The artworks Hitler loved to hate

Hitler fancied himself as an artist, but failed.

With some technical ability but no creativity, he still considered himself well-qualified to be a judge of art, admiring lifeless paintings of large, blond Aryan men and women representing the true spirit of Germany.

It was no surprise that, to him, the wild colours and radical compositions of the Expressionists and other modern artists stood for everything that was wrong and decadent.

Outside the Degenerate art exhibition 

He summed up his war against artistic freedom in a speech, warning that the ‘dilettantes and art-forgers . . . cultural barbarians and art-stutterers’ would be ‘picked up and liquidated’. Which leads us to the Degenerate Art exhibition in Munich in 1937.

Nine narrow galleries in the Hofgarten arcade were crammed with around 600 works seized from some of the best galleries in Germany and looted from individuals.

Valued paintings and sculpture by major artists were now ‘pilloried as the work of the insane, the criminal, the Jewish, the Bolshevist, the un-German degenerate’.

Thus art historian Stonard sums up the perverse ideology behind the exhibition that’s the subject of his book, flaying open the spirit of envy, hatred and revenge that drove Nazi zealots to pillory the work of artist Franz Marc, who was killed in the First World War.

What’s more, Germany was full of ‘degenerate’ art. The artistic revolution that began in France spread across a pre-Nazi Germany hungry for the new spirit of the age. But, as always, the detractors were ready to condemn work they could not understand.

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The work of Nolde, Klee, Kandinsky, Schlemmer, Dix, Grosz and many others challenged an ideology based on purity and control. Stonard explains, ‘The fundamental purpose of Nazi art policy was to create a viewer of art capable of appreciating the difference between the heroic body of Nazi art, and the deformed, degenerate body of the moderns.’

In 1937 people flocked to Munich to see a much-hyped exhibition of approved German art, as well as to peer at the show of reviled art not far away. It doesn’t take a psychologist to know that people always prefer to peer at what is ‘banned.’

Crowds gathered outside the Hofgarten; respectable German citizens queued to check out the subversive works that challenged and threatened that very respectability. Irresistible!

Entartete Kunst (‘Degenerate Art’) became the most visited exhibition of modern art, seen by more than three million visitors. Mocking captions invited contempt, yet the artists became better known than they were before.

In this terrific short book Stonard walks us into us the stifling galleries, so crowded you are ‘picking a path through a minefield of hate’.

It’s an imaginative tour de force. All the horrors of the war lay ahead. But Hitler could not destroy the power of great art to awaken souls.