‘Degenerate Art’ at the Neue Galerie

From the remainder, a Nazi apparatchik named Adolf Ziegler culled more than 650 confiscated artworks and books for an exhibit of so-called Degenerate Art, which opened in Munich on July 19, 1937 and subsequently traveled to eleven other German cities. The object was to display the decadent, Judaizing modernism of which German culture had now been cleansed before its final dispatch, to either the international black market, the private collections of Nazis of more elevated taste, or the flames.

Concurrently, the Nazis mounted an exhibit of approved art. The works here were handsomely framed and spaciously displayed, while the exhibit of the Degenerates was packed, ghettolike, into the minimum possible wall space, stacked from floor to ceiling with only inches between one work and another. To be sure, most of these latter works were by non-Jewish artists, but Judaism was for the Nazis a general predisposition to corruption; it required no direct contact with the contaminant source.

Surviving photographs and film footage suggest that the Degenerate Art show was well attended, and, despite placards inviting the crowds to mock, they appear silent and well-behaved. Some, no doubt, were lured by the fascination of the abomination and some by simple curiosity, but some, too, must have wanted a last look at a world that had been destroyed.

Some of the artists mocked by the Nazis were dead; some had or were about to escape Germany; some, like Otto Dix and Emil Nolde, chose internal exile. Max Beckmann left Germany on the day the Degenerate Art exhibit opened; he was among its featured painters. Years later, as a student at Washington University in St. Louis, I came across an exhibit being put up in the university art gallery. The canvases hadn’t been hung yet, but were simply propped against the walls. I knew nothing about their painter, nor that he had taught at the school I was now attending and created his last works there. I only knew I was stunned by their force and power, even though they were literally at my feet. That was my introduction to Beckmann, and to German Expressionism.

A symbolic recreation

Now, New York’s Neue Galerie has symbolically recreated the Degenerate Art exhibit, not this time to shame its participants but to honor them. It’s a sample, of course, although the artists represented were all in the original show, and some of the work, at least, had hung there. There’s also a gallery with a number of empty frames, which represent lost and destroyed works. And the last gallery of the show contains a selection from Hitler’s counterexhibit of Aryan art, including Ziegler’s own The Four Elements, which Hitler personally prized and ordered for his own apartments.

Framing the gallery spaces are photographs, documents, and images relating to the original exhibit and setting it in wider context. There’s a very large, blown-up photograph of a peaceful, pre-war Dresden, one of the most active sites of Expressionism, faced across the gallery by the iconic image of the sculpted angel of Dresden Cathedral looking out over the ruins of the city after its destruction by Allied bombing in February 1945. It’s a reminder of the price paid for Hitler’s own destructive nihilism and the reciprocal savagery with which it was exacted.

The actual quality of the works on display is almost beside the point, but they are, as one would expect of a show featuring prominent examples of work by Barlach, Beckmann, Corinth, Dix, Feininger, Grosz, Heckel, Kandinsky, Klee, Kirchner, Kokoschka, Lehmbruck, Nolde, Schmidt-Rottluff, and Rohlfs, of a generally high order. Some are very well known, for example Nolde’s woodcut, The Prophet, which is sometimes taken as the iconic image of the Expressionist movement itself, with its bold, angular lines and haunting sadness. Others are pleasant surprises, such as Christian Rohlfs’s The Towers of Soest, or of particular documentary importance, as Lasar Segall’s Eternal Wanderers and Felix Nussbaum’s The Damned (1943-44), which depicts the Holocaust of which Nussbaum himself was soon to be a victim. Paul Klee is represented by a number of works, some well-known but including three quick sketches of the beginnings of persecution in Nazi Germany, rarely if ever seen.

The artists themselves reacted very differently to their stigmatization. Oskar Kokoschka’s 1937 Self-Portrait as a Degenerate Artist is a defiant response to Ziegler’s exhibit that faces the viewer with a proud, jut-jawed look and arms akimbo against a forest background in which an indistinct red figure is fleeing — Masaccio’s Adam fleeing Eden? Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s own Self-Portrait, also from 1937, is by contrast a study in despair, with the left side of his face blanked out. Kokoschka, already 51, would live until 1980; Kirchner committed suicide in 1938, a year that also took Rohlfs and Barlach.

Barlach is represented, among other things, by his 1910 bronze, Berserker, which despite Goebbels’s admiration for it did not spare him from inclusion among the "degenerates." Nolde joined a Nazi organization in 1935, whether from opportunism or conviction, but the Nazis would confiscate over a thousand of his works. Deprived of oils and not daring to create human images, he painted luminous watercolor landscapes during the war years, a selection of which serves as a chronological bookend to the exhibit.

Ziegler’s three-paneled Four Elements, featuring antiseptic nudes with expressions ranging from the bland to the simpering, is hung opposite Beckmann’s great triptych of exile and persecution, Departure, in a curatorial masterstroke that brilliantly sums up the Nazi degradation of art and the response it elicited. It fittingly epitomizes a show that, for many reasons, should be seen. The censorship and denigration of art in our time is less conspicuous in our superficially permissive, consumerist culture and the surveillance regimes it masks, but it is no less worthy of attention.

For Richard Carreño's essay on degenerate art and the Neue Galerie show, click here.

(Above right: The Prophet, woodcut by Emil Nolde, 1912, private collection. Above left: The Berserker, bronze by Ernst Barlach, 1910.)