Paris. The sixty work gathered by Commissioner Johan Popelard, curator at the Picasso museum, immediately illustrates the difficulty of defining this artistic “category”, called Art Degenerated. There are few common points between the chromatic violence of Emil Nolde (The entrance to Christ in Jerusalem, 1915), the exploded forms of George Grosz (Metrópolis1916-1917) (see ill.), The angular characters of Ernst Kirchner (Street in Berlin1913), the abstraction of Vassily Kandinsky (Cross -shaped1926) or even the magic universe of Paul Klee (Marais legend1919). The only term to qualify the majority of these works seems to be expressionism, a movement which, from the 1910s, became practically synonymous with modernity. Anyway, for the Nazis, any distortion of a naturalistic vision is perceived as a form of mental alienation or as the product of two “tares”: Judaism and Bolshevism.
The educational panels and the many documents recall the facts here. On July 19, 1937, the exhibition of degenerate art opened its doors in Munich with more than 700 works that would make any museum of contemporary art pale with envy. The objective is clear: to convince visitors to the danger that all artistic production represents from the now admitted standards of Germanic art, based on neoclassical academism exalting the virtues of the new regime. “While the Nazis wanted to reduce art to a production of slogans, to a propaganda instrument at the service of the aestheticization of politics … The artistic currents of the Weimar Republic made such confiscation impossible”writes Jean-Michel Palmier (Degenerate art, an exhibition under IIIe Reiched. Jacques Berton, 1992).
The “purification” of art
Thus, the Munich demonstration is only the culmination of a process started in 1933, the year when Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of the Reich. Quickly, the first black lists were established to expurgate the world of culture of “Judeo-liberalism”, under the authority of Joseph Goebbels, Minister of Propaganda and Führer information. More than 20,000 works will be seized in German museums in order to “purify” the art of the country.
As early as April 1933, the Karlsruhe Museum of Fine Arts organized an exhibition denouncing the “Degenerate artists”targeting in particular the expressionism of Die Brücke and the Blaue Reiter. Later, the Bauhaus, this formidable avant-garde school, will be closed by the Nazis. Then begins a long exile for many artists: Kandinsky finds refuge in France, Paul Klee in Switzerland. Other creators were less lucky. Jew and communist, the painter and sculptor Otto Freundlich, one of the pioneers of abstraction, sees all his confiscated work. His sculpture Tall head (1912), of a powerful primitivism, even has the infamous honor of appearing on the cover of the “catalog” produced for the presentation of the Munich exhibition. Refugee in France, Freundlich is denounced, deported and murdered in Sobibor.
The merit of this exhibition is to shed light on the ideological foundations of what Nazi power considers as “ decadence “. We note that the term “degenerate” was popularized by the doctor and sociologist Max Nordau, inspired by the theory of evolution of Charles Darwin. In his work Degeneration (1892), Nordau studies many cases of artists and tries to demonstrate that humanity is in decline, a biological degeneration which it considers reflected and amplified by modern art. In other words, by valuing children’s drawings, the works of mental patients and the primitive style, the avant-garde, contrary to what its name indicates, would rather mark a dangerous regression. Already, Arlesian From Van Gogh (1888), this woman whose body does not obey anatomical precision, is perceived as a sign of this alleged decline, an idea that emerges from the end of the 19th century.
This first attempt to show degenerate art in France differs from the great exhibition organized in 1991 in Los Angeles County Museum, which at least tried to reconstruct the presentation of Munich. In Paris, the approach is rather thematic: a room is devoted to the particular destiny of Jewish artists, a privileged target of the Nazis – Marc Chagall, Jankel Adler, Hanns Ludwig Katz -, while another recalls the economic interest of this artistic treasure with the famous sale of Lucerne (1939), where 125 works were dispersed. Recent research contributes to the richness of the catalog-but was it really necessary three articles on Picasso?
Finally, faced with these works, it is difficult to stick solely to aesthetic considerations. Certainly, as we know, history is not repeated. We hope to be far from the hateful political climate which allowed this exhibition, which was aimed not only by the artifacts but also their authors. Nevertheless, how can we not think of the works destroyed in recent years in ideological pretexts or the various forms of censorship, more or less violent, which continue to develop?
