(2 of 3)
These questions, and others, are now raised and answered by an altogether fascinating reconstruction of "Entartete Kunst," which opened last week at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. "Degenerate Art: The Fate of the Avant- Garde in Nazi Germany" is the result of five years of patient detective work led by art historian Stephanie Barron, whose specialty is the art and cultural politics of Germany in the '20s and '30s. With the help of photographs that had lain unconsulted since the end of World War II in the archives of the National Gallery in Berlin, Barron was able to reconstruct not only the contents of the show, work by work, but also their hanging on the walls of the Archaeological Institute that far-off summer.
Although some of the 650 works have disappeared and others remain unidentifiable, Barron was able to borrow some 180 items that were in the original show. Among them are numerous masterpieces of the period, such as Kirchner's piercing image of castration anxiety, Self-Portrait as Soldier, 1915, and Beckmann's Still Life with Musical Instruments, 1926, perhaps the greatest of his still-life paintings, now seen for the first time in the U.S.
This pictorial core is preceded by a scale model of the original installation in Munich (an astonishing piece of detective work in itself), complete with the Nazis' derogatory slogans ("Revelation of the Jewish racial soul," "The ideal -- cretin and whore," and so forth) written around them. The museum has also produced voluminous samplings of other aspects of the Nazi program of culture as total propaganda. There are vitrines of banned books and Nazi catalogs, and tape loops of old newsreels of cultural parades in Munich: triumphal processions of kitsch, with huge papier-mache Greek heads borne by people dressed as Rhine Maidens and warriors of the Teutoburg Forest. There are screenings of films whose display is still illegal in Germany, such as Hitlerjunge Quex, 1933, and Jud Suss, 1940. One can listen to a duet from Act I of Lohengrin, conducted by the young Nazi virtuoso Herbert von Karajan, or to SS marches.
Short of summoning the Mormon Tabernacle Choir to belt out the Horst Wessel Song in the Hollywood Bowl, the museum has spared no efforts to sample the culture of the time as vividly as possible for an audience to whom the Third Reich is, at most, a remote and unwelcome memory. And the catalog, with its essays by Barron and other hands, German scholars as well as American ones, is certain to remain the definitive study of Nazi cultural repression for many years to come.