Seeing Degeneracy in Avant-Garde Art in 1937Nazi Germany

Azza El Masri

MCOM 390J

Anjali Nath

May 15, 2015

El Masri

Seeing Degeneracy in Avant-Garde Art in 1937 Nazi Germany

The dirty, small rooms were badly lit. Quotes and

citations were scrolled like graffiti on the walls,

ridiculing the artworks exhibited. People saw unframed and

chaotically-displayed paintings and installations of

disfigured, crippled bodies—bodies that criticized the

heroes of the War; in another room still, Jesus Christ was

de-sacrilized as viewers were forced to move past a garish

sculpture of Christ that distorted the purity of the

Christian icon into horrific shapes. Walking deeper into the

belly of the modern beast, we could no longer distinguish

between artwork and work of insanity. Feast your eyes on the

horrors of modernity that threaten to bring down the

morality of Nordic values; enter and see for yourself the

depravity. In July of 1937, the Nazi regime staged the

“Degenerate Art” exhibition to ridicule avant-garde art,

which had been a landmark of the Weimar Republic after the

First World War. Entartete Kunst, or “Degenerate Art”,

organised by the Ministry of Propaganda, stood as the

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antithesis to the Grosse Deutsche Kunstassellung that had been

inaugurated just a day before in the adjoining Haus der Kunst,

the first Nazi-sanctioned building. In that sense, Entartete

Kunst as the counter-exhibition was embedded in the

discursive practices during the Nazi regime, which were

influenced by pseudo-scientific “discoveries” that became

popular in Germany by the end of the 19th century. The

“Degenerate Art” exhibition was the Ministry of Propaganda’s

ultimate attack on the politics of modern art; but this

attack could not have “succeeded” without mobilizing the

German volk and placing it at the forefront of the spectacle.

Understanding Entartete Kunst: historical, socio-economic, and political

overview

Before the outbreak of the First World War, German

museums and art dealers raced to buy avant-garde artworks

more than in any other European country. The avid support

and enthusiasm for German Expressionism and European

Impressionism and post-Impressionism, amongst other modern

art movements, translated into the staging of a multitude of

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travelling exhibitions from Germany to cities around the

world, as well as the publication of German journals on

modern art. This was a practice unique to German art dealers

and museum directors that continued after WWI. Indeed, in

1897, the Nationalgalerie in Berlin acquired a painting by

French post-Impressionist Paul Cézanne, the first museum to

do so (Barron 1991, 13). But while avant-garde was featured

and displayed in most museums around the country, the German

people stood reeling from an economic collapse brought upon

by a humiliating defeat during the First World War and the

transition of an imperial government to a republic.

A shaky economy made more fragile through heavy

taxation exacerbated German people’s already-wary perception

of modern art movements. Cubism, Expressionism, and Dadaism

were thought elitist and intellectual currents, and were

linked to the economic stagnation brought on by the

devaluation of the German currency that was blamed on

Communists and Jews (Barron 1992, 11). The artworks, which

were already foreign to German citizens and were bought at

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seemingly exorbitant prices by the museums, came to

symbolise the government’s inability to cater to the needs

of the average German who was forced to cope with crippling

poverty. The Weimar Republic, established in 1919, saw a

hyperinflation and renewed contentious relationships with

the victors of the First World War. The Republic was at the

forefront of the Great Depression (1930–1933), which led to

a surge in unemployment brought on by a deflation policy.

The failures of the Weimar Republic, with which the German

people came to associate avant-garde art, gave rise to

extremist nationalist sentiment. Organisations like the

German Art Association (Deutsche Kunstegesellschaft)

sprouted against avant-garde art to denounce “the corruption

of art” and promote “art that was pure German, with the

German soul reflecting art,” (Baronn 1991, 11). But soon

after Adolf Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor, the Weimar

Republic crumbled, allowing the creation of a single-party

state and the beginning of Nazi Germany in 1933. National

Socialism’s popularity grew due to its promises to abide by

widely cherished traditional German values, and would later

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go on to label avant-garde art as “degenerate” created by

Communists, Jews, and non-Aryans. To counter this

“degeneracy,” the Nazi regime launched a campaign to

confiscate modern artworks from all public museum, citing a

“cultural collapse” in Germany (Barron 1991, 15). This

campaign, which capitalised on German people’s established

distrust of avant-garde art was coupled with a systematic

and swift reform of cultural departments, art schools, and

independent art institutions like the Bauhaus.

