“Wherever they burn books, they will in the end burn human beings too” (Heinrich Heine)
The Nazis Degenerate Art Exhibition, Part I
Bienvenue and welcome back to Musée Musings, your idiosyncratic guide to Paris and art. We’re going to talk about what the Nazis called ‘degenerate art,’ but first we’re going to take brief look at an exhibition I saw at the Musée Zadkine which took as its subject the friendship between Amadeo Modigliani and Ossip Zadkine, (Fig 1) You might ask yourself why if Modigliani is almost a household name and most people have not heard of Zadkine, is there a museum for the unknown guy and not one for the well known one. The answer is simple: a woman. In this case Zadkine’s wife, the long suffering artist Valerie Prax, whose paintings are occasionally displayed at the museum. Prax devoted much of her energy from the death of Zadkine in 1967 until her own death in 1981 to ensuring that a museum would preserve his work and coincidentally, her own.
Figure 1. Modigliani Zadkine Une amitié interrompe, Musée Zadkine
The friendship between Zadkine and Modigliani made for a very lively exhibition - connecting the dots between two artists who were friends when they were young and poor and ambitious. They met in 1913, in Paris, in Montparnasse, Modigliani arriving from Italy, Zadkine from Russia. Modigliani initially hoped to become a sculptor, Zadkine occasionally painted. They were both interested in African art. They were both friends with Chaim Soutine. The three of them, womanizers all (although the handsomest of the threesome, Modigliani, usually got the girl), were often at bars together, paying for drinks with money they should have spent on art materials. What else - Modi and Zadkine were both influenced by the sculptor, Constantine Brancusi. In the concluding section of the exhibition we learn about their enthusiasm for architecture and Modigliani's dream project for a Temple to Humanity. The influence of Brancusi is most pronounced here. (Figs 2-6)
Figure 2. Femme au ruban de velours, Amadeo Modigliani, 1914
Figure 3. Head of a Woman, Ossip Zadkine, 1924
Figure 4. Left Modigliani, Caryatid, 1914 (idea for his Temple of Humanity);
Right Zadkine, "Rebecca" ou "La grande porteuse d'eau", 1927,
Figure 5. Chaim Soutine, Amedeo Modigliani
Figure 6. Endless Column, Constantine Brancusi. Great Influence on both artists
Modigliani died in 1920 at the age of 35, of tubercular meningitis aggravated by alcohol and absinthe. Fakes and forgeries of his work abound. The exhibition includes a painting attributed to him which, after pigment and canvas analysis, was confirmed to be a fake. (Fig 7) Of his two drinking buddies, Soutine waited too long to flee Paris once the Nazis began rounding up Jews. He was forced into hiding, but after 2 years (1941-43) a bleeding ulcer sent him to the hospital. It was too late, he died on the operating table. Soutine was 50 years old. Zadkine (who fought for the French in WWI) did get out in time. He made his way to New York, leaving Praz to hide herself and their work from the Nazis. This is as good an introduction as any for our subject. Nazis and Art.
Figure 7. Brunette, formerly attributed to Amedeo Modigliani. Musée des Beaux Arts, Nancy, 1919
Question - does saying something is so, make it so? Answer: if you can enforce your opinion. For example, the names of many art movements were given by critics. They were meant as pejorative. The names stuck, among them, Cubism and Impressionism. But the negative connotations disappeared. What happens if someone who can summon the police and soldiers makes the call? The U.S. Attorney General labeled protests in front of Tesla dealerships ‘domestic terrorism.’ Will protesters be rounded up and taken to jail? Will the National Guard be called out to establish order? Will there be a repeat of Kent State, where armed boys shot unarmed boys and girls protesting the Vietnam war?
The exhibition on Degenerate Art at the Musée Picasso is the most recent in a series that take for their subjects, people and events connected to Picasso. Two years ago, it was Faith Ringgold, last year, it was Jackson Pollack. Both were influenced by Picasso. For this exhibition? Picasso was one of artists the Nazis labeled degenerate.
Two words - jealousy and revenge - may be all we need to explain what happened. Hitler wanted to be an artist. He applied for admission to the prestigious Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, twice. His application was rejected. Twice. Paintings by Hitler survive, here’s one example (Fig 8) It’s the antithesis of the avant-garde art that was being collected and exhibited by German museums and art galleries. (Figs 9, 10) Hitler was jealous. When the time came, he took revenge. Revenge motivates Trump, too. Last time he was president, he avoided institutions that did not share his ‘taste’. This time, he has taken them over. If Kennedy Center Awards are presented during the next four years, they will go to Trump supporters. On the one hand, who else would accept them? On the other hand, Trump rewards supporters and punishes detractors.
