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“If the world is turned upside down, the truth will become a lie.” – Guy Debord, 1967

“The image always gets the last word.” – Roland Barthes, c. 1975

“DEGENERATE! Hitler’s War on Modern Art” explores the ways in which Der Fuhrer’s Nazi party used modern art as a vehicle to sway public opinion, and the subsequent assault on artists deemed subversive by The Reich Chamber of Culture, established in 1933. Produced by and on loan from the Jewish Museum Milwaukee, the modern-art-star-studded exhibition is comprised of works from the avant-garde art movements of the early 20th century (German Expressionism, Fauvism, Dada, Constructivism, Cubism, and Surrealism). In addition to a stunning collection of paintings, prints, and drawings of the thriving global art movements of the era, “DEGENERATE!” provides historical context for the work, educating viewers on the early days of Adolf Hitler’s ideological assault on modern art and artists. It’s on view at the Maltz Museum in Cleveland, through April 20, 2025.

A centerpiece of the show is a timeline illustrating the rise of the Nazi Party’s totalitarian rule, and the censorship that was a consequence of the regime’s unchecked power, rooted in xenophobia, nationalism, and a hatred of outsiders to the “ideal, Ayran race.” The Reich Chamber of Culture was created as “gatekeeper of who [was permitted to] produce work in all artistic fields,” and they ultimately mounted the “Entartete Kunst” (“Degenerate Art”) exhibition in 1937 as a propaganda tool aimed at showing Germans, paradoxically, what they would not be viewing as state-sanctioned “German” art going forward. Filmed for maximum propagandizing, it was intended to publicly shame artists and frame their creative endeavors as not only subversive, but as “un-German, Jewish, or Bolshevik.”

The wrath of World War I was beyond human comprehension, and artists of the era questioned idealistic notions of progress through science, industry, and technology, as these “advances” were used to destroy major European cities and slaughter or disappear 40 million human beings all across the globe. Part of the project of modern art was to expose the flaws of modernity amid a global economic collapse and the chaos and that led to more global instability. Yet, works of art made in the aftermath of World War I often vacillate between abstraction-obfuscation, and ironic nihilism. While the latter category was “subversive” to Nazis for what it patently revealed about the hell of men’s wars and world, the former was just as problematic for The Commission because meaning was obscured. Abstraction in art during times of human tragedy on the scale of World War illustrated what cultural critic Dwight MacDonald would say about Abstract Expression after World War II. Artists employed abstraction in response to unfathomable human suffering on a global scale; “To describe is to accept the unacceptable,” he wrote of artists such as Jackson Pollock, Willem De Kooning, Lee Krasner, and Helen Frankenthaler.

Consequently, Hitler and the Commission loathed the ambiguity of works such as Jean (Hans) Arp’s Configurations, a simple, yet convoluted black geometric shape on paper, as much as gloomy or grotesque depictions of human suffering. Broken bodies and spirits belied “Aryan” perfection, conformity, and strength. Depictions of wounded and weary WWI veterans—the soldiers who fought to defend Germany, whose bodies and psyches were marred by the war, were deemed to be subversive subject matter.

Physical and emotional scars were reminders of German’s failure in World War I, and even Nazi sympathizer Rudolf Schilchter’ simple 1920 drawing, Invalid, which depicts a one-legged soldier looking humble, yet determined on wooden crutches, was included in “Entartete Kunst.” George Grosz was also persecuted for his realistic drawings of disfigured soldiers. Der Laubchen of 1927 depicts plump city shoppers stepping over an empty-eyed, wooden-legged veteran who is slumped on the street. Grosz was so persecuted for his truth-telling that he ultimately fled to the U.S. in 1932, where he remained until his death.

Hitler was himself a failed artist, as “DEGENERATE!” exhibition text reminds us. He applied twice to the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna [and was rejected] for rendering “too few heads” and for unsatisfactory drawing skills. “You would make a good architect,” an admissions official told him, as his classical Greek and Roman influences made for paintings of ideal landscapes, architectural forms, and the occasional human figure, passively in situ. Modern art often obliterated, abstracted, or mechanized the human form, and some of the most troubling works for the Commission were depictions of human frailty.

“DEGENERATE!” begins with film clips of the 1937 exhibition, which silently scans crowds of Nazi soldiers and officials, as well as the 100s of ordinary people, appropriately dressed, somberly gazing at art that would be destroyed. The viewers of “Entartete Kunst” are as compelling a study as the works on the walls, as soldiers in uniform and “respectable,” well-dressed people feign disgust and disinterest for the camera, lest they be deemed sympathetic or moved by the artwork.

