“DEGENERATE! Hitler’s War on Modern Art”

Every now and then, displays that reconstruct the history of the infamous, Nazi inspired Degenerate Art show of 1937, get museum exhibitions. These range from the large and scholarly 1991 exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to the modestly scaled 2014 show at New York’s Neue Gallery.  The Jewish Museum of Milwaukee can be added to this list with their exhibit Degenerate! Hitler’s War on Modern Art, a small but comprehensively researched exhibit of Modernist and Expressionist works from the early part of the 20^th century. The original Degenerate Art show – Entartete Kunst – was the outcome of the Nazi’s project to hunt down and confiscate all forms of Modernist art.  German museums were stripped of 16,000 artworks made by members of the Die Brücke (The Bridge),  Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), Blue Rider, Bauhaus and other modern art movements. From this the first Degenerate Art venue in Munich exhibited 650 works to be held up for public ridicule and shame.  

 

        The Jewish Museum exhibit has carefully hung displays with explanatory placards outlining the historical basis of the newly formed Weimar Republic established after WWI.  As Germany’s first experiment in democracy, Weimar was rife with economic and social chaos and political corruption. It was also a period that opened up new public freedoms and creative possibilities in culture and art. This creativity and freedom terrified the Nazis,  particularly works depicting the social and economic disintegration following outcome of WWI and hyperinflation imposed by the Versailles treaty. The latter resulted in a devaluation of the Deutschmark so severe that by November of 1923 one dollar was worth a trillion marks. A barrel of bills could not even buy a loaf of bread, resulting in food riots that broke down law and order. Even after the crisis was stabilized it became one of the motivating factors that helped bring the Nazis to power. The Great Depression of 1929 was the fatal blow to the Weimar era, leaving 30% of the country jobless and leading to a surge in popularity for the Nazi party that brought them to power in 1933.

 

        What the Nazis feared most – Jews, Bolsheviks, political leftists, cosmopolitanism, sexual liberty, the unconscious – became arbitrary negative labels used in aggressive propaganda campaigns to smear their targets of hatred. One of the museum’s wall texts explains the development of this history:

        The National Socialists used culture as a weapon for the ‘purification’ of Germany. When Hitler became Chancellor in 1933, he decreed that all mediums of art be aligned with Nazi ideology and swiftly instated edicts to remove foreign and so-called “detrimental’ influences… The Nazis’ strategy to reshape Germany’s cultural landscape was monumental in scope and their propagandist campaign against modern art unprecedented. Bans on creation; the purging of state collections; the seizing, sale, and destruction of thousands of modernist works; and mounting exhibitions of shame, including the infamous 1937 Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibit, played a decisive role in swaying public opinion. Promoting ‘untainted, German art reflective of its Nordic values and “superior” Aryan race paved the way for more extreme means of social division and cleansing.

        The Expressionists of the Neue Sachlichkeit or New Objectivity of the 1920’s era made art that protested the ugliness, sickness, and hypocrisy of social reality:  truths which the Nazis denied and repressed, not the least for the threat it posed to unveiling the dark sickness that lived within themselves. They saw Modern art’s vast array of creative expression as subversive to their project of totalitarian conformity; individuality had to be censored and destroyed. Modernist art was an evil plot to undermine the German nation and people. Adolph Hitler himself stated “We are going to wage a merciless war of destruction against the last remaining elements of cultural disintegration. All those cliques and chatterers,  dilettantes and art forgers are going to be picked up and liquidated.” 3     

 

        Most of the Jewish Museum exhibition artworks were small in scale, including many lesser-known artists sourced from local collections. Works were not from the original 1937 Degenerate exhibit, but plaques described each artists history focusing on Nazi persecution and the confiscation/destruction of their works. while also detailing those who had works included in the show. The texts also detailed those who had works that were included in the Degenerate Art show.

