The journey began with Emil Nolde's Christus und die Snderin (Christ and the Sinner), hung in a room devoted to imagery said to violate Christian sensibilities. Prior to the examination of the inventory in the V&A's archives, the exact layout and composition of the exhibition was unclear. Eager to take hold of this opportunity, Hitler approved the proposal on the 30th of June and appointed Adolf Ziegler, the head of the Reich Chamber of Visual Arts and painter of svelte asexual female nudes, responsible for the collection and curation of the artworks. Now I am going to take action . As Ines Schlenker points out in her catalogue essay, Defining National Socialist Art: The First Grosse Deutsche Kunstausstellung in 1937, Hitler vaguely defined acceptable Nazi art as eternal, stemming from the inner being of a people, leaving curators and artists scrambling to abide by his unclear wishes. Her story, which was far from unique, serves as a powerful reminder of the painful human realities hidden within the deceptively colourless pages of a bureaucratic document. Barr, it seems, utilized the notion of German guilt for the crimes of the Nazi regime as a means of resolving and rationalizing the troubling moral issues, Petropoulos concludes. Alastair Sooke compares it with some works the Nazis loved. The inventory consists of 482 pages (including blank pages and a missing page), split into two volumes. Let us know if you have suggestions to improve this article (requires login). Created at the heart of the Nazi regime by Joseph Goebbels' Ministry of Propaganda, the document records the confiscation of more than 16,000 works of art which the Nazis deemed 'degenerate'. The Confiscation of "Entartete Kunst" in 1937 and its Consequences. In 1937 opende in Mnchen de nazi-tentoonstelling voor Entartete Kunst waarin 650 moderne kunstwerken werden getoond uit 32 Duitse museumcollecties. People could not necessarily tell from listening to music or looking at a piece of artwork whether it was Entartete. The movement disassociated itself, both in style and theme, from the traditional discourse of narrative and representation illustrated in works before the 19th century. "Entartete Kunst" (Degenerate Art) exhibition Film | Accession Number: 1991.259.1 | RG Number: RG-60.0375 | Film ID: 210 The 1937 exhibit of ENTARTETE KUNST at the Archeological Institute in Munich, not far from the House of German Art, with paintings of modern artwork declared by the Nazis to be "degenerate" on the gallery walls. The exhibition presented 650 works of art, confiscated from German museums, and was staged in counterpoint to the concurrent Great German Art Exhibition. Although it is not yet known how, when and for what purpose Fischer obtained the list, he seems to have possessed it from at least the late 1960s. There are four money personality types. The 'liquidation' ended in July 1941. Segelbild, um 1915, by Jacoba van Heemskerck. Established museums collected and exhibited contemporary work by Max Beckmann, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Paul Klee, and others, introducing them to a wide international audience that included Alfred H. Barr, Jr., MoMA's founding director. As such, it stands as a memorial for a museum landscape that would never be the same again. The Reichsmusikkammer set up Reichsmusiktage (Reich Music Days) in Dsseldorf in 1938 to present sanctioned German music; they later set up an exhibition of degenerate music which echoed the Entartete Kunst exhibition. Departure, Frankfurt 1932, Berlin 1933-35. Explore the range of exclusive gifts, jewellery, prints and more. The day before the exhibition started, Hitler delivered . Klimt's omission from the Degenerate Art show is strange when one considers that even in his own life-time, Klimt was seen as a radical and morally questionable artist. In 1929, she suffered a nervous breakdown and was admitted to the psychiatric hospital in Friedensberger, where she continued to make drawings and to paint watercolours, many of which depicted her fellow patients. The list of more than 16,000 artworks was produced by the Reichsministerium fr Volksaufklrung und Propaganda (Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda) in 1942 or thereabouts. These works of art were shipped to a grain silo in Berlin Kpenick, where they were inventoried on index cards. The first three rooms of the Entartete Kunst exhibition were grouped thematically. In Munich, the Degenerate Art exhibition would take place concurrently alongside the pre-contrived Groe Deutsche Kunstausstellung (Great German Art Exhibition). Freie Universitat Berlin: Database Entartete Kunst. ], [Many thanks to the Neue Galerie in New York City for providing me with the image above from, a review copy of the catalogue to, and other press materials related to the exhibition Degenerate Art: The Attack on Modern Art in Nazi Germany, 1937, which runs through June 30, 2014. Blitz 2. Just two months after taking control of Germany in 1933, the Nazis staged an exhibition titled Kulturbolschewistische Bilder or Cultural Bolshevist Images. Entartete Kunst, however, may have been the biggest and remains the most notorious to this day. bpk, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Archiv Heinrich Hoffmann, You can change your preferences or opt out of hearing from us at any time using the unsubscribe link in our emails. Entartete Kunst - Free download as Word Doc (.doc / .docx), PDF File (.pdf), Text File (.txt) or read online for free. De ontaarde kunst tentoonstelling was de meest bezochte moderne kunsttentoonstelling ooit, maar leidde ook tot de vernieling van duizenden kunstwerken. It was also the title of a propagandistically designed Nazi exhibition of modern art held in Munich in 1937. Institution | 3. German painter Adolf Ziegler was appointed Senator of the Fine Arts at the Reichkulturkammer in 1935 and became the President of the Kunstkammer (Chamber of Art) in 1936. The Nazis claimed that Jewish influence was responsible for the creation of morally questionable modern art and music and sought to ban such works. The exhibition presented a diverse selection of artists and genres of music linked only because they were disliked by the Nazi regime. This exhibit was designed to contrast with a simultaneous