Otto Dix’s War Cripples of 1920, seen in the film footage of “Entartete Kunst,” is a macabre depiction of four World War I veterans parading down a street. It is a disturbing painting, each soldier deformed, disfigured in his own way. The first World War ushered in the medical market for prosthetics, which are prominently featured in Dix’s painting. The soldier leading the group is missing an ear, nose, and part of his left cheek; the man at the back dons the kind of facial prosthetic common in that time. Neither look quite human, and the prosthetics—meant to improve disfigured faces were mask-like, only draw more attention to the broken face. The second veteran in the lineup shakes and drools; traumatized, despite his stiff wooden leg, the right knee lifts, he continues to march in step. It is the tan, blonde, handsome soldier in the painting that may have drawn the most ire. His countenance, “perfect,” “Aryan,” contrasts his impotent body, which is limbless. His face is unscathed and his mouth holds a cigarette, around which he grins.

Film footage of “Entartete Kunst” reminds us that “DEGENERATE!” is also a show about the works that were lost to the Nazi purges of modern art. War Cripples is one of the first paintings viewers of the 1937 Munich exhibition saw as they entered the gallery space. Likewise, it is one of the first paintings viewers of “DEGENERATE!” see, but it is ghost-like now, at the Maltz in grainy black-and-white, and, online, in color, but small, its truthful ethos nonetheless present.

Marcel Duchamp, French, and a key member of Dada and Surrealist movements, is represented in “DEGENERATE.” His etching of 1915 is labelled “No Title,” as opposed to “Untitled,” the latter a moniker normally given to works of art by the artist or creator. The small etching appears to be a surrealist study of movement, time, and space, and Duchamp’s deliberate, albeit playful hand is evident. It’s a clever, delightful piece, yet the ambiguity of it, Duchamp’s exploration of modern themes through whimsical line-making, was subversive to the Nazi party.

Russian Wassily Kandinsky moved to Germany after WWI, joining the Bauhaus School in 1922 to teach color theory and painting. When the Nazis closed the School in 1933, Kandinsky, as well as other Bauhaus members, was a victim of a smear campaign that led him to move to France, where he made some of his most renowned works. His Joyous Ascent of 1923 was part of the Bauhaus School’s “master’s portfolio;” it is a colorful study of shape, line, and movement. The intersection of the Bauhaus as avant-garde art school and, subsequently, a haven for artists and cultural and artist theory makes it a compelling study for this contemporary moment, as we [in the 21st century] witness the dismantling of the academic humanities, Women’s and Gender Studies, and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs, not to mention the study and teaching of Critical Race Theory. Indeed, “DEGENERATE!” reveals to viewers about the rise of Nazi totalitarianism is that it begins slowly, touching only those thinkers, writers, creators who “dare” to tell the truths of history, and to imagine different ways of life and learning.

Marc Chagall is one such artist and “DEGENERATE!” features Chagall’s spiritually-Surrealist lithographs based on the Old Testament are sublime in color and form. With Chagall, humans, animals, angels, and prophets are depicted in an equally colorful and stunning manner. The power of these works is the manner in which Chagall experimented with color across media. At times, he contrasts colors—foliage green, brash red, basic blue, on fields of soft hues, his whimsical figures floating amid these fields. The five lithographs in the Maltz exhibition are from 1966, and illustrate the artist’s ability to alchemically transform the Biblical stories into spiritual experiences.

Kathe Kollwitz’s famous works on grief and loss are the most disturbingly poignant, and sadly beautiful in the exhibition. Some of Kollwitz’s most renowned works remain extant and are included in “DEGENERATE!” She “focused her artistry on the effects of poverty, war, and hunger on working-class people in Germany,” and lost her son to battle in WWI. The experience led her to socialism and pacifism; the exhibition text notes that she was the first woman to hold a teaching position at the Prussian Academy of the Arts. In 1933 she was forced to resign from her post, and her work was removed from German museums.

In unabashed contempt and co-optation of Kollwitz’s utter devastation over losing a son to the senseless battles of the world’s men, the Nazi’s appropriated her Mother and Child as pro-Nazi propaganda. For the last 11 years of her life, she was “hounded by the Nazi regime, which sought to keep her quiet.”

“DEGENERATE!” features three show-stopping works: The Sacrifice, plate 1 from War, 1922/23, a haunting print of a sleeping infant being from his sleeping mother into a blanket of darkness, and Death Seizes a Woman, a lithograph of 1934, 11 years before Kollwitz’s death. The point being, she—her full self, her peace, everything she ever thought she understood about the world, died through the process of losing her son.

“DEGENERATE! Hitler’s War on Modern Art” is an important exhibition for this political moment and is a primer on the ways in which totalitarianism operates.

DEGENERATE! Hitler’s War on Modern Art
Maltz Museum
2929 Richmond Road
Beachwood, OH 44122
On view through April 20, 2025