        These histories included controversy in the case of artists like Emil Nolde. He was a dedicated supporter of the Nazi party early as 1920, attracted to their faux Nordic mythology and intense anti-Semitism. Following the Nazi’s first attempt at overthrowing the government in 1923, Nolde wrote a friend  “The Führer is great and noble in his aspirations and a genius man of action.” Despitef Nolde’s pandering, the Nazi’s seized over 1000 of his works from German museums and hung 27 of his works in the Degenerate Art show, more pieces than any other artist.

 

        Overall the scale cultural oppression was quite breathtaking, as artists were systematically suppressed or persecuted in one form or another. Many chose to flee the country including Wassily Kandinsky, Max Beckmann, George Grosz, Kurt Schwitters and Paul Klee. By 1939 art that could not be sold at auction to fund the German war machine – some 5,000 paintings, watercolors, sculptures, drawings and prints – were burned to ash.  Much art that survived this first assault was destroyed by Allied bombing.

        The most memorable works on display were prints by major German Expressionist artists: Georg Grosz’s  Reckoning to Follow! (1923) and I have done my Part from The Robbers (1922),  Ernest Ludwig Kirchner’s Woman Buttoning Her Shoe (1909),  Erich Heckel’s Siblings (1913),  Max Beckmann’s The Yawners (1918) and Artist in the Company (1922) and Käthe Kollwitz’s Death Seizes a Woman (1934) and The Sacrifice (1922). All capture the condition of social tragedy and  disorientation in styles that are powerfully heightened by graphic innovations in the etching, woodcut, and lithograph print media. All express the zeitgeist of the time when these artists were at the height of their expressive artistic powers.

 

        Modernist Abstraction was condemned  by the Nazi’s as the product of deranged minds, being roundly ridiculed throughout the Degenerate Art exhibit. Several examples of abstract work in the Jewish museum included small prints by Wassily Kandinsky, Pablo Picasso, and Kurt Schwitters. Abstraction had also seeped into the styles of some of the 1920’s German Expressionists. This can be seen in Lyonel Feininger’s energetic 1918 woodblock Bark and Brig at Sea (1918) and also in the work of Georg Grosz in how he used Futurist geometry to construct his graphic scenes of social and political commentary.  After Max Beckmann suffered nervous breakdown as a medical orderly during WWI, his formerly realistic figures became grotesquely distorted, crammed into claustrophobically angular abstract  spaces. He stated“I hardly need to abstract things, for each object is unreal enough already, so unreal that I can only make it real by means of painting.” 4

 

        Beckmann and many other artists expressed intense anti-war feeling in their work, including Otto Dix, Georg Grosz and Oskar Kokoschka.  All had suffered serious trauma witnessing the madness of trench warfare. This accounts for the hallucinatory distortion of  figures and space in their work often combined with acutely bitter social observation. Kirschner suffered a serious nervous breakdown while enlisted as a soldier, a condition from which he never totally recovered and from which he eventually committed suicide in 1938.

        Socialist sympathizer Kathe Kollwitz lost a son early in WWI. This motivated her to create some of the most powerful anti-war graphics in the history of art. All of these artists’ intense anti-war anti-authoritarianism put them on a direct collision course with the Nazis, whose relentless propaganda glorified war, insisting there was no greater honor than martyring oneself as a soldier for the Fatherland. In 1993 Art Critic Robert Hughes commented on the perception of suffering expressed in German Expressionist art coming to resemble images of Holocaust victims.

I looked at the distortion and elongation in certain German Expressionist pictures, as though the aesthetic distortions of Expressionism have been made real and concrete…absolute real suffering on the human body by the Nazis.5

 

        The most memorable painting in the exhibit was Georg Kinzer’s intensely detailed Woman Before A Mirror (1932). A flabby woman combs oily strings of hair before a mirror while her stooped body and sagging breasts are covered in a tent-like camisole.  Her face has a bulbous shovel nose, grotesquely rouged cheeks and squinting gimlet eyes that look like they belong to rabid animal. Her fatuous preening is a common subject of New Objectivity art: monstrous conceit collides with hypocritical reality. The relentless precision of detail makes it one of the most fascinating and haunting images in the whole exhibition,  exposing the yawning gulf between society’s self-perception and its blistering truth.  In similar New Objectivity fashion Bruno Voigt’s drawings from the 1930’s express the miasma of despair brought on by the Great Depression, reflected in the wasted expressions of crippled drunks in a bar.  In another work paranoid men on the street are filled with fear and distrust as they glance over their shoulders with terror and their eyes.