Figure 8. House at a Lake with Mountains by Adolf Hitler - 1910
Figure 9. Self Portrait, Ernst Kirchner, 1931
Figure 10. Departure, Max Beckman, 1935
The Nazis’ public campaign to suppress and destroy modern art started in 1933 and ended when WW II did, in 1945. In 1937, Hitler authorized Goebbels to ransack museums of modern works from 1910 on, (eventually 16,000 works of art were confiscated). The year 1910 wasn’t random, it was the year that German expressionists founded the New Secession movement in Berlin, “replacing all the good old-fashioned values of realism and beauty” with their ‘degenerate art’. The ‘highlight of the Nazi campaign of denigration and banishment was the ‘Entartete Kunst’ (Degenerate Art) Exhibition that opened in Munich in 1937. (Figs 11, 12) Only a small fraction of the confiscated works (650) were displayed.
Figure 11. People attending Degenerate Art Exhibition, 1937
Figure 12. Crucifix, Ludwig Gies, 1921-22. Degenerate Art Exhibition, 1937
The art was by both German and non-German artists, by artists both living and dead. Expressionism and abstraction; Dada and New Objectivity, etc. were labeled as having been created by "idiots", “the mentally ill", "criminals", “speculators", "Jews" and “Bolsheviks.”. German artists whose work was classified as degenerate were publicly humiliated, dismissed from their teaching positions, banned from exhibiting and working, subjected to physical threats, forced into exile or killed in death camps.
Some people who came to the Degenerate Art exhibition had no idea what they were looking at, no idea why these works were being condemned. Other people were there because they appreciated this art and wanted to see it before it disappeared. The Nazis made sure to make their points. Among their strategies were to hang the paintings askew and put demeaning phrases alongside the paintings, like “Crazy at any Price,” “Revelation of the Jewish Racial Soul" and "Deliberate Sabotage of the Armed Forces.”
Simultaneously, an exhibition was held of’ traditional’ paintings and sculpture which extolled the Nazi party and Hitler’s view of the virtues of German life: ‘Kinder, Küche, Kirche’ (Children, Kitchen, Church). Is this where JD Vance gets his ideas? (Fig 13)
Figure 13. The catalogue for the ‘Good’ German art exhibition and one of the paintings exhibited.
Figure 13a. The Four Elements, Alfred Ziegler (before 1937)
The exhibition on degenerate art was much better attended, five times better in fact.
Four years before the degenerate art exhibition, right-wing students in Berlin threw thousands of books into the flames of a bonfire. (Fig 14) The authors of these books were famous and unknown, German and foreign. While the books burned, the students sang Nazi songs. The Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels gave a speech. Helen Keller sent a letter. “History has taught you nothing if you think you can kill ideas. Tyrants have tried to do that often before, and the ideas have risen up in their might and destroyed them. You can burn my books and the books of the best minds in Europe, but the ideas in them have seeped through a million channels and will continue to quicken other minds…"
Figure 14. Book burning Berlin, 1933
The Nazis didn’t destroy all the degenerate art they confiscated. They were too venal, too hypocritical for that. Some works were saved to be sold to raise cash for the Third Reich or to buy ‘acceptable’ works of art.
The exhibition at the Picasso Museum is the first on this subject in France. When was the first exhibition? The earliest one I found was in 1991, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which traveled to the Art Institute in Chicago and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. According to the exhibition brochure, “It was only through recently discovered installation photographs that the original exhibition could be reconstructed and the process of locating the works begun.” The architect Frank Gehry designed the installation, 175 of the works from the 1937 exhibition were displayed, all hung respectfully. (Figs 15, 16) Gehry relegated the demeaning original to a model.
Figure 15. Wild Boars, Franz Marc, 1913
Figure 16. Friends, Karl Hofer, 1923-24
The critic William Wilson, reviewing the exhibition repeated a question asked by many visitors: Why remind us of a historical aberration whose repetition is unthinkable? Wilson’s answer, and I’m paraphrasing here. As Jews have been insisting ever since, we think of it precisely to make sure it remains unthinkable. Nobody can imagine President Bush ordering the NEA chief to strip our museums of all art from Picasso to Warhol, declaring it obscene and selling it to pay for the Persian Gulf War. “(T)his show has become a cautionary tale about what symptoms signal a culture that may be in danger of going off the rails. …In 1937, Germany had already jumped the track. We have not. But we have experienced enough ongoing economic uncertainty, military anxiety, minority prejudice, anti-intellectualism and general coerciveness so that the psychological vectors coming out of “Entartete Kunst” have an eerie resonance.”
