The 20th century wasn’t short of “notorious” artistic events: the riot at the premiere of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring in 1913, the unveiling of Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain, a urinal exhibited as a work of art in 1917. But one stands head and shoulders above the rest: the Entartete Kunst – Degenerate Art – exhibition staged by the Nazis in Munich in 1937.
Featuring works by Picasso, Matisse, Chagall and a host of German modern greats such as Paul Klee, Max Beckmann, Georg Grosz and Kurt Schwitters, it was probably the finest modern art show ever staged; except that its purpose was to provide the “ordinary, decent” German with the opportunity to mock the debased, non-Aryan, avant garde culture the Nazis were trying to stamp out.
The event hastened the greatest artistic exodus in history, as just about every artist of even slightly experimental mien – or Jewish blood – fled Germany, first for neighbouring countries, then Britain and America, thereby doing more, paradoxically, to spread the Modernist creed than any other single event.
The Degenerate Art exhibition has become comfortably sealed in the past. Or it was until yesterday, when the chance disclosure of a discovery made in a Munich apartment reactivated the passions and controversies that still linger around that era and the whole matter of the restitution of works of art looted by the Nazis more than 70 years ago.
Read Full Article »