Exhibition

Degenerate Art: The Attack on Modern Art in Nazi Germany, 1937

Mar 13 — Sep 1, 2014

The term “degenerate” was adopted by the National Socialist regime as part of its campaign against modern art.

Max Beckmann
(1884-1950)
Departure, Frankfurt 1932, Berlin 1933-35
Oil on canvas
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Given anonymously (by exchange)
Digital Image © 2014 The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

Max Beckmann Departure, Frankfurt 1932, Berlin 1933-35

The term “degenerate” was adopted by the National Socialist regime as part of its campaign against modern art. Many works branded as such by the Nazis were seized from museums and private collections. Following the showing on these works in a three-year traveling exhibition that criss-crossed Germany and Austria, most were sold, lost, or presumed destroyed. The exhibition “Degenerate Art: The Attack on Modern Art in Nazi Germany, 1937” at Neue Galerie New York marks the first major U.S. museum exhibition devoted to the infamous display of modern art by the Nazis since the 1991 presentation at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Highlights of the show include a number of works shown in Munich in the summer of 1937, such as Max Beckmann’s Cattle in a Barn (1933); George Grosz’s Portrait of Max Hermann-Neisse (1925); Erich Heckel’s Barbershop (1913); Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s Winter Landscape in Moonlight (1919), The Brücke-Artists (1926/27); Paul Klee’s The Angler (1921), The Twittering Machine (1922), and Ghost Chamber with the Tall Door (1925); Oskar Kokoschka’s The Duchess of Montesquiou-Fezensac (1910); Ewald Mataré’s Lurking Cat (1928); Karel Niestrath’s Hungry Girl (1925); Emil Nolde’s Still-Life with Wooden Figure (1911), Red-Haired Girl (1919), and Milk Cows (1913); Christian Rohlf’s The Towers of Soest (ca. 1916) and Acrobats (ca. 1916); Karl Schmidt-Rottluff’s Pharisees (1912); and Lasar Segall’s The Eternal Wanderers (1919), among others.

Adolf Hitler and other Nazi officials (Hoffmann, Willrich, Hansen, and Ziegler) standing by the Dada wall at the “Entartete Kunst” (Degenerate Art) exhibition, July 16, 1937. Paintings by Vasily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and Kurt Schwitters have been deliberately hung askew and are accompanied by a slogan penned by George Grosz.

This photo was published in the Nationalist Observer, South German (Süddeutsche) issue, No. 199, July 18, 1937. Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin, Germany. bpk, Berlin, Art Resource, NY

LEARN MORE

Purchase the Exhibition Catalogue
The Neue Galerie exhibition is accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue published by Prestel Verlag. The publication provides a complete historical overview of the period and examines not only the genesis of the “Degenerate Art” show but also the rise of the topic “degenerate.” Additional essays examine the National Socialist policy on art, the treatment of “Degenerate Art” in film, and the impact of this campaign in post-war Germany, and the world at large, as the claims of restitution arose. Dr. Olaf Peters serves as the catalogue editor, which features contributions from scholars Bernhard Fulda, Ruth Heftrig, Mario-Andreas von Luttichau, Karsten Müller, Olaf Peters, Jonathan Petropoulos, Ernst Ploil, Ines Schlenker, Aya Soika, and Karl Stamm.