Dec
27
"Degenerate Art Then and Now" or "America is Not Germany, 1937"
Recent Censorship Recalls Spirit of an Earlier Era
In 1936 Adolf Hitler, German Chancellor, instructed Adolf Ziegler, president of the Reich Chamber of Fine Arts, to put together an “exhibition of shame”, depicting the “deterioration of art since 1910”. Ziegler gathered a group of what were called “art inspectors” to trawl through the public museums and galleries. The committee compiled everything from some 100 art collections they considered useful for defaming the Modernist movement. The “Degenerate Art” (Entartete Kunst) exhibition opened on July 19, 1937 in Munich, organized by Josef Goebbel's Information Ministry, and was thereafter toured to numerous German cities until April 1941 to expose the alleged cultural decline of the Weimar Republic.
In 1936 Adolf Hitler, German Chancellor, instructed Adolf Ziegler, president of the Reich Chamber of Fine Arts, to put together an “exhibition of shame”, depicting the “deterioration of art since 1910”. Ziegler gathered a group of what were called “art inspectors” to trawl through the public museums and galleries. The committee compiled everything from some 100 art collections they considered useful for defaming the Modernist movement. The “Degenerate Art” (Entartete Kunst) exhibition opened on July 19, 1937 in Munich, organized by Josef Goebbel's Information Ministry, and was thereafter toured to numerous German cities until April 1941 to expose the alleged cultural decline of the Weimar Republic.