A degenerate music exhibition in Dusseldorf, Germany, 1937. The Nazis really didn’t like Jazz.

On view now, artist Yael Bartana’s 16mm film installation Entartete Kunst Lebt! (Degenerate Art Lives!) is a statement about war built upon the work German painter and printmaker Otto Dix. Under the Nazis, Dix’s art was condemned as “degenerate,” a term used to describe modernism, which they considered Jewish and therefore perverse. Through stop-motion, Bartana brings Dix’s soldiers to life in her retelling, to rebuke the practice of censoring art as corrupt, asserting defiantly that “degenerate” art survives.

“My Catholic upbringing implanted in me a respect for all things visible, connected by the property of esse, that calls for unceasing admiration. I think that the sign of a healthy poetry is striving to capture as much of reality as possible.”
– Czesław Miłosz 
[Flower Garden - 1919 - Emil Nolde]

• The Nobel Prize in Literature 1980 was awarded to Czeslaw Milosz “who with uncompromising clear-sightedness voices man’s exposed condition in a world of severe conflicts.” More: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1980/milosz/biographical/ 

• InDumont’s stunning new release, Emil Nolde: My Garden Full of Flowers, Manfred Reuther describes the existential threat that grew up around the painter in the 1930s. “More than one thousand of his works were confiscated from German museums in conjunction with the action against ‘degenerate art.’ More: https://www.artbook.com/blog-featured-image-emil-nolde-my-garden-full-of-flowers.html 

• PARIS REVIEW INTERVIEW: This interview was conducted primarily at Milosz’s home in the Berkeley hills overlooking San Francisco Bay, where he lives with his wife, Carol, and a cat named Tiny. Other portions were recorded before a live audience at the Unterberg Poetry Center of the 92nd Street YMHA in New York. The first part of the conversation in Berkeley lasted four hours without interruption, until the poet looked at his watch and then, somewhat sympathetically, at his exhausted interlocutor to ask, “It is six o’clock, time for a little vodka?” https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1721/the-art-of-poetry-no-70-czeslaw-milosz 

davoser-tagebuch:

Entartete Kunst, 1937

davoser-tagebuch:

Entartete Kunst, Leipzig, 1937

A female patient, woman with landscape, 1929.

While this haunting painting was not destroyed by the Nazis, its creator was. Elfriede Lohse-Wachtler was diagnosed as schizophrenic in 1932, was forcibly surgically sterilized in 1935, and euthanized in 1940 at Pirna-Sonnenstein.

A poster advertising the “Degenerate Art” exhibit of 1937.

artnet:

Degenerate Art in New York

A must-see show this spring is the Neue Galerie New York’s Degenerate Art: The Attack on Modern Art in Nazi Germany, 1937, a fantastic exhibition that opened this month. 

Its aim is to recreate the notorious 1937 “Entartete Kunst” (“Degenerate Art”) show organized by the Nazis in Munich as part of its battle against perceived cultural decay.

To this notice I would add that the Entartete Kunst exhibition was already re-created in 1991 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The catalogue for that show, Degenerate Art: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany, by Stephanie Barron, is easily found today and deserves a mention. According to the press release, Barron’s “catalogue not only recreated the original show, but contains exhaustively researched essays on such topics as the Nazi ideals of beauty and resistance efforts by some German museums. Biographical information is available for each persecuted artist as well as rare photographs, and there is a room by room survey of and guide to the 1939 exhibition with a new English translation.” Further interest in the original travesty of an exhibition caused Fritz Kaiser to re-published the 1937 exhibition guide under the title Degenerate Art: The Exhibition Catalogue Guide In German And English in 2012. The Neue Galerie is to be applauded for once again bringing this spectacle of shame to a new public’s attention.