The need to assert German unity behind National

Socialism’s causes were transcended into the art scene.

After outlawing art criticism and modern art in 1936, the

Ministry of Propaganda staged a number of exhibitions to

either vilify Nazi enemies, as was the case of “The Eternal

Jew,” an exhibition held a year later in Munich, or glorify

Nazi-sanctioned artworks “based exclusively on German racial

tradition” (Barron 1991, 12). This was precisely the case of

the Grosse Deutsche Kunstausstellung (The Great German Art

exhibition, pictured below), which opened a day before

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Entartete Kunst on July 18, 1937 at the newly inaugurated Haus

der Deutschen Kunst (House of German Art).

The exhibition, which took four years to assemble, was meant

“to further shape cultural policy” (Barron 1991, 15). German

citizens were invited to submit artworks that demonstrated

“the triumph of German art in the Third Reich” (Barron 1991,

17). Out of 15,000 works presented, 600 paintings and

sculptures were selected by a committee chaired by Hitler

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himself. The Great German Art exhibition was meant to act to

wipe out “any hint of modernism that had permeated the

museums, galleries, journals, and press since 1918” while

the artistic “horrors” of the Weimar Republic were being

exhibited a few feet away at the Entartete Kunst (Barron 1991,

17). The Degenerate Art exhibition, then, was linked to a

particularly discredited government in German political

history, and came to reflect its failures.

Deconstructing Degeneracy

Adolf Ziegler, President of the Reich Chamber of Art

and Hitler’s favourite painter, was appointed by Minister of

Propaganda Joseph Goebbels alongside a 5-member committee to

select “degenerate” works in all major museums to be

showcased at the same time as the Great German Art

exhibition. The directive issued defined “degenerate”

artworks as those that “insult German feeling, or destroy or

confuse natural form, or simply reveal an absence of

adequate manual and artistic skill” (Barron 1991, 19). The

purpose of such an exhibition, according to Barron (1991),

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was to denigrate the artists but also condemn the actions of

institutions, directors, curators, and dealers involved with

the acquisition of modern art.

This practice was firmly rooted in recently popular

pseudo-scientific theories from the second half of the 19th

century and early 20th century. The term “degenerate” is

typically used in a medical context as it designated those

who had allegedly strayed from accepted “normal” behaviour

“because of shattered nerves, inherited abnormalities, or

behavioural or sexual excess” (Mosse 1991, 25) that is

supposedly dependent on the subject’s race. These discursive

practices can be traced back to physician Max Nordeau in his

book Degeneration (1892), whose eudo-scientific theory was

later picked up by Nazi loyalists like racial theorist and

architect Paul Schultze-Naumburg’s Art and Race (1928).

Schultze-Naumburg “proved” that the avant-garde artist was

equated with the insane and the Jew, who is supposedly

inherently degenerate and therefore more susceptible to

scrutiny (Barron 1991, 12). By that time, associating

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“degeneracy” to modernism was a typical practice in the

critique of art and had reached the masses. This discursive

power, adopted and endorsed by the National Socialists early

in their rise to power, would centre its authority on the

necessity of a “pure Germany.” Influenced by Darwin’s The

Descent of Man which will later justify German racism (Barron

1991, 11), the pseudo-medical legitimacy given to

“degeneracy” allowed the Nazi regime to regulate the masses’

bodies and classify them either “healthy” or “unhealthy”,

“normal” or “abnormal” by exercising its sovereign right to

“make live and let die” (Foucault 1992, 241) through the

promulgation of a body ideal that would preserve the Nordic

traits of a true German subject. Foucault (1992) called this

a biopolitical practice whereby “techniques of power”

emerged revolving around the body (242). The politicisation

of the German body, through the creation of a threat linked

to unfounded Nazi practices of racial hygiene, allowed to

create an “un-German” subject that is forcibly excluded from

society through coercive, regulatory manners: Jews, for

example, were first forced to relocate to ghettos, awaiting

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to either be transported to camps in order to either meet

their death or engage in hard labor. This biopolitical

practice was also applied in the conception of art, whereby

neoclassical and neoromantic art were officially adopted by

the Nazi regime for being “racially pure” (Mosse 1991, 25).

