Ausstellung 'Entartete Kunst'

Date

• 1937

Summary

• That "German blood and honor" which the Nurnberg Laws had been enacted to protect was celebrated in a new, official, and thoroughly German art. Expressionism, Germany's unique contribution to the history of modern art, was, because of its modernism, condemned as subversive and corrupting. In Hitler's words it was "an offense falling within the bounds of criminal law." With forms and colors which made up no part of the limited aesthetic vocabulary of National Socialism, it was branded as "degenerate" by the regime whose leader had never succeeded as an artist. It was ridiculed and vilified in the most successful art exhibition ever organized. In less than five months between July and November 1937, more than two million visitors queued in long lines and crowded the old gallery building in Munich's Hofgarten. This occured even before the "blockbuster" exhibition, whose artists made up a "Who's Who" of early twentieth-century art, travelled to Berlin, Hamburg, Vienna, and other cities on its tour. Otto Dix's "War Cripples" (Kriegskrüppel), one of the paintings from that memorable exhibition, which was destroyed by the Nazis after its denigration, survives only in the photograph reproduced on this postcard.