In tormented Europe of the 20th century, modern art became the target of an unprecedented ideological offensive. Considered by the Nazi regime as a threat to cultural purity, “degenerate” art undergoes censorship, spoliation and destruction. At the heart of this persecution, major works are condemned to silence, while their creators face exile or death. Today, the Picasso-Paris museum revives this memory by revealing the vestiges of this persecuted artistic heritage.
“Degenerate” art: an ideological concept before being a persecution
From the 19th century, the term “degeneration” was essential in various scientific disciplines. Medicine, anthropology and art history quickly integrate it. Max NORDAU popularizes this concept in its degeneration essay (1892). It combines new artistic forms with psychiatric disorders. According to him, the impressionists, symbolists and expressionists suffer from mental alterations. These disorders would make them incompatible with the standards of a healthy society.
In the 1920s and 1930s, Nazi ideologists took up these theories. Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels, Minister of Propaganda, perceive modern art as a cultural threat. For them, cubism, fauvism and dadaism symbolize a decadence to eradicate. Their speech then aims to preserve the unity and purity of German culture.
Hitler, himself a former aspiring artist, rejects these currents which he considers to be incomprehensible and harmful, as knowledge of the arts points out. He opposes these forms of expression an official art, based on the idealization of bodies and the glorification of Aryan values.
From their accession to power in 1933, the Nazis organized a methodical purge in German museums. They dismember their duties the directors deemed too progressive and also remove the works of the avant-garde of the public collections.
This movement accelerates when the Nazi authorities establish laws prohibiting certain artists from exercising. They censor many creators, especially those of Jewish origin or engaged in movements considered to be subversive, push them to exile or persecute them.
The 1937 exhibition: a public trial against the avant-garde
In 1937, the Nazis crossed a milestone in their offensive against modern art. In Munich, Joseph Goebbels is organizing the Kunst (degenerate art) exhibition, which becomes the window of this discredit campaign.
More than 700 works by 112 artists appear in a route that the Nazis design to provoke the rejection of the visitor. They hang the paintings and sculptures in a chaotic way and accompany them with mocking slogans as well as inscriptions denouncing an alleged threat to German identity.
The exhibition mainly targets expressionist, cubists and dadaist artists, accused of producing a destructive, incomprehensible and depraved art. Among the targeted figures are Paul Klee, Otto Dix, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Emil Nolde, Vassily Kandinsky and of course Pablo Picasso.
His works, whose feet wiping her feet (1921), are deemed symptomatic of a distorted and sick art. The exhibition also insists on an alleged Jewish and Bolshevik influence in artistic production, a discourse that is part of the anti -Semitic propaganda of the regime.
At the same time, the Nazis organize a counter exhibition, the large German art exhibition, which is held in the same district of Munich. This second demonstration, intended to show art deemed “healthy” by the regime, highlights paintings exalting the Aryan body, the traditional family and military power. This face-to-face between the two exhibitions then illustrates the will of the Nazis to impose a unique culture and in accordance with their ideology.
The exhibition of Kunst Encourte is a paradoxical success, comments Le Monde. More than two million visitors go there in four months, a figure much higher than that of the large German art exhibition. Part of the public attends it out of curiosity, while others come by adherence to the speeches of the regime. This indictment hardly strikes the artists, the authorities prohibit, confiscate or destroy the works of some, while others must go into exile.
The Nazi regime is not content to exhibit “degenerate” art to ridicule it. From 1939, he granted more than 20,000 works in German museums. He burns some during public ceremonies and sells others on the international market. An auction organized in Switzerland, in Lucerne, allows the Nazis to sell several masterpieces from Picasso, Van Gogh or Matisse. Part of the artistic loot is also entrusted to art merchants close to the regime, such as Hildebrand Gurlitt, who are responsible for monitoring these paintings abroad.
The Picasso Museum: a contemporary rereading of this censorship
The exhibition of the Picasso-Paris national museum explores this unknown episode in art history. It brings together works that have survived autodafés and forced sales. Metropolis of George Grosz, chaotic portrait of Berlin of the 1910s, embodies this modernity rejected by the Nazis. The legend of the Marais (1919) by Paul Klee, confiscated in 1937, is also exhibited. Presented in Munich in the section dedicated to the Dada movement, it is among the major parts.
A section brings together Jewish artists, which Nazi propaganda targets directly. Marc Chagall, Otto Freundlich and Ludwig Meidner appear there. The organizers present their works with defamatory slogans to erect them as a symbols of “racial degeneration”. The Gestapo stops Freundlich in France during the occupation. Deported to Sobibor, he died in this camp in 1943.
The exhibition of the Picasso museum also highlights the journey of the works after the war. If some have been recovered and restored, many are still dispersed today between private and museum collections. The history of the “Treasury Gurlitt”, discovered in 2012 at the son of the art dealer Hildebrand Gurlitt, recalls that the traces of this artistic spoliation have not completely disappeared.
By replacing these events as part of the Picasso Museum, the exhibition therefore takes on a special resonance. Picasso, as a avant-garde artist and opposing the Franco regime, embodies the figure of the artist persecuted by the Nazi regime. His painting Guernica, painted in 1937 in reaction to the bombing of the Spanish city, echoes the works qualified as “degenerate” and testifies to the political scope of modern art in the face of totalitarianisms.
Through this retrospective, the Picasso-Paris museum thus makes it possible to rediscover part of the European artistic heritage long threatened with forgetting. By highlighting the survivor works and the fate of their creators, the exhibition restores a fundamental pan of the history of the 20th century art.
With an unwavering passion for local news, Christopher leads our editorial team with integrity and dedication. With over 20 years’ experience, he is the backbone of Wouldsayso, ensuring that we stay true to our mission to inform.
