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This is a neatly timed show. Issues of censorship and political art resound in the American air as they have not since the 1930s. "Degenerate Art" may remind a few people (at least those who have not been utterly blinkered by their own sanctimony) how toxic a sense of political "correctness" can be once it is injected into the social arteries and corrupts the language that flows in them. In America today the free speech of culture has at least as much to fear from the academic lefties as from the religious Fundamentalists or the loony right, which was certainly not the case in Germany in 1937. For American artists today, censorship or repression usually means not getting a National Endowment for the Arts grant. Jesse Helms may be a bigot, but he is not Dr. Goebbels, and one can only imagine what the ghosts of George Grosz or Beckmann, exiled to America, might say to those who think he is.
The difference between the attitudes behind "Entartete Kunst" and those of America's cultural puritanisms is vast and crucial. No American has ever got away with the suggestion that art, along with literature, music, drama and film, should conform to a state-enforced ideology. The popularity of "Entartete Kunst" sprang from a common ground of bewilderment, the feeling that advanced art, in the 1930s as in the 1980s, had lost contact with the man in the street. It was seen as an index and even, in some obscure way, a cause of the sense of social "decay" on which Nazism harped.
America has never been short of paranoids who fantasized some "essential," ideal American society, undermined by "outsiders." But they had no totalitarian frame through which this romantic pessimism could be magnified, whereas Hitler invented one. Anti-Semitism was only part of the demonology of the "Entartete Kunst" show. In fact, only half a dozen Jewish artists, the best-known of whom was Marc Chagall, were included in it.
What seems to have been of far greater appeal to the German audience was the diffused threat of general pathology, of an incurable strangeness that was Modernism itself. Entartet, as Barron stresses, was at root "a biological term, defining a plant or animal that has so changed that it no longer belongs to its species." But today the work shown in "Entartete Kunst" strikes us as classic. It has become part of the legend, the official culture of the 20th century. No doubt some folks will get more thrills from the show's documents of Nazi kitsch than from the once "shocking" works of Kokoschka and Kirchner. Still, "Degenerate Art" is a brave and necessary effort.