In turn, the “crippled,” “disformed,” and garrish bodies

portrayed and sculpted by avant-garde artists were a

flagrant reflection of a lack—a racial, sexual, and mental

absence—which was justified by the popularity of knowledge

production, like Schultz-Naumburg’s Art and Race, centered on

the argument of biodeterminism and the preservation of a

pure German race (Bauer 2010). Rancière understands such

aesthetic processes as “forms of visibility that disclose

artistic practices, the place they occupy, what they ‘do’ or

‘make’ from the standpoint of what is common to the

community” (2004, 15).

This is made possible by the medical support given to

“degeneracy”, exacerbated with the help of religious and

educational institutions, that led German masses to

internalise its standards, giving Nazi regime a new way to

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impose its authority.By utilising this visuality, it

recognises a threatening “other” that has no claim to

political or aesthetic space (Merzoeff 2011, 1). The

biopolitical discourses revolving around the mental

capacities of non-Aryan subjects and objects made it

possible for Nazis to rewrite history “that manifests [its]

authority” (Merzoeff 2011, 2). The legitimacy given to these

biocultures of evolution make the visualisation of

degeneracy “self-evident,” allowing to distribute “those who

have a part in the community of citizens” (Rancière 2004,

12) and what is allowed to be visible, which is neoclassism

and neoromanticism in German art and excludes the avant-

garde by classifying it as “degenerate,” “abhorrent,” and

“unhealthy.” The Degenerate Art exhibition becomes,

therefore, the antithesis of the Great German Art

exhibition. Avant-garde is then an illustration of the

aesthetic regime which Rancière defines as a regime that

“stands in contrast with the representative regime” (2004,

22), meaning that it doesn’t fall into the realm of the

sensible brought on by Nazi authority.

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In tandem with the biopolitical discourse of

“degeneracy,” the discourse of “respectability” was linked

to the ideal German body and its discipline. Indeed, the

Weimar Republic, embodied in avant-garde art, was blamed for

attempting to destroy all moral values that German people

held dear, namely family, marriage, chastity, and a

constant, tranquil life (Mosse 1991, 25). It is important to

note, however, that this discourse was not

first used by the National Socialists, but

is actually traced back to just after the

French revolution. In this manner,

“respectability was made political issue

from the very beginning” (Mosse 1991, 25).

In the case of Nazi authority, the

discourse of respectability came to anchor

German masses and establish order around

traditional values that had been jeapordised before the

Nazis took power (Mosse 1991, 25). Indeed, it served as a

standardising factor whereby even beauty was rendered

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sexless in order to adapt to this discourse. It is therefore

a standard rooted in morality based upon ideals of the 19th

century. When it comes to art, these ideals belong to what

Rancière calls a poetic regime whereby “the notion of

representation or mimesis […] organises these ways of doing,

making, seeing, and judging” (2004, 22). In that sense,

neoclassism and neoromanticism, as the official art

movements adopted by the National Socialists, needed to

conform to an orderly representation of the German subject.

Beauty, therefore, is understood as a “self-portrait of

society, the view it likes for itself” (Mosse 1991, 27).

Modern artists who strayed from this standard were accused

of having “nervous deformities and stunted growth” (Mosse

1991, 27). For the German body, “beauty without sensuality

was demanded,” according to Mosse (1991, 25). A perfect

German body was “muscular, perfectly proportioned, Nordic

featured” (Bauer 2010, 100) but its nudity was turned into a

stylistic principle to preserve this discourse of

respectability (pictured above). This pure representation

of the German subject was desacrilized by avant-garde

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artists who were thought to make a mockery of German heroism

and values (Mosse 1991, 31).

In that sense, Entartete Kunst

was intentionally conceived to

“be out of the ordinary, a

survey of all that was

indecent and ugly,” and

therefore “degenerate” (Mosse

1991, 30–31).

