzerland which in November 2017 exhibited a number of them in an exhibition entitled "Gurlitt: Status Report: Degenerate Art - Confiscated and Sold".
In 2014, the Neue Galerie New York staged Degenerate Art: The Attack on Modern Art in Nazi Germany, an exhibition bringing together paintings and sculptures from the 1937 exhibition along with films and photos of the original installations, promotional and propaganda materials and some surviving Nazi-approved art from the official exhibition set up to contrast with the modernist and avant-garde works the Nazis considered "degenerate".
The Museum of Modern Art has now established a digital exhibit that showcases artwork from the Degenerate Art Exhibition. MoMA highlights a collection of work that were deemed as "degenerate art" and removed from German state-owned museums by the Nazi government.