Picasso Museum: the trial of “degenerate art” under Nazism

From the entrance, the tone is set. Images from propaganda films parade showing demonstrations of force by the Nazi regime. Opposite them, photos show visitors to the Munich exhibition of July 1937, "Entartete Kunst" (Degenerate Art), looking at paintings... that they are invited to hate. One wonders: are they stunned or do they adhere to this vindictiveness against works that Hitler wants to make disappear?

The approach is perverse: it involves showing the public works that one wants to remove from their sight! How? By getting rid of them through sales or even destroying them. George Grosz, Paul Klee, Oskar Kokoschka, Vassily Kandinsky, Vincent Van Gogh, Lovis Corinth, Picasso are among the artists targeted.

It is their paintings – magnificent, formidable – that the Picasso Museum is showing us, to better underline the pure madness of this pillorying theorized by the doctor Max Nordau in an 800-page “reactionary critique”.

Some artists, the author says, "paint with mud." According to him, the era is inhabited by "a contempt for the traditional values ​​of customs and morality." He sees in the works of these artists a kind of decadence, world weariness and a voluntary rejection of the limits of morality governing the universe. His "reasoning" which mixes art history and psychiatry transforms the works into symptoms of mental illnesses.... We must "stop the epidemic," he claims under the cover of scientism.

A large number of artists were banned. Directors of progressive museums, such as the one in Mannheim, were dismissed. Critics and gallery owners were labelled "agents of degeneration". Picasso, who had been present in German collections from an early age, became persona non grata.

This policy of cultural destruction prefigures that of human beings. Some artists, such as Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler, were eliminated as part of Action T4, a program to exterminate the physically or mentally handicapped. She was euthanized in 1940.