ENTARTETE KUNST
ENTARTETE KUNST

Summary/Abstract: Degenerate art – Entartete Kunst – is a term drawn from the vocabulary of medicine, to which fascist ideology and practice attached the important task of “purging” art of the non-artistic, of carrying out a major clear-out to make way for a “sanitized” flow and to advance “German culture in its responsibility to the German people and nation.” The two exhibitions held to this end in 1937 – the Great German Art Exhibition and the Degenerate Art exhibition, were designed to demonstrate the crucial difference between grand, sanitized German art, the “cultural foundation of the national socialist state,” and the sick, tainted, decadent and degenerate art, encumbered with “Bolshevik and Jewish elements,” which, with its “cosmopolitanism,” shamelessly misled the German people, and must therefore be resolutely and uncompromisingly done away with. The paper deals with the consequences of this ideological, “outright” demonstration of the criteria that, in the field of the visual arts, led to “such works being banned from museums and galleries, as from other public places, and to a taboo on any mention of the artists– other than in a pejorative sense – and of all those who favoured such works, among them the heads of various museums and galleries, being dismissed forthworth. A spiritual purge preceded the physical one.”

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