Painting and Sculpture

Degenerate Art exhibition

The Degenerate Art exhibition (German: Die Ausstellung "Entartete Kunst") was an art exhibition organized by Adolf Ziegler and the Nazi Party in Munich from 19 July to 30 November 1937. The exhibition presented 650 works of art, confiscated from German museums, and was staged in counterpoint to the concurrent Great German Art Exhibition. The day before the exhibition started, Adolf Hitler delivered a speech declaring "merciless war" on cultural disintegration, attacking "chatterboxes, dilettantes and art swindlers". Degenerate art was defined as works that "insult German feeling, or destroy or confuse natural form or simply reveal an absence of adequate manual and artistic skill". Entry was free. One million people attended the exhibition in its first six weeks, and another two million in the remaining six months in Munich. Another million saw the exhibition on tour. According to Frederic Spotts, it was "the biggest blockbuster art show of all time." A U.S. critic commented that "[t]here are probably plenty of people—art lovers—in Boston, who will side with Hitler in this particular purge". This view was controversial, however, given the greater political context of the exhibition.

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See also

• ▸Bernard van Orley
• ▸All Saints' Episcopal Church (Austin, Texas)
• ▸Frost in Louveciennes

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Text from Wikipedia; plate via Wikimedia Commons. Text CC BY-SA 4.0; plate freely licensed (see Commons). Source record. Images and catalogue data are reproduced from open-access collections.