Through April 20
Anyone who has been following culture-related events of the past three months will have an uneasy sense of familiarity walking through the Maltz Museum’s current special exhibition DEGENERATE! Hitler’s War on Modern Art.
Hitler believed that modern art, which was then transforming arts scenes around the world, was an aesthetic attack led by Jews to undermine the purity of the German spirit. His wide net captured artists who were largely not Jewish, such as Picasso and Kandinsky, but he blamed Jewish ideas for encouraging what he called “degenerate” art. In 1937, his government, led by propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, put together a vast exhibition of the work he reviled in the Degenerate Art Show in Munich, a “house of horrors,” which ran in contrast to a show of purer German art. Actors were hired to mingle with the crowds and express their disgust with work. Countless hundreds such works were seized and/or destroyed.
You can see for yourself exactly what Hitler considered “degenerate” in the Maltz show, which closes April 20. It’s well worth making time to catch it before it leaves. The average viewer today is unlikely to be shocked by the work of these artists, many of whom are staples in museums around the world. The exhibit includes works by Pablo Picasso, Josef Albers, Marc Chagall, Wassily Kandinsky, Lyonel Feininger, George Grosz and others. But Hitler’s government wanted to use art to further its own ideas and influence public opinion in its favor, while blocking out diverse influences he didn’t control. (One of the artists featured, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, who was named as a “degenerate” artist and 1937 hundreds of his works were confiscated or destroyed and he committed suicide the following year disturbed by the developments in Germany.)
If this reminds you of Trump’s recent takeover — and likely destruction — the Kennedy Center, one of Washington D.C.’s crown jewels, it should. The same with its demands that the Smithsonian and other institutions stop reflecting diverse viewpoints and only reflect “official” white male “patriotic” culture. In a horrifying move this week, Trump cancelled all grants to humanities councils across the country, announcing that he will use the money for his bizarre National Garden of American Heroes,” which he announced during his first term — a quirky collection of nearly 250 seemingly random individuals ranging from Sitting Bull to Kobe Bryant, Abraham Lincoln to Julia Child.
Visitors to DEGENERATE! will see works that survived the Nazi purge and have the chance to reflect on how far attempts by a government to control people’s ideas and creativity can go if left unchecked.
