Few exhibitions at the moment could be more timely than Degenerate Art: Modern Art on Trial Under the Nazis, on show at the Musée Picasso in Paris (until 25 May). It covers the propaganda exhibition Entartete Kunst (degenerate art), mounted by the Nazis in Munich in 1937, attacking Modern art as the work of Bolshevists and Jewish people, and therefore “un-German” and unpatriotic—and above all un-Nazi—in spirit.
Hanging in a sequence of narrow galleries in the Institute of Archaeology in Munich, Entartete Kunst showed some 650 works by over 100 artists (only six of whom were Jewish), including Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Paul Klee, Max Beckmann, Emil Nolde, Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc, Otto Dix and Oskar Kokoschka, all confiscated from German museums known for their pioneering support of Modern artists, in a lightning campaign authorised only three weeks before the exhibition opened in July.
Entartete Kunst was seen (if official figures are correct) by around three million people as it toured around Germany and Austria over the next few years, making it one of the most popular exhibitions of all time. This was in part down to the cynical cunning of Nazi propaganda, tapping into widespread existing prejudice about Modern art (of a type that still exists). People came to be outraged and shocked, and generally left satisfied.
Visiting the exhibition was also a sign of allegiance to the regime, in a climate of intense paranoia and political violence. Although by 1937 Hitler’s political position was secure, the astonishing thoroughness of Nazi propaganda wanted to leave no corner of individual life untainted—it was not enough simply to get votes, Joseph Goebbels said, “we want rather to work on people until they have become addicted to us”.
Once you had been to the Hofgarten to jeer at the Dadaists and Expressionists, and express shock at how much public money had been spent on such garbage (it is thought that the Nazis hired actors to spur this sort of reaction within the exhibition), you walked over the park to the recently built Haus der Deutschen Kunst, “a new temple in honour of the goddess of art”, as Hitler put it. Here you could stand in silent reverence among the pro-German works of art in the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung (great German art exhibition), full of classicising heroic kitsch.
Attacking democracy
The two exhibitions were part of an astonishingly thorough and intricately co-ordinated campaign to assert nationalist values and to attack democracy. From the time of Hitler’s swift rise to power in the early months of 1933, smaller exhibitions—Schreckenskammern der Kunst (chambers of horrors of art), decrying the anti-German spirit of cultural bolshevism in Modern art—had been mounted in towns around Germany. By this time most cultural organisations, down to the smallest local art appreciation societies, had been taken over by National Socialists in some form or other, or abolished. In January 1932 the Bauhaus Dessau was forced to close. Mies van der Rohe attempted to revive the school in Berlin, but that effort lasted a matter of months. In 1936 Goebbels ordered the closure of the Modern art galleries of the Nationalgalerie, housed in the former Kronprinzenpalais in Berlin. Shortly after, he banned art criticism on the grounds that the public should make up their own minds.
For artists and those working in museums, the decisive moment was the passing of a law in April 1933—the Gesetz zur Wiederherstellung des Berufsbeamtentums (law for the restoration of the professional civil service)—making it possible to dismiss government employees for not being patriotic enough, or being overtly “un-German”. Naturally most artists and many museum workers fell into this category. Many well-known artists lost teaching posts, and those museum directors who had built up pioneering collections of Modern art, often buying directly from artists, were replaced by lacklustre Nazi sympathisers, such as Count Klaus von Baudissin, who on being appointed director of the Museum Folkwang in Essen promptly sold one of Kandinsky’s Improvisation paintings from 1912—a sale that started an avalanche of Modern works of art being removed from German museums, many ending up in Entartete Kunst, others burned or cynically sold for foreign currency. “We hope at least to make some money from this garbage,” Goebbels wrote in his diary.
There are clearly parallels between the Gleichschaltung (bringing into line) of the civil service—and with it public life in general, through to the National Socialist revolution—and the actions of Donald Trump’s administration in the US, in pursuit of his own “Make America Great Again” revolution. Liberally oriented federal workers are losing their jobs and living in a climate of paranoia and fear, while federal agencies are being targeted for elimination, such as (most recently) the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the sole federal entity devoted to supporting libraries and museums in the US. The executive order of 27 March, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History”, which targets 'woke' culture at the Smithsonian Museum', is an echo of the “cleansing” of museums of un-German ideology in the 1930s.
‘American hero’ sculptures
The comparisons with the Nazi era do not stop there. You might think there could be no contemporary equivalent for the hero-worshipping kitsch of the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung—endless rows of perfected bodies in pristine marble, and passionless Aryan nudes by the painter Adolf Ziegler (who had organised Entartete Kunst in cahoots with Goebbels). But at the end of January this year, Trump signed an authorisation for the creation of a “National Garden of American Heroes”, a vast park of sculptures honouring “heroic” Americans. It is not hard to imagine the style in which such sculptures would be made (there is not a single sculptor on the current list of honourees)—the same “neo-classical” style mandated in the previous Trump administration’s 2020 executive order to “Make Federal Buildings Beautiful Again”, which would undoubtedly have been satisfactory for the Nazi architect Albert Speer.
Trump himself has used the word ‘degenerate’, in relation to the work
of Chris Ofili
Trump himself has used the word “degenerate” (in relation to the work of the British artist Chris Ofili) and it might seem only a matter of time before some equivalent to Entartete Kunst is mounted in the US—an exhibition of un-American activities in art. The unpatriotic degeneracy in question would be “woke” art—identity- and issue-based art, and the public money that has supported programmes supporting diversity, equity and inclusion.
By the time Entartete Kunst opened, on 19 July 1937, the die had already been cast. It was no longer possible to make a living as an artist or writer in Germany, and many had already emigrated, as Jean-Michel Palmier documents in his epic Weimar in Exile: The Antifascist Emigration in Europe and America (originally published in French in 1987). Similarly in the US, for many artists the damage has already been done—the withdrawal of funding from existing exhibitions and programmes, and the shrinking of possibilities for anybody not signed to a major gallery or making the sort of politically indifferent work that can be bought by Silicon Valley executives and other bank-rollers of Trumpism.
There remain many differences between these times and the tumultuous 1930s in Europe. There has been a financial crisis, but not on the level of hyper-inflation, and nothing like the political chaos and street violence following Germany’s defeat in the First World War. What differs nowadays also is the possibility of a meaningful collective response. Despite the abysmal crackdowns on protests in the US, UK, Turkey, Russia and elsewhere, the situation is still a long way from the brutality of life in Germany, where any form of public resistance within the country’s borders was impossible, as Palmier describes so hauntingly in Weimar in Exile. Every age gets the fascist it deserves, but not every age can effectively oppose them. The 1930s offers one good model at least: no works by Picasso were included in Entartete Kunst, but as the exhibition opened in Munich, his Guernica, one of the greatest acts of defiance against war, fascism and indifference to human suffering, was hanging in the Spanish Pavilion at the International Exhibition in Paris.
• John-Paul Stonard is an art historian and author