That was 1991. Today we are much closer to the unthinkable. Trump threatens to take over Greenland, turn the Gaza Strip into a beach resort and annex Canada. Selling art he doesn’t understand to pay for those excesses is one possibility since he certainly won’t be taxing the billionaires who had first row seats at his inauguration, which was held indoors to avoid the humiliation of a small public turnout, again.
In 1992, the LACMA exhibition was supposed to close, but it didn’t, it traveled to Berlin instead. As Suzanne Muchnic wrote (LA Times), “German officials expected a high degree of interest in the exhibition when they requested that the …exhibition travel to Berlin. But German response to the landmark show…far outstripped expectations.” Ironically, the exhibition had been a great success in 1937, too.
According to Stephen Kinzer, (NYT 1992), The exhibition opened as Germans began to confront long-repressed truths about the Nazi era. Weeks earlier, the lakeside villa in Wannsee where the final solution was determined, had opened as a museum.
One of the speakers at the exhibition’s opening in Berlin, Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, described Nazi attempts to restrict artistic expression as "a step toward the catastrophe that produced the mass murder of European Jews and the war of extermination against Germany's neighbors…” To him, “The paintings ….stand for the triumph of creative freedom over barbarism…Political freedom is possible only in a free culture. The dark years of National Socialism have taught us that artistic and cultural freedom means, above all, freedom from all government influence.”
Christoph Stolzl, director of the German Historical Museum, noted, “Nazi leaders were quite correct in believing that modern art threatened their legitimacy and ultimately their hold on power. (M)odern art is about individuality. It reflects the view that each person sees the world in a different way, and that no one perception of reality can be accepted as an absolute truth.” Bjorn Kommer, a museum director from Augsburg said this, ”One thing that all Germans have in common is our Nazi history. (F)acing the Nazi evil may help us realize how important it is that we grow together into a free, open and tolerant society.”
The next exhibition on Degenerate Art I found was in 2005, at the Tate Gallery in London. According to Guardian critic Jonathan Jones, the Tate presented the exhibition as a tragedy. Which of course it was for so many artists and art collectors. Johnson thought the curators should have ‘repackaged’ the original exhibition as a celebration. It’s German modernism not Nazism that triumphed. Well, 20 years ago, that was true.
The next mention I found for Nazi Degenerate Art was in 2013. Not in connection with a museum exhibition but with the discovery of the ‘Gurlitt Collection.’ A cache of 1500 objects that included confiscated works and forced purchases from Jewish owners. In sheer numbers, it was the largest collection found since the end of WWII. The art work was in the possession of Cornelius Gurlitt, whose father, Hildebrand Gurlitt, had been one of four Nazi art dealers tasked with selling degenerate art, for the coffers of the Nazi war effort and to buy art that wouldn’t offend delicate Nazi sensibilities. (Figs 17-20)
Figure 17. Part of the Gurlitt Cache of degenerate art
Figure 18. Part of the Gurlitt Cache of degenerate art
Figure 19. Woman by Henri Matisse in Gurlitt cache, returned to Paul Rosenberg collection
Figure 20. Horse, Franz Marc found in Gurlitt Cache
Before becoming a Nazi art dealer Hildebrand Gurlitt (whose family was Jewish) was an art historian and museum director whose focus was modern art. When he became an art dealer, he sold contemporary art. Starting in the mid-1930s, he also purchased artworks at undervalue prices from Jewish owners who were liquidating their assets to pay exorbitant taxes or to flee the country.
Michael Kimmelman (NYT) wrote a review of the exhibitions held in 2017 (Bern, Bonn & Berlin) on the Gurlitt ‘treasures’ this is in part what he said, “Breathless news accounts when the Gurlitt collection was uncovered speculated about a $1 billion trove of art. The fact is, it’s not really a collection.… It’s a dealer’s inventory …. Buying for Hitler, Hildebrand had a blank check and no scruples, obtaining works by Delacroix and Fragonard, Seurat and Courbet, sometimes to fill gaps in German museums left by the elimination of modern art, skimming off what he wanted to keep or sell.”
Of 1500 objects, no more than 200 had been looted or acquired at forced sales. Kimmelman was disappointed that Cornelius Gurlitt did not become an example of what happens to people who keep stolen art. Only 14 of the artworks found were identified as Nazi-looted art and restituted after years of delay. As anyone who has read or seen ‘Woman in Gold’ knows, European governments have been steadfast in their reluctance to return works of art that were purchased under duress or stolen from Jewish owners.
