“Experts” of “degenerate art”
The term Degeneracy gained currency in Germany by the late 19th century when the critic and author Max Nordau devised the critique theory of modern art, explained as the work of those so corrupted and enfeebled by modern life that they have lost the self-control needed to produce coherent works. Explaining the painterliness of Impressionism as the sign of a diseased visual cortex, he decried modern degeneracy while praising traditional German culture. Nordau drew upon the writings of the criminologist Cesare Lombroso who claimed researched that there were “born criminals” whose atavistic personality traits could be detected by scientifically measuring abnormal physical characteristics. Following such expertise Paul Schultze-Naumburg wrote several books on art including Kunst und Rasse (Art and Race) in which he argued that only racially pure artists could produce a healthy art which upheld timeless ideals of classical beauty, while racially mixed modern artists produced disordered artworks and monstrous depictions of the human form. By reproducing examples of modern art next to photographs of people with deformities and diseases, he graphically reinforced the idea of modernism as a sickness.
By 1937, the concept of degeneracy was firmly entrenched in Nazi policy. That year Goebbels put Adolf Ziegler (head of Reich Chamber of Visual Art), in charge of a six-man commission authorized to confiscate from museums and art collections throughout the Reich, any remaining art deemed modern, degenerate, or subversive. These works were then to be presented to the public in the Degenerate Art (Entartete Kunst) exhibition intended to incite further revulsion against the “perverse Jewish spirit” penetrating German culture. Contrasting this proposed future world of Aryan bliss were cubist and expressionist images of faces and bodies by Picasso, Kokoschka, Emil Nolde, and others, likened to the deformed faces and bodies of mentally ill institutionalized citizens in a chilling Nazi-era slide show. Using such threatening if simple-minded paradigms helped immeasurably in demonizing Jewish (and modern) artists and thus Jews. More “hygienic” art showing “normal,” robust Germans at work and in repose could counter what Hitler and his minions reduced to a kind of noxious bacteria burrowing into the German body: the Jew. Many ambitious doctors joined this effort, with the least ethical, those willing to put the stamp of approval on this idea, elevated to the top ranks. (Nearly half of German doctors were Party members.)
During exhibition there were slogans painted on the walls:
# Revelation of the Jewish racial soul
# An insult to German womanhood
# The ideal–cretin and whore
# Deliberate sabotage of national defence
# German farmers–a Yiddish view
# The Jewish longing for the wilderness reveals itself – (in Germany the Negro becomes the racial ideal of a degenerate art)
# Madness becomes method
# Nature as seen by sick minds
At the end of four months Entartete Kunst had attracted over two million visitors.
