‘Degenerate’ Art: Modern Art on Trial Under the Nazis

In 1937 the Nazis staged an exhibition in Munich of artworks that they saw as Entartete Kunst – ‘degenerate art’ – in a bid to provoke the revulsion of the German public. The show – the culmination of a wide-ranging purge in which some 20,000 works from German collections were censored, sold or destroyed – exhibited more than 600 works by artists including Nolde, Kandinsky, Picasso, Kirchner, Dix, Klee and Mondrian, selected for various reasons including being too modern, too abstract, too socialist, insulting to religion or the state or its ideals of racial ‘purity’, valorising madness, or simply being created by a Jewish artist. Now the Musée Picasso is dedicating a survey to the theme of degenerate art, showing works by artists who were included in the 1937 exhibition, such as George Grosz’s cacophonous cityscape Metropolis (1916–17) and a depiction of a rabbi from the 1920s by Marc Chagall (18 February–25 May).

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Kreuzform (1926), Wassily Kandinsky. Photo: Hanna Neander; © LWL-Museum für Kunst und Kultur, Westfälisches Landesmuseum, Münster

Pregnant Woman (1918), Emy Roeder. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Museum für Vor- und Frühgeschichte. Photo: Achim Kleuker; © Museum im Kulturspeicher Würzburg, estate of Emy Roeder

Metropolis (1916–17), George Grosz. Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid. © Estate of George Grosz, Princeton, N.J./Adagp, Paris, 2024

Cover of the exhibition guide for ‘Degenerate Art’, 1937, designed by Adolf Dressler. Photo © Christophe Fouin/mahJ