In 2014, the Neue Galerie’s exhibition entitled “Degenerate Art: The Attack on Modern Art in Nazi Germany, 1937” opened. In his NYT review, Holland Cotter described the entrance to the exhibition. The walls on either side had photo-murals. On one side, Hamburg 1938, a long line of people wait to see the traveling anti-modernist exhibition. On the opposite wall, the railroad station at Auschwitz-Birkenau 1944, a dense crowd of newly arrived Carpatho-Ukrainian Jews line up along the platform… (Figs 21, 22) The message is clear: The..first picture led to the.. second. “The “Nazis’ selective demonizing of art …helped foment an atmosphere of permissible hatred and forged a link between aesthetics and human disaster.” Just as Heinrich Heine had predicted.
Figure 21. Entrance to Degenerate Art exhibition, Neue Galerie,
Figure 22. People waiting to see Degenerate Art Exhibition, Hamburg, 1938
Shanon Connolly noted that the curator of the exhibition, Olaf Peters selected paintings, sculptures and prints along with posters, film footage (and) photographs..to “recreate the ‘aura’ of the Entartete Kunst exhibition, without adopting its degraded tactics of installation and display. Instead, through a series of provocative formal juxtapositions,” the New York exhibition invited visitors to judge for themselves, echoing Adolf Ziegler’s (president of the Reich Chamber for the Visual Arts) words at the Munich Degenerate Art exhibition in 1937. “German Volk, come judge for yourselves.”
In one room, for example, the classical art that Hitler favored was on one side and on the other, the expressionist art that offended his sensibilities. (Fig 23) In another room was the art that flourished in Dresden before and after WW I. And in another, the Bauhaus school as it tried to adhere to increasingly restrictive directives imposed by the Nazis until it was finally shuttered. As Cotter noted, The Bauhaus “style wasn’t “degenerate” exactly, but the school’s international - read, foreign - outlook was nearly as threatening…Most Bauhaus members felt comfortable enough in the wider world to leave Germany behind, and did.” The United States was the beneficiary of this talent.
Figure 23. The Four Elements, Adolf Ziegler, left before 1937; The Departure, Max Beckman, right, 1935
On loan from the V & A. was the sole known copy of the “ledger book filled with typed lists of ‘degenerate art’ officially confiscated from German museums.” (Figs 24, 25)
Figure 24. Victoria & Albert Ledger book filled with typed lists of confiscated degenerate art
Figure 25. One of typewritten pages of art confiscated from German museums
During the the past decade, the Neue Galerie has presented two more exhibitions on German pre-WW II art, the New York Historical Society held an exhibition on the rise of German anti-Semitism, an exhibition on fascist art was held in Milan and a joint exhibition at the Picasso Museum in Paris and the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid featured Picasso’s Guernica, his ‘cry of rage against Franco and the Luftwaffe.’ And yet here we are, mute in the face of the current administration’s assault on decency. Musk’s Nazi salute during a video call with German Neo-Nazis on the 80th anniversary of the Liberation of Auschwitz was noted but uncensored. The Trump administration sued South Africa for its treatment of whites and expelled the Ambassador of South Africa for calling out racism where he saw it. Thanks to Democratic Senators, Trump alone controls the federal budget through September 2025. The unthinkable has arrived. The only thing separating the US from the abyss is a Supreme Court with a 6-3 Republican majority.
With that background, next week we’ll see how the Picasso Museum’s exhibition on degenerate art stacks up.
Gros bisous, Dr. ‘B.’
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Undated
Victoria & Albert Museum. Entartete Kunst': The Nazis' inventory of 'degenerate art
https://www.vam.ac.uk/articles/entartete-kunst-the-nazis-inventory-of-degenerate-art#
1991
Exhibition brochure. ‘Degenerate Art’: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany. Los Angeles County Museum of Art & Art Institute of Chicago
1991
Wilson, William, ART REVIEW : Revisiting the Unthinkable : Nazi Germany’s ‘Degenerate Art’ Show at LACMA
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-02-15-ca-1169-story.html
2005
Jones, Jonathan, What the Nazis didn't want you to see
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/aug/16/secondworldwar
2014
Holland Cotter, “First, They Came for the Art”
2014
Connolly, Shannon, “Degenerate Art: The Attack on Modern Art in Nazi Germany, 1937” Olaf Peters, editor. Exhibition Catalogue for Degenerate Art exhibition, Neue Galerie
http://www.caareviews.org/reviews/2354
2017
Smirna K Degenerate Art - Modern Artworks Dismissed by the Nazi as 'Filth'
https://www.widewalls.ch/magazine/degenerate-art-nazi-artworks
2017
Kimmelman, Michael, The Void at the Heart of ‘Gurlitt: Status Report’
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/19/arts/design/the-void-at-the-heart-of-gurlitt-status-report.html
2018
Farago, Jason, Walk Through This Exhibition With Dread. You Know Where It Leads