Real culture wars
This article is taken from the June 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Find our subscription offers here.
When the German Chamber of Culture planned the 1937 exhibition Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art), it must have felt great confidence in the effectiveness of the Nazi propaganda machine. After all, the official rejection of modern art had previously only led to bolstering its popularity. The 1863 Salon des Refusés, for example, strengthened the standing of Manet and Courbet, whilst the exclusion of Duchamp’s Fountain from a 1917 exhibition became a legend of its own.
Staging the display of some 650 “degenerate” works of condemned avant-garde art confiscated from German museums head-to-head with The Great German Art Exhibition, a show of regime-sanctioned works, was the culmination of Hitler’s four-year cultural revolution. Since the Nazi party held absolute control over what art could be shown and how, the success of this initiative was as good as guaranteed.
In The Worst Exhibition in the World, art historian John-Paul Stonard narrates a visit to Entartete Kunst, a display of paintings and sculptures by the likes of Otto Dix, George Grosz, Max Beckmann and Oskar Schlemmer. The text dwells on many of the show’s highlights, such as Ludwig Gies’s 1921 Lübeck Cathedral crucifix (vandalised) and Franz Marc’s 1913 The Tower of Blue Horses (now lost). It also explains Nazi attitudes to art and, by addressing the reader in the second person, presents a veiled warning for today.
The book is rich and compelling in its treatment of the artefacts. Yet the shortcuts it takes with psychopolitical analysis undermine the sense of aesthetic determinism with which it approaches one of the most significant interventions in art history.
Entartete Kunst consolidated Nazi theories of modern art’s aesthetic and political degeneracy. Formally, Nazi opposition to Expressionism, Bauhaus, Dada and other early-20th century artistic movements stemmed from Max Nordau’s 1892 Degeneration, a treatise that linked certain aesthetic tendencies with mental illness. Nordau argued that artistic breach of propriety was heritable, providing the German Reich with an ideological mandate not only for iconoclasm but also the persecution of artists.
Stonard is aware of this but, in line with many post-war accounts of the exhibition, discounts the suggestion that the organising committee (he characterises them as “a sour bunch”) believed in what they were doing. Granted, such nuance is beyond this text’s remit (readers may be interested in Eric Michaud’s The Cult of Art in Nazi Germany).
But taking the Nazi cultural establishment’s racial hatred as blind and personal animus within the German art world as given, Stonard reflexively must place his readers on the right side of art history. To be clear, Nordau does not invite charitable reconsideration. But overlooking the wider project’s cultural consistency strips all art criticism of aesthetic conviction.
The extraordinary Munich show, which contained only a small selection of some 16,000 works identified by the Nazis as undesirable, was punctuated by sarcastic descriptions like “insolent mockery of the Divine” and “nature as seen by sick minds”. Stonard, who otherwise grants the reader a vivid encounter with the artefacts, has his fictional 1937 visitors shout obscenities in outrage at the canvases.
Is this to suggest that all Germans, a staggering two million of whom visited Entartete Kunst, would have mindlessly sided with the curatorial propaganda? Did none appreciate the “remarkable energy”, in the writer’s words, of Marc’s canvas, for example? How would art history account for Dix’s 1920 potent anti-war painting, The Trench, failing to deter Nazi sentiment? Was degenerate art the triumph of modernity or, as one of Stonard’s characters had it, a “waste of taxpayers’ money”?
This portrayal is a choice not entirely excused by the sparsity of evidence of the exhibition’s reception. In accounting for the inclusion of artists whose relationship with the Nazi regime was ambiguous — Emil Nolde, for example, was originally designated a degenerate but had his work withdrawn from Entartete Kunst; he collaborated with the state, yet suffered bans on exhibiting until the end of the war — The Worst Exhibition in the World treads more carefully.
Stonard ahistorically believes that his readers would not to be swept up, in 1937 Munich, in the hatred of degeneracy. The conviction stems from Walter Benjamin’s proposition that fascism resorts to the aestheticisation of politics, whilst its opposite (communism) does this the other way around.
This device allows art historians to moralise the value of modern forms because they survived Entartete Kunst, overshadowing the pro-Nazi works in the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung across town. Given the battle over artistic propaganda raging today, this paradigm is worth revisiting.