The Performance of the Degenerate Art Exhibition

When Ziegler invited the German Volk to “judge for

[them]selves!” the degeneracy of avant-garde art, art that

was “Bolshevik,” “Jewish,” or “mentally ill” in nature,

visitors gave into the illusion of participating in deciding

the fate of these works of art. Visitors were coaxed to look

in horror and disgust at the “degenerate” works of “un-

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German” artists. The haphazardous way the 650 paintings and

sculptures were curated, coupled with garish graffiti-like

quotes from the Führer, Nazi officials, and even disgraced

museum directors who contributed to the freak show of avant-

garde art as seen by the Nazi regime. The propaganda

techniques utilised to guide visitors in their perception of

avant-garde were the culmination of a visuality that

succeeded in giving Germans the illusion of sharing that

authority (Merzoeff 2011, 7). In that sense, with the Great

German Art exhibition next door, the comparison available

allowed visitors to conjure their own opinions of what can

be considered as German and what isn’t—or at least, that was

what they were supposed to think. Instead, the Ministry of

Propaganda, alongside the Haus of Bauhaus, stood complicity

of a propaganda campaign staged as an “counter-exhibition”

(Levi 1998, 42).

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By classifying the exhibition and the art included in it as

“degenerate”, the National Socialists actively and

implicitly participate in what Rancière calls the

distribution of the sensible. The author understood this

process as a “system of self-evident facts of sense

perception that simultaneously discloses the existence of

something common and the delimitations that define the

respective parts and positions within it” (2004, 12).

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While National Socialists rested on pseudo-scientific

findings and returned to traditional values to justify the

“degeneracy” of avant-garde art showcased, the fascist

attempt to strip these works of their aura and desacrilize

the masterpieces once regarded with awe allowed masses to

displace it from its “high” status and place it within a new

discourse that likens it to mental illness. The fascist

destruction of the

aura (Benjamin

1970, 306) of

these artworks was

systematic

throughout the

years, a practice

that started with Schultze- Naumburg who juxtaposed

Expressionist works by Karl Schmidt-Rotluff and Amadeo

Modigliani and photos of facial deformities (see right).

This practice was later applied in the curation of the

Degenerate Art Exhibition where where by Kandinsky and Kee

were place with works of mentally ill people and the people

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was forced to disce rn between previously-respected artwork

and arbitrary expression (“Which of these three drawings is

the work of… an inmate of a lunatic asylum?” Levi 1998, 60).

The fascist use of photography to destroy avant-garde’s aura

was an important factor in the creation of such a propaganda

exhibition that aimed to give the visitor an illusion of

inclusion in the decision-making invested in censorship.

Indeed, the Entartete Kunst, held at the Institute of

Archeology, was displayed in such a way as to drive people

to comment, critique, and ridicule —which were the only

sentiments Germans were allowed to feel. The exhibition,

which ran until April 1941 and travelled to thirteen German

and Austrian cities, had been

visited by close to three million

people, a number that has yet to be

matched (Barron 1991, 20).

The old Institute of Archeology

had been emptied out to allow for

the hasty preparation of an

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exhibition where artworks were placed randomly, cramped in a

small space, some with their frames removed, to install a

sense of discomfort to the visitor, as opposed to the

meticulous and spacious arrangement of the Great German Art

exhibition. Over 650 paintings and sculptures were separated

into seven thematic rooms: Religion, Jewish art (only 6 out

of the 112 artists featured in the exhibition were Jewish),

Woman and Family, Degeneracy, Anarchism, and Insanity.

Artworks were classified loosely and hastily in either of

these themes while some were mislabeled and credited to the

wrong purchasing museum. The assembling and display of these

works were meant to illicit discomfort as viewers were

greeted with Ludwig Cries’ Crucified Christ, an imposing wood

sculpture (see right). Upon entering, the writings on the

walls provoked the viewers’ indignation, a sentiment that

would guide them throughout the exhibition as quotes of

ridiculed museum directors were placed beside excerpts of

Hitler’s speech from the 1934 Nuremberg party rally. The

condemnation of these artworks and the destruction of their

aura went so far as curators tapping into the German

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people’s painful memories of the crumbling economy and

