‘Degenerate Art’ at Musée Picasso

A busy few days in Paris with lots to see, starting with a fascinating exhibition at the Musée Picasso.

In 1937, Adolf Hitler had an exhibition set up in Munich to display all the art that he believed degenerate.. ‘Entartete Kunst’ (‘Degenerate Art’) showed more than 650 paintings, sculptures and prints that had, until a few weeks earlier, been in the possession of thirty-two German public museum collections. The works were assembled solely for the purpose of clarifying for the German public by defamation and derision exactly what type of art was unacceptable to the Reich.

When the National Socialists came to power they began a systematic campaign to remove modern art from public museum collections. For Hitler, an attack on modernism was an opportunity to use the average German’s distrust of avant-garde art to further his political objectives against Jews, Communists, and non-Aryans. The charge of ‘degeneracy’ was also levelled at avant-garde or ‘un-German’ practitioners of music, theatre, film and literature, and their works were confiscated to purify German culture.

During the four months that ‘Entartete Kunst’ was open in Munich it attracted more than two million visitors; over the next three years it travelled throughout Germany and Austria and was seen by nearly one million more. On most days twenty thousand visitors saw the exhibition, and records show that on one day, Sunday 2 August 1937, thirty-six thousand people saw it. According to newspaper accounts, five times as many people visited ‘Entartete Kunst’ as saw ‘The Great German Art Exhibition’, an exhibition also running in Munich at the same time which showed officially-approved art.

Weimar Republic Germany had witnessed an explosion of modern art, literature, music and film created by individuals who would be labelled ‘degenerate’ in the 1930s. The emergence of artists’ groups such as ‘Die Brücke’ and ‘Der Blaue Reiter’ and the publication of radical periodicals to which these artists contributed, characterized German Expressionism. These Expressionist artists were influenced by the exotic; for example, the carvings and wall hangings of African and Oceanic peoples in the Dresden Volkerkunde-Museum. This was all ‘proof’ that German art was being infiltrated and tainted by degenerates.

‘L’art dégénéré – le procès de l’art moderne sous le nazisme’ at the Musée Picasso is the first exhibition in France devoted to so-called ‘degenerate’ art, It explores and puts into perspective the methodical attack of the Nazi regime against modern art.