exhibition of art approved by Nazi leaders made up of works executed in an academic style and dealing with typical Nazi themes of heroism and duty. degenerate art, German Entartete Kunst, term used by the Nazi Party in Germany to describe art that did not support the ideals of Nazism. . The day before the Degenerate Art exhibition opened its doors to the public, Hitler had officially inaugurated the German Art Exhibition, showcasing those works selected by a commission tasked with finding the very best the Reich had to offer. A failed artist himself, Hitler wanted to mold the German soul in every way, including how it viewed the world through the prism of art. Virivores discovered: Microbes that survive on a virus-only diet, Bad at saving? The painting was an homage to the Weimar Republics gay scene, which Alport had experienced before being forced to leave Germany because of his Jewish roots and homosexuality. So that people can see and learn to recognize it.. The exhibitions argued that this art had been nurtured by those politicians who had betrayed Germany by signing the Versailles Treaty (the peace treaty that ended the First World War), condemning Germans to a life in servitude to outside forces, and who had thereafter promoted utterly destructive social and cultural trends. Banned Jewish composers included Meyerbeer, Mendelssohn, Schoenberg, Ernst Krenek and Bruno Walter. The inventory's two volumes appear to have been bound (or re-bound) at around this time, and they are stored in a matching dark grey box with the title 'Entartete Kunst' stamped in gold on the spine. Thus, art, especially the art of the Jews or those he felt had been supported by the Jews, had to be stopped. It applied the 'racial science' of the day to the art world, establishing a disturbing connection between artistic expression and mental or physical disabilities, both of which were supposed to be eradicated from the 'racial community'. Chief Menominee did not negotiate to sell the land, but three other chiefs did. The exhibition drew large crowds and would go on tour throughout the Reich. His self-portrait was lent to the 1938 exhibition by Emil Korner, an economics professor with whom Kokoschka had sought refuge in Czechoslovakia, before Korner himself was forced to emigrate to Zurich. Volume 1 covers the cities Aachen to Grlitz, while Volume 2 covers Gttingen to Zwickau. His deeply pessimistic and disturbing paintings created for the University of Vienna caused a scandal. Etymologi Entartete Kunst er tysk og betyder 'udartet, dekadent kunst'. Most of the remaining works of art were destroyed in a bonfire held in the courtyard of the Berlin fire department, echoing the public burning of books in 1933 that were considered to be incompatible with Nazi values. By the end of the exhibition on November 30th, 1937, and to this day, Entartete Kunst remains the most visited modern art exhibition in history with over 2 million visitors. The aim of radiation is to stop the ability of degenerated cells to divide and thus to prevent further growth of the tumour. Misinformation accompanied the artworks, and slogans emphasised their degeneracy. Ultimately, Hitler despised the idea of an artistic movement that could stand as the ideal of communication to oneself and ones community because it lay promises of an emancipated people that, uninhibited, could explore their own humanity. These were artworks from a time before the cultural rot was said to have set in, or which were composed by artists seen to have resisted its poisonous temptations. Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 2023, Background image: Adolf Hitler inspecting confiscated artworks, 13 January 1938 (Aktion "Entartete Kunst"), photograph by Heinrich Hoffmann. As Olaf Peters, guest curator of the exhibition from the Martin-Luther-Universitt Halle-Wittenberg, points out in his catalogue essay, From Nordau to Hitler: Degeneration and Anti-Modernism Between the Fin-De-Sicle and the National Socialist Takeover of Power, [o]ver the course of the nineteenth century, concepts such as decadence and degeneration increasingly found their way into both cultural criticism and scientific discourse until eventually, [t]he National Socialists reduced this discourse to racist themes and instrumentalized it as a constitutive component of their propaganda for the policy of extermination created by the Third Reich. Nordau, a trained physician, felt that the pace of modernization disturbed the human mind to the point of creating mental illness that he categorized as degeneration. Remove the stimuli of modernization, the reasoning followed, and the mind would return to a healthy state, Nordau the wayward Darwinist argued. The Nazis ran a concurrent exhibition, the Grosse deutsche Kunstausstellung (Great German art exhibition) which displayed art approved by the Nazis, though Entartete Kunst was much more popular. One million individuals were reported within the first six weeks alone, while an additional million saw the Degenerate Art project as it traveled throughout Germany between February 1938 and April 1941. Sanctions were created to forbid the exhibition and even the creation of any contemporary art not approved by the Nazi Party; such work was labeled, along with the artists who created it, as degenerate. In 1933 this art began to be displayed in defamatory exhibits intended to disparage modern art, and to link the Jewish race with the decline of German art. Komm nach Osten 3. Corrections? In particular, the University maintains an extensive database that includes entries for many of the artworks included in the inventory held by the V&A. In contrast, the banned artistic genres such as Cubism, Dadaism and Surrealism were arguably somewhat disliked or misunderstood by ordinary Germans. Ziegler, who had overseen the confiscations of the works now on display, made the opening address, in which he left no room for doubt as to how the artworks should be interpreted: "Look around you at these monstrosities of insanity, insolence, incompetence and degeneration". The culmination of these exhibits was Entartete Kunst, which opened in Munich in July 1937 and was advertised as culture documents of the decadent work of Bolsheviks and Jews. 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