ART: A CULTURAL GIFT FROM HITLER

EXILED BY NAZISM, EUROPEANS IMMENSELY ENRICHED AMERICAN ART

Exiles and Emigres," the exhibition running through May 11 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, is a fine example of a genre that often and easily goes wrong: the politically didactic art show. Its curator, Stephanie Barron, in 1991 created a survey named "Degenerate Art." Her subject then was the censorship, repression and persecution of modern artists in Hitler's Germany, culminating in the infamous "Entartete Kunst" ("Degenerate Art") show of 1937, in which hundreds of works by artists from Oskar Kokoschka to Henri Matisse were pilloried with insulting wall labels. "Exiles and Emigres" is the sequel to Barron's earlier...

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