‘Hitler’s War on Modern Art’ at Jewish Museum Milwaukee

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It might have been better for German artists if Hitler had never been an artist. Aside from whatever resentment he may nurtured over his failure as a painter, for Hitler, politics was always cultural. The arts were inseparable from his agenda and the artists (along with entire art movements) he disfavored were repressed.

“Degenerate! Hitler’s War on Modern Art” is a well curated investigation of the forbidden visual arts of Nazi Germany. The exhibition at Jewish Museum Milwaukee derives its title from the infamous 1937 “Degenerate Art” exhibit in Munich that attempted to discredit the art Hitler hated through disinformation and appeals to populism.

Munich rivaled Paris and Vienna as a magnet for modern art in the early 1900s, but modernism assumed new potency in Germany after the country’s unanticipated defeat in World War I and the disruptions that followed. “Germans were in a state of turmoil,” says the Jewish Museum’s curator, Molly Dubin. “They were forced to accept blame for the entire conflict and pay reparations. There was grief for the millions of casualties, economic depression, hurt pride.”

Some German artists represented in “Degenerate!” directly addressed postwar trauma by painting and drawing crippled veterans. Otto Dix and George Grosz pointedly interrogated the rationality of war. In subtler ways, other artists depicted the psychological cost of the war and the peace that followed. On one level, the Nazis sought to turn the page by accentuating what they saw as positive German ideals. But those “positive ideals” were rooted in Hitler’s hateful mythology of Aryan (Northern European) racial superiority and the struggle for dominance by Aryans against other “races,” especially the Jews.

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The majority of the 38 artists represented in “Degenerate!” were not Jewish, a statistical mirror image of the 1937 Munich exhibit numbering only six Jews among the 112 artists shown. The Nazis were terrible expounders of an enduring conspiracy theory that supposes Jews are the wirepullers behind capitalism and communism, with arts and media serving as propaganda or reflecting alleged “Jewish” influences and tendencies. In other words, you didn’t have to be Jewish to be a carrier of “Jewish” ideas. Many of the German artists included in “Degenerate!” and at Munich had fought for their country in World War I but their work was deemed “degenerate” nevertheless.

Sickness of Modern Life

One of the information panels at the Jewish Museum explores the meaning of “degenerate” in the context of physician and social critic Max Nordau’s influential 1892 book Degeneration. In that book, Nordau diagnoses the debilitative effects on modernity on individual and social health. For him, the emerging new art was symptomatic of the illness; he called modern art “incoherent,” characterized by the artists’ “loss of self-control” and “enfeeblement by modern life.” Ironically, given his influence over Nazi aesthetics, Nordau was also a cofounder of Zionism.

Most of the works on display are unstartling to contemporary eyes but were worrisome to the Nazis. The portrait of a woman in blue by Martel Schwitzenberg represented a dark haired, dark eyed person of obviously unAryan, probably Southern European heritage. Portraits of blond women were deemed “degenerate” if painted in loose brush strokes (as opposed to the Nazi version of social realism). Pictures of sex workers were out of bounds, along with scenarios of desperate poverty and misbehavior. Any hint of Cubism, Surrealism, Primitivism and Expressionism was verboten. Several dark, fluid drawings by German Expressionist Emil Nolde are included in “Degenerate!” In another of the exhibition’s nods to irony, Nolde’s early membership in the Nazi Party wasn’t enough to keep his work from inclusion in the “Degenerate” Munich exhibit.

The Jewish Museum’s “Degenerate!” includes works on canvas and paper, paintings and prints, by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Wassily Kandinsky and Marc Chagall as well as many lesser-known artists and were drawn from private collections from around Wisconsin along with the Milwaukee Art Museum and the Haggerty Museum of Art. The original Munich “Degenerate” exhibit, Dubin says, was intended to “mock and shame the artists and educate Germans on the meaning of good art.” “Degenerate” was held at the Munich’s Archeological Institute in conjunction with an exhibit at the nearby, newly built House of German Art featuring work reflecting Aryan values. Dubin adds that ticket sales for “Degenerate” dwarfed attendance at the exhibit of officially approved art, indicating that Germans voted with their pocketbooks in favor of alternatives to Hitler’s aesthetic ideals.

“Degenerate! Hitler’s War on Modern Art” runs Feb. 24-June 4 at Jewish Museum Milwaukee, 1360 N. Prospect, and will include many talks and special events. For more information, visit jewishmuseummilwaukee.org.