Among all the efforts to clamp state censorship on art in the 20th century, one symbolic event stands out. It is "Entartete Kunst," the Nazis' show of "degenerate art," the purpose of which was to ridicule Modernism. Even when Stalin launched his terror against the Russian avant-garde in the 1930s, it never occurred to his apparatchiks to hold a big show of the art he loathed. But this was precisely what Hitler did in the summer of 1937 in Munich, contrasting it with another exhibition -- reverently installed in the neoclassical halls of the new House of German Art -- of the art he approved.
The second show was called the "Grosse Deutsche Kunstausstellung" (Great German Art Exhibition), and much of it was handpicked by the Fuhrer himself. In his opening speech, he promised that "cliques of chatterers, dilettantes, and art forgers will be picked up and liquidated."
Over there, across the park, one saw the works of Max Beckmann, Max Ernst, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Oskar Kokoschka and others. The viewer could imagine what demons stood behind them: the creeping Jew, the scheming Bolshevik, the Negro with his thick lips and saxophone, the slavering pervert. In here it was all David and the Apollo Belvedere, noble simplicity and calm grandeur as $ interpreted by such heirs of Michelangelo and Polyclitus as Hitler's favorite sculptor Arno Breker and his court painter Adolf Ziegler. What kind of Germany, the two shows asked, do you want?
"Entartete Kunst" was the first traveling blockbuster show of the 20th century. It went to several venues in Germany and Austria and was seen by the staggering total of nearly 3 million people, a larger box office than any art exhibition before or since. (By comparison, the Museum of Modern Art's Picasso retrospective drew 1.1 million four decades later.) It contained some 650 paintings, sculptures and prints by just about every Modernist artist of consequence in Germany and Austria; it was a huge, random anthology of the achievements of German Expressionism. Everything came from German museums, since the idea was to show how the official public culture of Germany had been infiltrated by Modernism. At the end of the show, whatever seemed salable was auctioned by the Fischer Gallery in Switzerland. Minor or unsalable works were destroyed. The whole affair was an elaborate purification rite, art's equivalent to book burning.
Yet although "Entartete Kunst" is still an archsymbol of cultural repression, it remains vague in detail. The catalog was a mere brochure, and only a few photos of the actual installation seem to have survived. What, exactly, was in the show? Below the obvious surface of anti-Semitic and anti- Modernist stereotypes, what did it actually represent? How did it fit into the larger programs of Nazism, and why was it so popular?