Worst enemies of humanity

If you think that art is frivolous or that the concerns of the avant-garde are trivial, you should know that, before you, the worst enemies of humanity in the 20th century—the Nazis—took great care in considering this subject too. In their own way, they “considered” modern art, to the point of isolating it, exhibiting it and even selling it.

Entarte Kunst

This is the story recounted by an important exhibition at the Musée Picasso, running through May 25 of this year.

Well before orchestrating what they called the “Final Solution,” Hitler and his many accomplices sought to eradicate art that they deemed “degenerate” (“Entartete Kunst”).

Otto Freundlich

Cécile Debray

“Curiously, no exhibition has ever before been dedicated to this subject in France,” notes Cécile Debray, president of the Musée Picasso. (See here an other interview of Cécile Debray). “In reality, they attacked all forms of intellectual production, from philosophy to architecture. For us, it made that much more sense to explore the topic, given that Picasso was one of the major symbols of this classification.”

“Judeo-Bolshevik” peril

The museum’s archives are filled with press clippings, collected by Picasso himself, that spew hatred against the painter and, more broadly, against the so-called “Judeo-Bolshevik” peril. Exhibition curator Johan Popelard even confirms that, at the time, Picasso was compared to a Jew corrupting French art. The catalog includes excerpts from the period that illustrate this: “It is, unfortunately, easy to see that art has become in turn a formidable and insidious weapon in the hands of the Jew, and that its influence on public taste has been most nefarious.”

Erich Heckel

Propaganda

Johann Karl Genzel

This movement of sorts originated in Germany in 1933. Propaganda exhibitions were staged in cities like Dresden, Mannheim and Karlsruhe. The operation reached its peak in 1937 in Munich, where more than 700 works by a hundred artists—both German and foreign, spanning various modern art movements—were displayed under the banner of “Entartete Kunst.”

Two million visitors

Over the course of four months, no fewer than two million visitors, including Hitler himself, walked through this display of denigration.

Deliberately undramatic setting

Vincent Van Gogh

At the Musée Picasso, a small selection from that exhibition is presented in a deliberately undramatic setting. The first thing of note: here are many beautiful paintings, notably by German artists, that we rarely get the chance to see in France. Such is the case with “Metropolis,” a painting from 1916-17 by George Grosz (1893-1959) depicting war-time Berlin, teeming with chaos.

Otto Dix

Otto Dix

Equally fascinating is a 1928 painting by Otto Dix (1891-1969), an unflinching, unsettling portrait in an expressionist style of his fellow artist Franz Radziwill. In a striped sweater, his eyes vacant, the sitter holds in his hands a large architect’s ruler.

Joseph Goebbels

Karl Hofer

An entire room is devoted to the colossal purge of German museums under the “degenerate” banner. In just a few months, no fewer than 20,000 works were removed, from Van Gogh to Picasso. On January 13, 1938—six months into the operation—Hitler visited the storage site in the company of Joseph Goebbels. The latter recorded in his journal: “Not a single painting finds favor in our eyes.” Their goal was clear: to rid Germany of this art.

Auction in  Switzerland

Several major sales were then organized to dispose of the works, including a public auction of 125 pieces in Lucerne, Switzerland, on June 30, 1939, organized by the dealer Theodor Fischer. Among them was a portrait of a rabbi painted in the 1920s by Chagall to illustrate a Yiddish legend.

A new legend

Marc Chagall

In 1933, this painting, then belonging to the Kunsthalle Mannheim, was paraded through the city streets with a sign that read: “You who pay taxes, you should know where your money is going.” By 1937, it had become one of the sad stars of the “Degenerate Art” exhibition.

The phrasing may seem very familiar to us today.  Now, it belongs to the Kunstmuseum in Basel. And it embodies an other legend…

On view through May 25, 2025. www.museepicassoparis.fr/fr