 

        Other that Käthe Kollwitz, works by rarely seen women Expressionists on display including Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler’s  Lissy (1931) and Martel Schwichtenberg’s Seated Woman with Flowers (1920 – 21). Schwichtenberg was also a successful designer educated in Dusseldorf and ran her own art studio. She was one of many women who availed themselves of new freedoms under Weimar democracy, breaking out of the imprisoning role of Kinder, Küche, Kirche – children, kitchen, church – by seeking new social roles in education, politics, and work. This resulted in misogynistic attacks by reactionary conservative forces. The media printed sensational stories of Lustmord:  gruesome murders of woman and prostitutes by violent men. Women’s freedoms were  perceived as an attack on traditional masculine German morays, though these deaths were also the result of psychotic fits by traumatized war veterans. Lustmord artworks by Otto Dix, Rudolph Schlichter, and Georg Grosz expressed the explosion of uncontrollable madness and violence that could longer be held in check or repressed by a society in disintegration.

 

        The message of historical warning in the Milwaukee Jewish Museum’s Degenerate! exhibit speaks directly to our present social and political instability; a sober judgement against the dangers of authoritarianism that have taken root within the United States and globally. It is well to remember Hitler arrested members of the transgender community first (a playbook that US red state governors are embracing) followed by the persecution and Jews, homosexuals, gypsies, leftists, the handicapped, anyone considered “undesirable.” The pattern of fomenting hatred and social division targeting the most helpless in society should be familiar to anyone paying attention to politics since Trump became president in 2016: attacks on ethnic and religious minorities, immigrants, the LGBTQ Community and women’s reproductive rights. Stories about the rise of White Christian nationalism, billionaire dark money funded extremist groups attacking public education and voting rights, right-wing media spreading lies and hate, book bans and the outlawing of US racial history – all have become familiar subjects on the evening news.

        As yet we are not as far down the fascist rabbit hole as Germany was in 1933, but we are certainly on a dangerous path leading there. The stock market crash of 2008 and the “slow depression” of the following decade mirror what happened in 1929 and its aftermath. Our own “Weimarization” – the hollowing out of institutions and traditions that support democracy – has been underway for a long time and could lead to the kind of authoritarianism seen in Hungary’s Viktor Orban, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, or India’s Narendra Modi.  

        Theodore Adorno’s critical study The Authoritarian Personality defines the tactics of authoritarianism: the politicizing of independent institutions, spreading disinformation, aggrandizing executive power, quashing dissent, targeting vulnerable communities, stoking violence, and corrupting elections. Dix, Kollwitz, and Grosz and many other artists were committed political leftists for good reason. Big business and the conservative elite allied themselves with Hitler to destroy the political left and workers movements using these tactics. They overplayed their hand, leading to the eventual fascist overthrow of German democracy. Then as now oligarchic power allied with right wing despotism weakens democracies, corroding their institutions and leading to their downfall. The Expressionist’s uncompromising art is a sharp historical warning about what could happen if we do not succeed in fighting the rise of authoritarianism in our midst today.   

 

Diane Thodos is an artist and art critic who lives in Evanston, IL. She is a Pollack Krasner Grant Recipient who exhibits internationally. Her work is in the collections of the Milwaukee Art Museum, the National Hellenic Museum, the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago, the Block Museum at Northwestern University, and the Illinois Holocaust Museum among many others. For more information visit dianethodos.com.

 

1. 1. Theodore Adorno, The Authoritarian Personality (1950), Verso Books 2019 p. 976

1. 1. Degenerate art  – 1933, the Nazis vs. Expressionism https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QE4Ld1mkoM

1. 1. Ibid

1. 1. Max Beckmann, “On My Painting,” 302–3.

1. 1. Degenerate art  – 1933, the Nazis vs. Expressionism https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QE4Ld1mkoM