hyperinflation associated with the Weimar Republic. Red

stickers displayed prices of the artworks “paid with the

hard earned wages of the German volke” (Levi 1998, 56) with a

reference to the museum that purchased them. In that sense,

the blame for the crumbling economic was relegated to the

disgraced art institutions. This practice, however, was not

copied in the German Art Exhibition. Instead, this tactic

coaxed the spectator to embrace the secure and ordered

values of the Nazi regime. Inflamatory titles (“Under the

Catholic Center’s rule, impudent mockery of the God-

experience” Levi 1998, 51) were scrawled on the walls in

every room to guide the spectator in engaging in an open

ridicule of these defamed artworks and the institutions that

harboured them. In that sense, Entartete Kunst was “very much

an exhibition of words” (Levi 1998, 48) where artworks and

art dealers were defamed by the comparison. Levi went so far

as describing the Degenerate Art exhibition as “a textual

performance that is theatrical precisely to the extent it

forgets its very recent history” (1998, 50). This is further

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exacerbated by the clear contrast Entartete Kunst was supposed

to make with Grosse Deutsche Kunstausstellung as they were made to

“[‘sully’] reflections of the same generic images that the

Nazis sanctified as Great German Art: farmers, soldiers,

mothers, and landscapes” (Levi 1998, 43). The Degenerate Art

exhibition, therefore, acted as a “counter-exhibition” to

Great German Art. Despite this structural relation, the

“mockery” made of Crhistianity and Jesus Christ was not

redeemed in the Great German Art exhibition. Instead,

religion was replaced by the glorification of the leader,

Hitler. The Führer replaced Christ and was given the title

of saviour in his place, namely because Christ’s racial

origins had been the subject of a long debate within the

ranks of National Socialists. According to Levi, this

fixation on Hitler is equated with Entartete Kunst’s

“prescription with the sacred experience and authority, and

the proper attitude toward that authority” (1998, 52).

The Degenerate Art Exhibition’s “performative function”

(Levi 1998, 50) as counter-exhibition made it a unique

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propaganda experience where the spectator was given the

illusion of participating in the act of censoring whilst

being led by the Nazi regime to denounce the self-evident

“impunity” (Levi 1998, 56).

While National Socialism picked up the remnants of a

destitute Germany society in the aftermath of the First

World War, avant-garde art was used a symbol of the failures

of the Weimar Republic that brought the German economy to

its knees. Viewed as elitist and intellectual by the German

volk, art movements like Expressionism, Cubism, and Dadaism,

which were endorsed by museum directors in 1920s, were at

the forefront of an ideological battle for the German

population’s discretization. The performance of the

Degenerate Art Exhibition construed avant-garde artists,

disgraced museum directors, and art dealers complicit in the

suffering of the German people. Nazi propaganda sought to

capitalize on the German people’s insecurities by placing

art at a central position within its regime. This was the

first time in modern history where art played such a

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significant role to “[monopolize] the entire creative

potential of a people, […] every aesthetic instinct […] to

the purpose of the leaders of collective society” (Lehman-

Haut in Barron 1991, 10).

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References

Barron, S (ed). (1991). Modern Art and Politics in Prewar

Germany. In Degenerate Art: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi

Germany (pp. 9-23). Los Angeles: Los Angeles Museum of

Art.

Bauer, F. (2010). The Transparent Body: Biocultures of

Evolution, Eugenics and Scientific Racism. In J. Kromm &

S. Benforado Bakewell (eds.), A History of Visual Culture: Western

Civilization from the 18th to the 21st Century (pp. 89-103). Berg:

Oxford International Publishers.

Benjamin, W. (1992). The Work of Art in the Age of

Mechanical Reproduction. In F. Frascina & J. Harris,

Art in Modern Culture: An Anthology of Critical Texts (1st ed., pp.

297-307). New York: IconEditions, Harper Collins.

Foucault, M. (2003). Chapter Eleven. In Society Must Be

Defended: Lectures at the College de France, 1975-76 (pp. 239-264).

London: Allen Lade, Penguin Books.

Levi, N. (1998). "Judge for Yourselves!"-The "Degenerate

Art" Exhibition as Political Spectacle. October, 85, 41.

doi:10.2307/779182

Merzoeff, N. The Right to Look, or How to Think With and

Against Visuality. In The Right To Look (pp. 1-32). Durham,

NC: Duke University Press.

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Mosse, G. (1991). Beauty without Sensuality/The Exhibition

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of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany (pp. 25-32). Los Angeles: Los

Angeles Museum of Art.

Rancière, J. (2004). Artistic Regimes and the Shortcomings

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Distribution of the Sensible (pp. 22-30). New York: Continuum

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Rancière, J. (2004). The Distribution of the Sensible:

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